MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: Then everything would change according to the weather. The best-laid plans would fly out the window and we would have to improvise. Being so well planned, and at the same time being ready to throw it all out, was really the tip of the iceberg. We battled time, the elements, fatigue, and ourselves.
For starters, there was the terrain of the location, called Saintfield.
CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): It looks like you’re going out to a field and having a battle, but there’s a lot more to it when you have a soft, undulating field. The trick was making it friendly for man and beast, and that takes a lot of time and money. Because the minute you put them on something that’s not hard tarmac, they sink. Then it rained for the first three days, which turned everything really slick and muddy, and it never recovered.
The field was also slightly bowl shaped, which made it even more of a muddy soup. During filming, 160 tons of gravel were laid down by hand using shovels and wheelbarrows (it would have been far easier to use machines, but they would have left tracks in the field that would be seen on camera). If you stepped off a gravel-laid path, you would quickly get stuck. Tug your leg, and your boot was slurped right off your foot.
As getting on and off set required trudging up a steep, slippery hill, Sapochnik only allowed himself a single once-a-day pee break (which, perhaps, ranks as the resolute director’s most impressive feat of endurance).
The field also had to be dressed with mock corpses, of the human and horse variety.
DEBORAH RILEY (production designer): It was a huge job. You can buy a prop body, but then you need to make prop costumes as well. And make sure all the prop horses were wearing the appropriate prop saddlery. It was something like $4,000 for each prop dead horse. And then of course it rained; then all the bodies became waterlogged and we had to shift them around the battlefield. It was a lot of lugging these heavy things around.
And then there were all the challenges with the horses. . . .
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: With horses, everything takes about 50 percent longer. Horses also get bored and spooked, and some perform better than others. They also need an entire separate field to rest in. Oh, and they shit and piss all the time.
In fact, one of the hardest scenes to shoot was the parley [meeting between Jon and Ramsay] prior to the actual battle. Getting a bunch of horses to just stand there all day and do nothing is much harder than getting them to run around. They would fart and pee a lot, often in the middle of Kit’s lines.
LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth): I nearly got killed during the Battle of the Bastards. I’m reasonably handy on a horse. I’m sitting on the horse and they had this very expensive crane with what they call a “Russian head” on it. They came in like this [swooping across toward him], but the horse wanted to play with its mates and ride off, and he jumped two feet to the left and the camera went straight over where my head was. I could have been decapitated, but I ducked. A bunch of people ran up horrified. You couldn’t blame anyone. It was just one of those horsey things.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: And every time we charged the horses it took twenty-five minutes to reset all the fake snow on the field and rub out the previous horseshoe prints. So how many times can we afford to charge the horses each day knowing we need time for a reset that’s ten times longer than the actual shot? Another thing was: How do we make five hundred extras look like eight thousand when shooting in a field and there’s just nowhere to hide your shortfall? It became like a bonkers math equation.
The horse breaks allowed for some team members to likewise have bouts of downtime during filming. During one such intermission, several of the actors sat in the green room tent playing the classic board game Risk (appropriately, “The World Conquest Game,” as its description reads). Turner sang pop songs. The reserved Aidan Gillen found a quiet spot to read a David Foster Wallace novel. And the producers watched playback on monitors in the video village tent, as spiders from an adjacent hillside crawled through the flaps and fell onto them.
The writers based Jon Snow and Davos Seaworth’s initial strategy to defeat Ramsay on the legendary battle between the Romans and Hannibal of Carthage. Hannibal allowed the much larger Roman army to push forward, absorbed their initial attack, then sent part of his forces around the sides of the battle to the rear, enveloping the Romans in a chokehold.
After their parley, however, Ramsay surprised Jon Snow. Instead of charging, Ramsay advanced just one of his pawns, a captive Rickon Stark (Art Parkinson). He ordered the youngest Stark brother to run across the field toward Jon, then fired arrows at the fleeing boy, trying to spur Jon Snow into foolishly charging and scrapping his original strategy. Of course, Jon did exactly what Ramsay wanted.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: A key thing for David and Dan was they wanted to make sure we could see the way Ramsay ensnares Jon the same way Davos had planned to defeat the Bolton army.
KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): He doesn’t have much choice. The guy’s just killed his younger brother. He knows what he’s doing by charging in, but he doesn’t care. Jon is not afraid of death. He’ll do what is right over what’s safe 100 percent of the time, and that’s why we like him. In that moment, his rage gets the better of him. The Starks are always fighting with their balls and not their heads.
IWAN RHEON (Ramsay Bolton): Jon Snow’s the antithesis of Ramsay. They’re almost a yin and yang. They both come from such a similar place, yet they’re so different. And even though they’re enemies, they’ve both risen so far as bastards, which is almost incomprehensible, and now they’re both here facing each other. They couldn’t be any more different yet more similar.
Despite Jon Snow’s heroic effort, Rickon was felled by one of Ramsay’s arrows. The youngest Stark, whom the producers once briefly considered leaving out of the show entirely, only spoke a handful of lines throughout the series.
Jon’s move also left him exposed, the House Stark king suddenly vulnerable to Ramsay’s thousands of charging frontline pawns. Davos ordered Jon’s men to rush into battle to back up their commander. Soon Jon was engulfed by the chaos, and the camera followed him on a minute-long “one-shot”—a single take of Jon Snow hacking and ducking and staggering through a blizzard of wartime mayhem and carnage.
KIT HARINGTON: I can pick up a fourteen-beat fight very quickly. That was important, because everything would change once we got out there; it just naturally does. It’s like a dance. If you get it just right, it’s the difference between an epic moment and “all right.” I want it always to be right, and I want to sell it. I don’t want the editor to have to cut around a swing or a parry. I like whole movements. The hard bit was letting it go when Miguel said we needed to move on. The hardest thing is when they said, “It’ll do.” If I could have another take, I wanted it.
DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): It’s become such a trend in action scenes to have them all chopped up into quarter-second shots to make everyone look superfast and superhuman. You can fake it, but we’re so good at picking up fakery on-screen. There was something about watching Kit do a sixty-second take where he’s doing all the moves and he’s just so fucking good at it.
DAN WEISS (showrunner): He might actually be of serious value in a medieval army.
KIT HARINGTON: The one-shot was a lot of rehearsal. There are three cuts, but it was all one shot. We had gotten the shape of it and rehearsed it for a couple weeks before. It was the longest “one-up,” as we called it, we’d done. Then you add horses into anything and it has to be pinpoint accurate.
But I will forever look at that shot and see the faults. Just little bits I could have done better with the sword. It’s always going to irritate me. I loved it, and to everyone else it looked good, I guess, but to me there’s always going to be bits I could have done better. I think that will be the case with all of it.
Jon’s forces ended up pinned between a growing pile of corpses and the Bolton army with its Roman legion–inspired wall of shields and spears. Bryan Cogman dub
bed it the Game of Thrones version of the trash compacter scene from Star Wars.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: The Bolton shield wall was a production-friendly way to emulate a “double-envelopment pincer move” [flanking an enemy on two sides] without using horses as originally scripted, and also as a way to avoid seeing horizons on the field and therefore having to dress fewer dead bodies or stage background fights too deep because we didn’t have the money. I also really liked the visual of a wall of Bolton red-and-white crosses on the shields. It felt very fascistic and graphic.
DAVE HILL (co-producer): One reason the battle looked so good is we hired a military drillmaster, and he took the soldiers before the season and trained them and molded them into separate units so they each had their own fighting style. The Boltons and the Wildlings and northern men all trained separately. Then when filming was over they even had separate wrap parties.
Between takes, the drill instructor would call out soldiers who weren’t quite perfect. “Who’s new on shields?” he yelled after a shot where the Bolton lineup looked insufficiently congruent. “No one! That was shit! The shields should not move!”
DAVE HILL: The stunt coordinator also had to keep pulling Kristofer back because Kristofer loved the fight scenes. He’d get really into it. “No, Kristofer! You need to hold back a little bit!”
KRISTOFER HIVJU (Tormund Giantsbane): It’s like doing a heavy metal rock concert with a guitar exchanged with a sword, and your singing is exchanged for screaming. It’s real adrenaline, five hundred people to dress up like wild people with swords and screaming and fighting. For a modern man to do this stuff, it’s catharsis.
Filming the battle was controlled chaos. But Sapochnik’s ability to adapt to the ever-shifting circumstances on the ground was put to a critical test when he realized he wasn’t going to have enough time to shoot a key sequence. The result was a very rare instance when the meticulous production, where thousands of cast and crew members are always following an intricately detailed months-long plan, went entirely “off book”—working without a script.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I realized we just could not complete a sequence as planned. Consistent rain had turned the field into a bog nine inches deep with mud so thick that things were slowing down, and morale with it. The crew were a tough bunch, but when the wind and rain is blowing in your face thirteen hours a day for weeks on end, and it’s literally a game of death to walk up the hill to grab a drink or use the loo because it’s so slippery, everyone gets a bit down.
DAVE HILL: There was a part in the script where Jon was going to run up the body pile and he and Tormund would stand up there with a 360-degree view of how the battle was progressing. But to do that, you’d have to keep re-dressing that entire field.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: On the body pile, Jon was going to survey the carnage, unaware that a horseman with a spear had locked on to him. As Jon watches his men perish, we were going to have an “all is lost” moment. The horseman charges up the body pile toward Jon. At the last minute, the pile of bodies explodes and the giant Wun Wun bursts through, coming between the horseman and Jon and punching the horse, knocking it back down and saving Jon in the process.
DAVE HILL: Miguel was like, “I need three extra days to do it.” The production didn’t have three extra days.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I wrote a long email to David, Dan, and the other producers to suggest an alternative that I thought we could achieve in the remaining time, but that would mean going off book. I finished the email and waited for the response, which I fully expected to be a chastisement and general reaming for even suggesting it. Dan and David like their scripts executed the way they wrote them, and with good reason. And if we were going to do this we needed to employ the idea first thing the next day. I hadn’t even worked out exactly how to do it, I just knew we needed a Plan B.
DAVE HILL: Miguel wrote, “What if Jon gets knocked out and kept getting run over and it’s this suffocating, claustrophobic scene? ‘This is how he’s going to die, being trampled by his own men.’”
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: Not fifteen minutes later, I got a ping on the email. David and Dan said it sucked not to be able to finish as scripted but they also understood the crunch we were in and they trusted me and to have at it. That’s a kind of trust you can’t buy. It felt like a privilege to have been given that kind of support to go into uncharted territory by the producers during such a high-stakes game.
Once again, a creative pivot to an unexpected problem resulted in a classic Game of Thrones moment.
KIT HARINGTON: It was a last-minute genius choice by Miguel and worked a lot better than what we had planned. It’s not fun being trampled on by a ton’s worth of Northern Irishmen. But it felt right.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: No VFX, no fighting, just Kit giving a stellar performance and a crazy top shot as he pushes his way back out.
KIT HARINGTON: I’ve always loved the overhead shot [of Jon clawing his way up through a mass of soldiers] because it echoes Daenerys when she’s held aloft at the end of season three with all of them calling her “Mother.” It’s the opposite for Jon having to fight his way out instead of being held aloft, which says a lot about their stories.
CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: It’s perhaps the burden of being the most moral character in the show that Jon Snow has to fight everything.
BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): I always thought that Jon feels like he’s living on borrowed time, that he’s not supposed to be here and that following his death and resurrection, he doesn’t deserve it. He says to Melisandre the night before the battle, “If I fall, don’t bring me back.” I think part of him for the rest of the series wanted to die, and events that transpired don’t make him feel any better about it. So that moment where he’s being kind of swallowed up by the crush of bodies and pulls himself out is very powerful.
In general, I don’t think Kit gets enough credit for the subtlety of his performance post-resurrection. There’s this lazy criticism—“He’s exactly the same as he was before”—but that’s not true. If you watch closely, he’s doing very subtle and sophisticated work. Jon’s just not the type of guy who’s going to talk about it. If anything, he finds coming back almost . . . shameful.
KIT HARINGTON: There’s a brilliant line when Melisandre asks, “What did you see?” He says, “Nothing, there was nothing at all.” That cuts right to our deepest fear, that there’s nothing after death. That was the most important line in the whole season for me. He realized something about his life now. He has to live it because that’s all there is. The Battle of the Bastards was him wanting to go to sleep and then he pulls through and gets his focus back.
Jon Snow and his allies were rescued at the last minute by the timely arrival of the Knights of the Vale—thanks to Sansa having secretly sent a raven to Littlefinger requesting his help. Yet the fight wasn’t over. Ramsay fled to Winterfell and was pursued by Jon Snow.
DAVE HILL: The smallest detail can be much more difficult than you ever thought. You know the scene where Jon charged Ramsay in the courtyard? It was scripted that Jon picked a shield off the ground and charged Ramsay, catching his arrows on the shield. Then you’re shooting it and have to figure out which shield it should be. Is it a Wildling shield? A Bolton shield? A Stark shield? A Glover shield? A Mazin shield? They’re all different shapes. They all have different hand guards. We had to try all of them to figure out what could Kit get quick enough around his arm that would give him enough protection, but also be able to explain—in our minds—why it was there.
After grabbing the shield (it was from House Mormont, as it turned out), Jon finally got his hands on Ramsay, knocked him down to the ground, and savagely pounded his smug, hateful face.
DAVE HILL: Jon Snow would be the most exhausted man on earth after that battle. So how do we sell that he’s exhausted, that he’s been driven by pure adrenaline and rage and now he’s going to beat Ramsay to death—but then stops when he sees Sansa and realizes Ramsay is not his to kill? Conveying his
exhaustion, rage, lack of control—and then adding control—was tricky. You could think, “Oh, it’s just one dude punching another dude.” But we’re still trying to tell a story in that moment.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: We spent an entire day beating Ramsay. It was a little surreal. Kit and I discussed how that moment should feel like an empty victory for Jon. His character takes a nosedive into darkness this season in some respects. His faith in humanity is fractured and fragile. He’s tired of fighting and living, and yet he cannot seem to die, and so in a way he’s lost.
KIT HARINGTON: He’s beating on Ramsay and he’s killing Ramsay and he just doesn’t care. At the end we should be more terrified of Jon because he’s not him anymore, he’s like this machine pummeling bread.
DAVE HILL: Kit was supposed to be pulling his punches, but at the end of the day, Iwan was like, “Yeah, he got me a few times.” He put a few bruises on Iwan.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: There’s this weird moment when Iwan stops scrunching up his face to receive the blows and just lets himself relax into it. On camera it looks like we’ve used some sort of digital effect to make his face change, but it’s all real. It’s kind of disturbing.
SOPHIE TURNER (Sansa Stark): I was loving the idea of Kit killing Ramsay. Then I was like, “No, Sansa needs her first kill, and it has to be Ramsay.” When he says, “He’s yours,” I’m like, “Yes.”
Jon turned Ramsay over to Sansa. The Bastard of Bolton was tied up in the kennels with his beloved killer hounds, which he’d been starving in anticipation of having enemies to feed to them. Instead, Sansa let her former tormenter get devoured by his own beasts. The move was foreshadowed by Ramsay’s father, Roose, who had warned him, “If you acquire a reputation as a mad dog, you’ll be treated as a mad dog—taken out back and slaughtered for pig feed.”
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