Game of Thrones: People were “losing their minds” filming the Battle of Winterfell

Game of Thrones mounted lots of huge battles, but purely from a production standpoint, few measure up to the epic Battle of Winterfell in season 8. “The Long Night” marked a turning point for the series, with the White Walker army finally descending on Winterfell, where a last alliance of Elves and Men Starks, Lannisters and Targaryens waited to give battle. Shot over the course of 11 weeks of night shoots with hundreds of extras, it was easily the most ambitious episode of Game of Thrones’ entire run.

It was also notoriously difficult to film; the cast and crew literally took home jackets that said, “We Survived The Long Night.” Over the course of 55 consecutive nights, the Game of Thrones team filmed in grueling conditions and even blizzards to bring the epic battle to life. As Brienne of Tarth actor Gwendoline Christie said in the behind-the-scenes book Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, “it was utter madness.”

The Last of Us showrunner recalls how “people were literally losing their minds” filming Game of Thrones

Craig Mazin is the showrunner of HBO’s new hit The Last of Us as well as the creator of Chernobyl; he’s also the guy who famously told Game of Thrones showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff that they had “a massive problem” with their original, unaired pilot for the show. He’s been in the know at HBO for quite a while now, and was friends with Benioff and Weiss throughout the series’ run.

During one of the recent episodes of The Last of Us Podcast, Mazin compared his show’s big  battle in Episode 5 — which was similarly shot over several weeks at night with a cast of hundreds — with “The Long Night.” Mazin was told people were “literally losing their minds” shooting “The Long Night,” something he very much understands after his own experience on The Last of Us:

"So, the infected, they are scarier in the dark. And fire is awesome in the dark. And I said, ‘Oh shit,’ because I knew that the sequence was going to be about three weeks to shoot. Everybody now has to work at night. The nights were getting shorter, and yeah, because it was Calgary, it also occasionally would snow in the middle of the night. So we would lose some time to that.But mostly it’s just, working at night is hard on everybody. If you do it two or three nights in a row you get over it. Three weeks, it starts to really get into you mentally. I mean, even as your schedule shifts, mentally you start to wear down.The episode of Game of Thrones, the famous one in the last season, they shot I think 11 weeks of night. And I remember Dan Weiss telling me that people were literally losing their minds."

“If that hadn’t been the last season, there would have been a mutiny halfway through the night shoots.”

While this might sound a little dramatic, it absolutely lines up with everything we’ve heard from the cast and crew who were involved in the shoot. Thanks to James Hibberd’s excellent behind-the-scenes book Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, there’s a wealth of corroborating accounts we can look at.

Iain Glen, who played Jorah Mormont in the series, is a veteran actor with no small amount of experience filming difficult action sequences, and he called the Winterfell battle “the most unpleasant experience in all of Thrones.”

"I don’t think people can comprehend what 11 weeks of continuous night shoots does to the human body and brain. It destroys your system and your thinking. We just had to get so wet and so dirty and so cold and do it again and again that it really was the hardest thing in all eight seasons for all departments. You kind of try and retain a gallows humor, but it was absolutely brutal.In storytelling terms, it made sense because of who they were up against. But it was a real test. It completely fucked your body clock. You have no life outside it. On day shoots you’ll go have a meal in the evening and do a bit of something. On nights those down hours are removed. You get to sleep at seven in the morning and then you get up in the midday and can’t really do anything. It was the most unpleasant experience in all of Thrones."

And then there was Maisie Williams, whose character Arya Stark got her hands plenty dirty fighting wights and taking down the Night King during the battle:

"Nothing could prepare you for how physically draining it was. It was night after night and again and again, and it just didn’t stop. You can’t get sick. You have to look out for yourself because there’s so much to do that nobody else is going to. You get wet and then at four A.M. the wind comes and your leather outfit is soaking and you just have to keep going. It’s bizarre because when you see the movies it looks so glamorous. And there are times when it is. But there are times when it goes the other way so far that it’s not even recognizable as the same industry. There are moments you’re just broken as a human and just want to cry."

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie Lannister) also weighed in: “If that hadn’t been the last season, there would have been a mutiny halfway through the night shoots.”

"George R.R. Martin, back in the day, said that this would be impossible. And there we were, shooting it."

Whatever your feelings on the final season of Game of Thrones, there’s no denying the feat of producing “The Long Night,” and the extremely hard work that everyone involved had to put in to make it happen.

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h/t Entertainment Weekly