Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): [Producer] Chris Newman, whose wife is from Iceland, sent me a picture before season two: “I know we’re going north of the Wall next year and I was thinking of Iceland, what do you think of this?” I’m like, “That’s exactly what we need!” So I went to David and Dan, and they asked, “Do you think we can do that?” and that’s always all I need to hear. “Of course we can do that!” Then I walked out of the office going, “How the fuck do we do that?”

  So we came up with this whole plan to go to Iceland using a smaller crew for what little money we had at that point. And by the time shooting approached, wouldn’t you know it, it’s not snowing in Iceland. Every day I’d say to Chris: “Anything?” “Not yet.” As producers, you feel responsible for things even that are not in your control.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): It was a little nerve-wracking for me, having persuaded everybody to go there.

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: Eventually Chris says, “I’m going to have them pack a bag of [fake] snow in with our equipment.” I’m all, “Chris, one bag of snow is not going to do it!” And he goes, “I know! But I have to do something!”

  Just three days before we started shooting, it started snowing in Iceland.

  But then it didn’t stop.

  DAVID BENIOFF: We got there, and it was a blizzard. I was driving to set in the morning up this tiny little road heading up the mountains. We had to pull over our Land Cruiser to let another car go by. We tried to get back on the road and our car got stuck in this massive snowdrift. We were completely stopped. We tried to shovel our way out and couldn’t get out. So a production van came to give us a ride and we got about another half mile. Then the van got stuck in a gully. So a truck came and pulled the van out and the rope snapped. It was that hard to get to the set.

  DAVID NUTTER: We were out scouting a location, and it was cliffside driving in a Jeep with four-feet-high snow. We went off the road. Fortunately, we went off on the hill side, not on the cliff side, but the car rolled over sideways, and I jumped out. I was like, “Okay, let’s use that other location that’s back down the hill.”

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: At one point snow was coming in so heavy, we were stuck at the hotel and couldn’t go anywhere except on foot. So we said to the director, Alan Taylor, “Just walk outside the hotel.” We took the one camera we had, and he shot the scene where Samwell hears the three horns signaling the attack on the Fist of the First Men. They did that just outside, within sight of the hotel dining room. Yet it looks extraordinary as the hotel was right underneath a mountain. Sometimes you end up with a better scene when something doesn’t work.

  DAVID BENIOFF: The wind was blowing so hard. There was a shot where Samwell is talking to Jon. We’re on Samwell and he’s talking and he looks kind of normal, then you cut to Jon, and then you cut back to Samwell and he looks like Father Time—snow and ice frozen onto his face in just a matter of seconds.

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: Then there were also all these rumors of Iceland’s volcano blowing again, which would have been really bad. Chris and I were like, “Let’s just not tell anybody that, let’s keep that between us.”

  KIT HARINGTON: It was like guerrilla filmmaking. One day it was minus thirty-five, a frozen whiteout. There was a moment I had to yell, “Stop!” because Rose was walking backward around a five-hundred-foot drop. There was another when we were all on a frozen lake and you heard this huge crack underneath and we all had to run off.

  ALAN TAYLOR: Every English person ran for the shore, but every Icelandic person just kept walking.

  ROSE LESLIE (Ygritte): You’re trudging through the snow and trying to make it look effortless on camera, because it’s rather treacherous. This is Ygritte’s home, she’s incredibly comfortable in this particular surrounding, so you can’t look like you’re working so hard to trudge up a hill and I was, like, panting inside.

  JOHN BRADLEY (Samwell Tarly): We said, “We’re never going to complain about November in Belfast again,” though of course we did. It also felt really special. It’s an astonishingly beautiful place. You’re standing on a glacier and you look a certain direction and there’s not a trace of the modern world anywhere. It looks like it did a million years ago. I was looking at this view and I was with my friends and colleagues who I love and respect, and I realized how lucky I was.

  DAN WEISS: I went up to Kit on his second day of shooting, and he looked like he was on ecstasy. He said, “I’ve never ever had a day of shooting that I loved as much as this day of shooting.” He was just so in it and happy to be there that it became infectious.

  When the Thrones team returned to Iceland for season three, filming was complicated by Harington’s getting injured before filming began. “I left my keys in the house, so after a drunken night out I tried to climb up to the . . . window, but I fell backwards and broke my ankle in four places,” Harington told the UK’s Daily Mail at the time. “The doctors asked me if I’d been caught with another man’s wife and had to jump out of the window. I had to say no, but that would have been far more exciting.”

  Harington sounded glib but privately felt terrible about the mishap and worried about how his injury would impact the show.

  KIT HARINGTON: That’s what happened. I didn’t see the point in lying to anyone. I was an idiot. The invincibility of youth. The line producer had to rearrange everybody’s schedules around me, and I bought him a nice bottle of whiskey because I felt so guilty. I’m sure they were cursing my name behind my back.

  The schedule was shuffled to push all the Jon Snow scenes by two months. Publicly, the production downplayed Harington’s injury and suggested the actor only had a bit of a limp. But a body double was used for some of Jon Snow’s footage and Harington’s action duties were scaled back.

  ALEX GRAVES: He couldn’t walk! At the time it was a big “let’s keep this quiet” thing. We didn’t want people watching the scenes wondering, “Is that him or not?” I designed a way to film and cut a scene where Kit would start walking, then I would cut to Ygritte, and then he would end up next to her. Then we did all the wide shots with a body double.

  KIT HARINGTON: Even if it was just somebody walking, I had real problems with not going up to the guy doing the doubling and telling him how to do things differently. You don’t think you create a walk for a character, but there were a couple shots where I checked his gait and I was like, “Nah, that’s not right.”

  Between Clarke’s brain surgery and Harington’s ankle, the producers began to think about how easily the show could get permanently derailed due to a random and unforeseeable misfortune. Thrones had a large number of characters considered essential to its story. That some tragedy might befall a lead actor, or that a performer whose star was on the rise might quit the production to take a coveted movie role, was a background source of anxiety until the show’s very last shot.

  DAN WEISS: Accidents happen. But if Kit’s fall had gone differently, then he’s not in the show anymore. We had a lot of people, and the odds that something was going to happen that makes it impossible for them to continue started to feel pretty high.

  During season three, Harington returned to Belfast for the rest of his storyline, which included Jon Snow and Ygritte’s making love in a cave-sheltered hot spring. “[Harington] was, as ever, a gentleman,” Leslie told reporters of the cave scene. “He made sure that I was comfortable with where he was going to be positioned, and he would always turn around when they called “cut” and the lovely wardrobe ladies would come in with a dressing gown, and then I would be covered. He made sure as much as possible that I didn’t feel awkward standing in front of people with your tits out. So it’s never going to be an enjoyable day, it’s always going to be an awkward one, but he and the rest of the crew were incredibly considerate.”

  KIT HARINGTON: [The cave scene] was incredible. That scene in this really dire, dark world where nothing good happens and there’s very little joy, that scene is one of the very few hap
py moments where you can escape from the grimness and horror of Westeros. There are promises made on film sets about water being warm. Bullshit, you know it’s going to be cold. But they made a lovely warm bath for us.

  ALEX GRAVES: Kit said he wanted to jump in the pool with Ygritte. I’m all, “Are you sure you want to do that with your ankle?” And he said he’d just use his other leg. So he got up naked and just jumped in.

  Later, the duo scaled the Wall with their Wildling companions Tormund (Kristofer Hivju) and Orell (Mackenzie Crook). The Wall was actually a fifty-foot-high plaster-and-polystyrene “ice” surface constructed inside a studio. As with real ice, the actors could use axes to literally climb its surface.

  KIT HARINGTON: Every time you walk onto a new set on Thrones you’re like, “Fuck. They topped it again.” I remember we tried to climb up the wall individually [before filming]. Mackenzie and I got a bit higher than Rose, but only by a little bit, by putting one ice pick in at a time until we couldn’t pull ourselves up anymore with the costume and everything. Kristofer went up the whole wall in one try and nearly destroyed the thing. I have never met anyone who’s more like their character.

  The climb concluded with the most romantic shot in the series: doomed lovers Jon and Ygritte kissing on top of the world, a moment of bliss before the inevitable darkness to come.

  KIT HARINGTON: The top-of-the-Wall shot is one of my favorite shots in all of Thrones. It’s probably the best place Jon gets to in the show. Somewhere out there is a behind-the-scenes shot where you see there are also guys with fans turned on us and the AD and the art department and the director standing around. I think for me that sums up Thrones. Because you take all the green screen away and it’s just this beautiful moment where I was kissing my future wife. I remember not wanting them to cut. I was like: “Please don’t cut, this is perfect.”

  Shortly afterward, Ygritte figured out that Jon Snow was still loyal to the Night’s Watch—and shot him with three arrows to express her annoyance. Their relationship came to its tragic end during the Wildling attack at Castle Black, which Neil Marshall returned to direct. It was another grueling, rain-soaked shoot. During one unexpected high point, the bullying Ser Alliser Thorne got to be the sword-swinging hero for a change, when he led a sortie against the Wildlings.

  OWEN TEALE (Alliser Thorne): That was my Henry the Fifth moment. The rain was pouring so hard that night, it was like Blade Runner. They put some boards coming down like a boardwalk so you can walk into the courtyard because a huge amount of water was falling into a small area. But in the few minutes before we shot, so much water had come down, the boards had floated away. They said, “Just keep going!” There was something really exhilarating about it.

  When Jon Snow found himself once again face-to-face with Ygritte, she had an arrow nocked and ready to fire into his heart. Jon couldn’t help himself. He smiled, happy to see her.

  NEIL MARSHALL (director): I suggested to Kit: “I don’t care what’s happened between you and her. You love her.” And so there’s that little moment of smile, and then it’s crushed by the tragedy that follows, which just really helped that moment of payoff.

  ROSE LESLIE: She wasn’t shooting to kill him [earlier in the season]. She wasn’t shooting to stop him. I think she was shooting to hurt him. That he couldn’t just up and leave without any consequences. She wanted to make him pay. She’s in love with him and couldn’t bring herself to kill him. She could have killed him in one fell swoop with an arrow through the heart if she wanted to. She finally looks at him [at Castle Black] and can’t bring herself to do it, hesitates. It’s that hesitation that’s the ruin of her. It’s lovely she was in Jon Snow’s arms.

  In Martin’s A Storm of Swords, Jon found Ygritte’s dead body after the battle, the apparent victim of a random Night’s Watchman’s arrow. For Thrones, the writers initially scripted a scene where Jon walks toward Ygritte and she’s shot in the back by an anonymous shooter. Then they realized that Ygritte’s killer could be Olly (Brenock O’Connor), the bitter young orphan whose parents were killed by Wildlings.

  NEIL MARSHALL: Olly was a character who was never supposed to be so involved in the show. He was supposed to have his parents killed and then run to the Wall and that was to be it. It’s an example of the writers going, “Wait a minute, we got a bigger story here,” and then he turns out to be the killer of Ygritte.

  When Jon’s cradling Ygritte in his arms, another thing I wanted to do was have the battle raging around them in slow motion. If we were still in the battle, it would have kind of killed that moment. I needed to separate them somehow in the viewer’s mind. But slow motion wasn’t a thing that was part of the visual language of Game of Thrones at that point, so there was a discussion with Dan and David. I’m really proud of that shot.

  DAVID BENIOFF: From the moment he saw her to the moment she’s dead, it’s some of the most powerful seconds we’d put on-screen. People talk about chemistry. The chemistry between Kit and Rose was something that couldn’t be faked no matter how good an actor or director might be.

  ROSE LESLIE: They did a wonderful send-off. After my final take I was given my bow and arrow. Where I hold it with my left hand they replaced the grubby Wildling wrapping with white leather and put the emblem of a rose. It was absolutely beautiful. She’s such a fiercely independent character, and I loved playing her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “This Is Going to Be Good”

  Frigid rain pelted a lush green hilltop as a muddied Nikolaj Coster-Waldau took a break from filming. It was one of those miserable Northern Ireland nights where Game of Thrones crew members longed for the rare moment they could huddle next to a space heater or perhaps get a cup of hot tea. Yet there was Coster-Waldau, all smiles as the rain streamed down his grizzled face. “I actually really like it,” the Jaime Lannister actor said, quite convincingly. “I don’t mind having physical obstacles because it makes it easier to forget about the acting. You don’t want to think about lines, you want to be in the moment. The hardest scenes are sitting around a table talking.”

  It was October 2012, and Coster-Waldau had found himself chained in the mud once again. At least this time, he had company since the actor was with Gwendoline Christie, playing Jaime’s captor-turned-fellow-captive Brienne of Tarth. Christie displayed her bound wrists and happily beamed up at a visitor. “I can only shake hands with my eyes!” she said.

  Though Jaime was first introduced in the series premiere and Brienne was added to Thrones early in season two, it wasn’t until the third season that their characters came into focus. Just like how Ygritte helped reveal new sides to Jon Snow, Jaime and Brienne lured each other out of their respective emotional armor.

  Behind the scenes, Coster-Waldau and Christie’s relationship mirrored Jaime and Brienne’s to a degree that was surreal and hilarious to witness. The duo would trade scathing insults mixed with occasional and seemingly reluctant admissions of profound respect. But they got off to a bumpy start on the day they first met.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth): I was hugely shy and had fallen in love with the character. I had also watched the show and never been involved with a show that I’d already watched. So this was a completely new experience to me. I saw Nikolaj and how imposing he was in the first season. I felt very intimidated.

  On one of my first days of filming, I was told Nikolaj was in the makeup truck and that I should go and say hello. I didn’t want to because I felt so shy. They said, “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be nice.” So I walked in and I said, “Hello, my name is Gwen . . . ,” and then, “I’m playing Brienne.”

  He just looked me up and down like I was an alien from another planet, possibly a pile of manure, and then said: “Oh, so that’s you, is it?”

  I was really uncomfortable. I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Okay . . . ,” and then he went back to looking at himself in the mirror. I felt awful.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): She h
as this whole story about me being very rude to her when we first met. I don’t remember that at all.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: He has denied this! He has denied it publicly. He’s denied it to my face in private. But when he denies it privately, he laughs. Nikolaj can have an incredibly selective memory.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: I do remember she was very upset about having to get her hair cut for the part. I’m such an insensitive guy. I probably didn’t understand how upset she was about the loss of her hair and made some stupid joke and that clearly left an internal mark on her, so she keeps bringing it up over and over.

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: So then, the next day, we were shooting. The first thing he said to me was, “Do you know your lines?” And I said, “Good morning!” And he said, “Do you know your lines?” And I snapped back: “Yes, I know my lines. Do you know your lines?”

  Then we got into the van to go down to the set and started bickering. We were annoying each other, but it was also making both of us laugh. It vacillated between being quite savage and very entertaining.

  So I asked, “Are you Method?” And he said, “No, I am not Method. Are you Method? Because if you are, this is going to be exhausting.” And I said: “I do what I like. . . .”

  He was really winding me up. And then he said, “This is going to be good.” There was something about him that made me know he wasn’t being serious. And that set the tone.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: We both quickly agreed, to the annoyance of everybody around us, that we would just fall into those two characters. There was a constant carrying on of the banter between Jaime and Brienne on and off the set.