MARK MYLOD: You read it on the page and think, “Oh great, a water battle!” Then you have to shoot in a car park in Northern Ireland. There’s no book you can read on how to direct a sea battle; you can only watch other sea battles. So you try to find your way through it. Euron had such a messy viciousness to him that that seemed like a good way into the treatment of the fight—make it really nasty, the opposite of ordered and nice. We also took a little influence from the style of Mad Max: Fury Road.
GEMMA WHELAN: We rehearsed our fights in a tidy tent, very slowly, no costumes, and it was all very easy. Then you got on set and there was fire everywhere—real pyrotechnics going off and embers being fired on us. You’re wearing a heavy costume, everything’s wet and moving, and there were all these stuntmen. You didn’t have to do any acting because it was terrifying. You just had to remember your badass face.
JESSICA HENWICK (Nymeria Sand): It was a clusterfuck. It was more intense on set than on-screen. Normally there’s a lot of CGI [when filming action scenes] and you watch it on-screen and you see a massive, epic battle, but when you’re filming it’s all quite tame. The Thrones audience couldn’t feel the heat on their face from the pyrotechnics going off, or feel the wave machine trying to knock us off our feet, or the sweat dripping off our faces.
MARK MYLOD: It was slightly torturous. After every shot we needed to let the boat cool to a certain temperature. So it was, “Light the torches, go water, and go action!” You get thirty seconds of action, then you have to cut. Then you extinguish all the fire, take down the water, refill the water tanks, and let the boat cool down. Everything was so methodical, it was difficult to get momentum going. It took a lot of patience on very cold nights. But the Sand Snakes actors were brilliant at latching on to that physical work.
JESSICA HENWICK: Obara’s stunt double’s wig caught on fire—wigs are full of hairspray and highly flammable. At least three crew members fell through the floor because some of it was balsa wood so you could smash through it, but it wasn’t marked off, so occasionally you’d just hear this yelp as another crew member fell through.
PILOU ASBÆK: Whenever I would [hold back during the fighting], there was a guy who would come down and go, “Why the fuck you faking it? I got three hundred guys standing behind you giving three hundred percent and you’re standing in front of the camera fucking faking it!” So you couldn’t fake it. I was almost breaking ribs on those guys.
Euron viciously turned the Sand Snakes’ own weapons against them, spearing Obara and strangling Nymeria with her whip.
JESSICA HENWICK: There was an accident when Pilou almost freaking choked me out with my own whip. Then they were shoving me onto a forklift and hoisting me up there [for Nymeria’s death shot]. It was cold, windy, and I don’t do well with heights. They wanted to tie me there and put pressure around my neck. As soon as they put it on I was like, “Get it off, get it off, get it off!” Even just the slightest pressure around my neck was really awful.
For a few moments amid the fighting, Theon finally found his heroism. But faced with Euron holding Yara hostage, his “Reek” alter ego was once again triggered, and Theon jumped off the ship. It was arguably a wise decision, as Euron would have surely killed Theon, yet the move felt like it was inspired more by cowardice than strategy.
BRYAN COGMAN: Trauma runs deep. Even though Theon acquits himself in the battle, Reek resurfaces when he comes up against Euron. And a huge, expansive fight scene shrunk into one that’s very personal.
PILOU ASBÆK: Honestly? I don’t think Euron gave a shit. For Euron his main focus is power, and Theon doesn’t have any. Yara and Theon are nothing to him. They’re not a concern. I think he was just keeping Yara for fun.
The finished sequence was a uniquely frenetic set piece. Like just about every action scene on the show, the sea battle had its own style and told a character-driven story while still feeling like part of the Thrones world.
MARK MYLOD: I’m very proud of the sequence, and the special effects guys did an excellent job of making it not feel like a car park, giving the whole thing texture and making you feel like you’re really at sea.
Euron captured Ellaria and her daughter, Tyene, and took them back to King’s Landing. Then Cersei got revenge for her daughter Myrcella’s murder in one of the most devious ways possible: poisoning Tyene while forcing a chained and gagged Ellaria to watch, unable to comfort her dying daughter. Ellaria and Tyene’s desperate agony, combined with Cersei’s slightly conflicted gloating, made for a deeply disturbing sequence.
INDIRA VARMA: What I love about that scene is you’re reading it, and from one sentence to the next you don’t know what’s going to happen—how Cersei is going to treat her victim. I just thought the delivery of that information was so clever. Especially since the kiss [of death] comes before the information.
MARK MYLOD: The most obvious thing would be for Cersei to just bathe in her revenge. But there’s almost this self-loathing about her character—that she was giving in to this, and on some level hated herself, but was doing it anyway.
Lena always made that left-field choice. She always played the black notes on the keyboard and surprised you with her choices, they were so smart and almost counterintuitive. She never played her character like a baddie but a character trying to do the right thing from her point of view.
INDIRA VARMA: It was a lot of blood and snot and sweat and tears. Rosabell [Laurenti Sellers] and I had to be shackled. They very kindly put some felt inside the handcuffs so we didn’t get bruised and battered, though we ended up [bruised] anyway because your acting takes over. The shackles kept coming off, so they had to tighten them, and then we couldn’t get them off.
Ellaria hasn’t had quite the screen time, so people are inevitably more invested in Cersei. But obviously, nobody wants to see somebody’s child killed in front of them. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare, beyond worst nightmare. It was quite a challenge from an acting perspective to be interesting with no lines. It was fun trying to play anger, resentment, and impotence in that situation but still wanting to fight. At what point do you give up wanting to fight? It’s a parental instinct where you just want to keep fighting for your child.
Daenerys dispatched yet another fleet to the Lannister homestead of Casterly Rock to seize the Lannister fortress. But Jaime had already taken his forces and departed to attack Daenerys’s allies at the Tyrell seat of Highgarden. Jaime was using the same ploy Robb Stark used on him at the Battle of the Whispering Wood.
At Highgarden, Jaime personally executed Olenna by commanding the Queen of Thorns to drink poison. The unruffled Olenna still got the last word by revealing she had been the one who’d arranged Joffrey’s assassination. “Tell Cersei,” Olenna said in one of the show’s all-time best final lines. “I want her to know it was me.”
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): Finally, Jaime got something right. He was this man who you’d heard so much about, but you’d never seen him do anything that worked. Here he succeeded in a clever outmaneuvering of Daenerys, and then he’s up against this powerhouse, Olenna Tyrell. She was like Cersei, just from our point of view she’s on the good side. She goes out with bite.
MARK MYLOD: Nikolaj walked into this scene with all the power in the world. He just decimated this army, he’s a god, a conquering hero, and yet this little old lady takes him apart him in fifteen seconds. She takes every bit of power from him even though she’s dead. That’s so Game of Thrones to me. And Nikolaj’s directness and not milking the moment—yet showing the underlying humanity that’s been growing in him—was so brilliant.
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: Jaime Lannister finally kills a major character—and it’s a grandmother with poison! He was trying to be nice about it, but he’s still killing her. She’s an old lady, but has to go. She got the final word and it was devastating. She was never going to beg.
And Diana Rigg did an amazing job. It was fun to be there when we wrapped and the showrunners came out
and said a few words. She had a huge impact on the show.
DAN WEISS: Olenna was probably the only character to win her own death scene.
MARK MYLOD: My one regret was there was some confusion over how we wanted that scene to end. I wanted to end by stealing a shot from The Godfather. So when Nikolaj leaves you can still see Lady Olenna through the cracked doorway as the camera pulls back. The door ended up being built in a different spot, which was a heartbreaker at the time.
Having looted some spoils of war from Highgarden, Jaime led a Lannister army wagon train back toward King’s Landing. But an enraged Daenerys was finished playing nice and ambushed the Lannister forces with her Dothraki bloodriders and dragons. Finally, we saw the nuclear potential of Daenerys’s full-grown children with a sequence that set an industry record for the number of stuntmen set on fire.
DAVID BENIOFF: Our stunt coordinator really wanted to get in the Guinness book of world records for that.
ROWLEY IRLAM (stunt coordinator): We had seventy-three fire burns, and that itself is a record. No film or TV show has ever done that in a whole show, let alone in one sequence. We also set twenty people on fire at one time, which was also a record. In Saving Private Ryan they had thirteen on a beach, and on Braveheart they had eighteen partial burns. Because of the nature of our attacking animals, we had the liberty to expand on that.
As you might expect, setting a person on fire and then watching them burn for a while is a rather tense business. Each stuntperson is covered with fire-resistant clothes, a cooling gel, and a mask, but the process is still dangerous. Once aflame, a stuntperson has to hold their breath until the shot is complete and all the flames are extinguished. Even a shot lasting just thirty seconds can feel like an eternity when you’re engulfed in flames, unable to see, and weighed down by heavy protective gear and a costume, all while running around waving your arms.
ROWLEY IRLAM: It’s totally different than going underwater in your bathtub and counting the seconds in your head. If somebody bumps you and you breathe in by accident, you will breathe in flame. The most dangerous thing is reignition. There’s a good minute of everybody staying down afterward as you’re still very flammable at this point.
Getting a unique performance out of each stuntperson is also difficult, because when a person is on fire, their focus is pretty strongly fixated on not dying. Back in season one, a scene at Castle Black required setting a stuntperson on fire when Jon Snow threw a lantern onto a wight, except the take originally didn’t go as planned.
DANIEL MINAHAN (director): We had to figure out what does a wight do when it burns, and wanted to avoid the zombie trope. The one thing I knew I didn’t want was for him to run around and wave his arms—because that’s what people always do when they’re in a burn. So we rehearsed with the stuntperson, “This is what you we want you to do.” We got everything ready with the mask and the chemical on him, and then we threw the fire on him. And what did he do? He ran around and waved his arms!
One victim of Daenerys’s dragons in the Loot Train attack may have been a character who wasn’t shown on camera during the sequence. Earlier in season seven, pop singer Ed Sheeran had a cameo as a singing Lannister soldier. Later, season eight would include a curiously specific throwaway line of dialogue describing the fate of a Lannister soldier named “Eddie,” “a ginger” who “came back with his face burnt right off”—“he’s got no eyelids now”—following the Loot Train dragon attack. The showrunners never revealed whether the dialogue referred to Sheeran’s character, who was the object of considerable discussion when the season aired.
JEREMY PODESWA: One thing that Game of Thrones never did was stunt casting. Everybody in the world wanted to be on Game of Thrones, and Dan and David never rose to that bait. With Ed Sheeran, it didn’t feel like a weird thing to anybody on the show because Maisie knew him, he’s in the UK, we needed somebody who could sing, it was a small part, and he had acted before. Then when he got there he was the loveliest, most grounded guy you could ever meet. It was really cold, and we were out in the wilderness all day long. He didn’t run back to his trailer. He sat down with all the extras playing the Lannister army and was happy to be there. And he did a lovely job. If he wasn’t Ed Sheeran, pop star, nobody would have ever batted an eye at the person playing that role.
Daenerys’s firebombing attack also sparked a debate between the showrunners, one they say is a typical example of their occasional disputes.
DAVID BENIOFF: There was a long argument over when the dragons fly over the Dothraki. Should their horses be afraid? And Dan is like, “You know they’ve been with her for a long while. . . .”
DAN WEISS: Why would they be afraid?
DAVID BENIOFF: Because they’re horses and they’re fucking dumb and dragons are big and scary. So we spent like an hour on that.
DAN WEISS: An hour discussing literally four seconds of film that probably will happen when most people are looking at their watch or checking their messages.
(The Dothraki horses, by the way, were fearless.)
Just four episodes into season seven, the Martell and Tyrell families had been wiped out and the Lannister forces had been attacked during an epic sequence that normally would have served as a season’s climactic battle. Behind the scenes there was some debate about the show’s quickening narrative urgency.
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: I had been lulled into a different pace. Everything was happening quicker than I was used to. Storylines met and clashed, and it was very surprising—“Already? Now? What?!” A lot of things that normally took a season took one episode.
KIT HARINGTON: Thrones had been a plodding, slow machine, and it was turning into a classic drama, like a thriller. I was worried about that, if I’m honest. “Will changing what Thrones is work?” Because it was so different than what everybody is used to.
DAVID BENIOFF: For a long time we’d been talking about “the wars to come.” Well, the war was pretty much there. So it was really about trying to find a way to make the storytelling work without feeling like we’re rushing it and give characters their due.
DAN WEISS: It’s urgency from within the story that drove the pace rather than any external decision. It wasn’t “Let’s make things move faster.” Things were moving faster because in the world of these characters the war that they’d been waiting for was upon them, the conflicts that have been building the previous six years were upon them, and those facts gave them a sense of urgency that made them move faster.
BRYAN COGMAN: We made a choice to “just get on with it” that season. You can sit at home and do the math for how long it took boats to get from point A and point B and whatever that was, yeah, that’s what it was. There was always something everybody had got to graft on to, and I guess that outrage was better than others.
The epicenter of the pacing debate was “Beyond the Wall,” the visually spectacular sixth episode of the seventh season, following Jon Snow as he led an expedition with Tormund, Beric (Richard Dormer), Gendry, the Hound, Jorah, and Thoros (Paul Kaye) to capture a wight in order to obtain proof of the Army of the Dead’s existence.
On the set in 2016, Alan Taylor directed the bulk of the sequence in a Northern Ireland quarry that had been dressed to match a real-life location in Iceland. The set’s “frozen lake” looked unnervingly real; when you stepped on the “ice” you expected your foot to slide right out from under you.
The actors trudged across the set against paper “snow” getting blasted into their faces from a trio of giant fans. It might not have been Iceland, but the set was still freezing. “You can tell when people are really cold; they get this look,” said co-producer Dave Hill, noting the ruddy, braced expression on the faces of the cast.
Between takes, the actors coughed up paper, rubbed their eyes, and made jokes about getting “white lung” from the fake snow. Harington attempted to crack up Joe Dempsie before one shot as they prepared to look deadly serious on camera. “I’m gonna tickle your ball
s later,” Harington intoned gravely. “I’m going to reach under and give them a little tap.”
The group then came under attack by an undead polar bear, a creature the showrunners had wanted to wedge somewhere into their tale since season four. Taylor had the actors circle up for a cinematic Magnificent Seven shot where the reluctant band of brothers began to work together for the first time. “It should feel like a shark attack on dry land,” Taylor said. The director infused the scene with a sense of dread that the bear could strike from any direction (though on set, the creature was simply a stuntman pulling a green sled).
The trip beyond the Wall was a solution to a puzzling creative problem: How do you get the Night King and his Army of the Dead south of a seven-hundred-foot ice wall that was constructed eight thousand years ago specifically to keep them out?
DAN WEISS: We were talking about breaching the Wall and trying to figure out what pieces we already had on the board without introducing new deus ex machina pieces. What was in the world already that could conceivably knock down the Wall? Just getting the Night King past the Wall didn’t do it; just getting the White Walkers past didn’t do it. You needed to get an army of a hundred thousand dead men past the Wall, which means a giant hole. We were racking our brains as to what could do that. Then we realized there would be something massive in the show—they weren’t massive at the time we thought of this—and that was the dragons. But getting a dragon north of the Wall was tricky.
Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon Page 33