Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): The idea from the beginning was there were all of these squabbles going on that seemed so important and global and earth-shattering and were happening against the backdrop of much larger and more momentous events that very few—people who lived on the fringes of the political world—knew about. It always was the overarching structure of the series that these things in the far east and far north would come together and decide the fate of everybody in the middle.

  Typical battle episodes on Thrones would contain about fifteen minutes or so of calm-before-the-storm discussion scenes before all hell broke loose. In season eight, the writers devoted an entire episode to the characters’ preparing for battle, Bryan Cogman’s playlike “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (we’ll discuss some of the major moments from that episode later). That way, “The Long Night” could hit the ground running with arguably the longest consecutive battle sequence ever filmed—an eighty-two-minute episode consisting entirely of various types of action sequences (by comparison, the famed Omaha Beach assault that opened Saving Private Ryan was twenty-seven minutes, and the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers was forty minutes). To lead the project, producers brought back “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards” veteran Miguel Sapochnik.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK (director): There was a bit of trepidation because there was now this expectation that you have to beat yourself, which I loathe.

  DAVID BENIOFF: Having the largest battle doesn’t sound very exciting. It sounds pretty boring. Part of our challenge—and really Miguel’s challenge—was how to keep that compelling. If it’s just humans hacking and slashing at wights for fifty-five minutes, it was going to quickly become dull.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: At some point you exhaust an audience. I watched The Two Towers, and it’s actually three different battles in three different places intercut. I was trying to get a sense of when do you tire out. It felt like the only way to really approach that stuff properly was to take every sequence and ask yourself: “Why, as an audience member, would I care to keep watching?”

  The battle’s not-so-secret weapon was the show’s ensemble of beloved characters. The team figured if the episode focused on fan favorites having different kinds of battle adventures, then a variety of character-driven stories would pull the audience through all the requisite hack-and-slash.

  DAN WEISS: The action is driven by character, not by how many swords and spears you can swing around. We’ve been lucky enough we’ve had seventy-plus hours of showing who everybody is. There were so many individual stories you bring to that situation.

  DAVE HILL (co-producer): Most battles are the last fifteen minutes of a movie for a reason. People lose interest. So we’d have a big field battle. Then we’d have Arya in a haunted-house sequence in the library. We’d have Tyrion and Sansa in the crypt, which would become like a horror movie. We have Dany and Jon on the dragons. Each story had different textures so it wouldn’t just be the same thing.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: The process of whittling down the script took a lot longer this time because David and Dan wanted to keep everything. We all wanted everything but were up against the reality of what we could achieve. And one of the things I found interesting was the less action—the less fighting—you can have in a sequence, the better. And we switched genres from suspense to horror to action to drama, and that way we’re not stuck in killing upon killing, because everybody gets desensitized and it doesn’t mean anything.

  The original production plan for “The Long Night” was to break up filming into small segments, which would require fewer cast and crew members to be on the set at any given time. But that would make the filmmaking heavily structured and limit Sapochnik’s ability to improvise or to have as many shots that included large groups of cast members. As Sapochnik had learned on “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards,” nothing ever goes precisely according to plan—especially when filming outdoors in hostile weather—so it was essential that he could quickly pivot in response to changing circumstances.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: We built this massive new part of Winterfell and thought, “We’ll film this part here and this there,” and basically broke it into so many pieces it would be like a Marvel movie, with never any flow or improvisation. Even on Star Wars, they build certain parts of the set and then add huge elements of green screen. Everything would be broken into little morsels to be put back together. And that makes sense. There’s an efficiency to that. But there’s something that you lose when doing it that way, and you lose the spontaneity of being able to move the camera anywhere. And I was walking around the set thinking, “This is really cool, I can walk around and find angles I would never have found beforehand.”

  So Sapochnik suggested an alternative schedule that would include eleven weeks of consecutive night shoots.

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I turned to producers and said, “I know it’s shitty and going to be cold. I don’t want to do eleven weeks of night shoots, and no one else does. But if we continue the way we’re going, we’re going to lose what makes Game of Thrones cool—that it feels real, even though it’s supernatural and we have dragons.”

  Thrones had filmed plenty of nighttime action sequences over the years, but the rain-drenched battles for the Battle of the Blackwater and the Battle of Castle Black had taken about three weeks each. To the producers’ knowledge, no movie or show had ever attempted a filming schedule like this before.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth): They brought us into a tent and broke the news to us. They ran through the episode’s pre-viz—a slightly animated storyboard in visual form. We saw this extraordinary series of images. Miguel was saying we’re going to do this over fifty-five nights, and there was a lot of people looking at each other. There were those of us who were on “Battle of the Bastards,” which was less than half of what this was attempting, and during the day. I immediately thought, “Fucking hell. This is a nightmare. It’s like a deliberate attempt to fuck the whole thing up.” On paper, it’s madness. But they wanted everybody to be aware of the shit they would put us in so nobody could say they didn’t know.

  DAVE HILL: Miguel sent out an email to all the cast: “Please get on a night schedule ahead of time, because you’re going to be so tired and wet and cold you need to give yourself every advantage you can.”

  GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth): I requested a meeting with Miguel. It was very important to me that we saw Jaime and Brienne’s relationship expressed throughout the battle. That what we should see is this relationship has been going on and building for a long time, and they’re in a rare situation where they can completely trust and depend on each other. You take that complicated and solid relationship and take that into brutal, mind-blowing, apocalyptic war. Does it break them apart or force them closer together?

  MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): I had skipped the battle every year, which is bizarre since Arya’s the one who’s been training the most. Then Miguel called me a year before and said: “Start training now, because it’s going to be really hard.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah . . .”

  The episode would include the death of several characters, such as Theon Greyjoy, who finally had a selfless and heroic moment when trying to protect Bran from the Night King. . . .

  BRYAN COGMAN: It was difficult for Alfie because there was a degree of physical stunt work and effects and things that were out of his control. And for him to have to play his final moments amidst all that chaos and craziness was tremendously challenging for him. I remember the night we shot it, and it was just one of those things you had to do in addition to a bunch of other things. It’s only when it came together and you see beautiful subtlety and anguish in his performance, but also that kind of catharsis that Theon’s finally at peace going out protecting Bran. For all the talk of redemption arcs, fulfilled or not, his was certainly fulfilled.

  . . . and Jorah Mormont, who died protecting Daenerys from the Army of the Dead.

  IAIN GLEN (Jorah Mormont): You either con
clude as a character, or you get to the end of the whole thing and people try to project forward of what’s the future of your character that you’ll never know. I was happy to conclude. He would absolutely sacrifice his life for her to succeed. In a way, he was given the conclusion he wanted.

  DAVE HILL: For a long time we wanted Ser Jorah there at the Wall in the very end—the three coming out of the tunnel [in the series finale] were to be Jon, Jorah, and Tormund. But the amount of logic we’d have had to bend to get Jorah up to the Wall and get him to leave Dany’s side right before [her tragic turn]—there’s no way to do that blithely, and Jorah should have the noble death he craved defending the woman he loves.

  Another casualty was young Lyanna Mormont. Actress Bella Ramsey was originally only cast for a single episode in season six, but she was such a ferocious scene stealer, the showrunners kept bringing her back. (Ramsey’s favorite of her character’s feisty lines: “I don’t care if he is a bastard, Ned Stark’s blood runs through his veins!”)

  BRYAN COGMAN: Bella’s first scene could’ve been a disaster. It could have easily ended up on the cutting-room floor if some cute kid actor came in. But she was utterly credible. And at one point Kit blew a line and she fed it to him because she had memorized every line in the scene.

  MARK MYLOD (director): Kit was all, “I wished I’d learned my lines better. I’m being shown up!” It was one of those times when you called “cut” and there was a spontaneous round of applause.

  In “The Long Night,” Lyanna faced off against a zombie giant. She was crushed in his fist, yet still managed to take him down by stabbing him in the eye.

  BELLA RAMSEY (Lyanna Mormont): There was one thing Miguel said to me that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I wasn’t sure if she would be really scared or just a slight bit of scared. We tried it several ways. He said, “It’s like someone removed her fear gene.” And that was a really great bit of direction. Her story maybe had the potential to grow, but she was going to go at some point because everyone does, and the way she went was the best way she could have. I wanted to either end up on the Iron Throne or have a really good death. So I’m happy.

  Melisandre perished as well. The Red Woman returned to help defeat the forces of darkness, then stripped off her necklace granting eternal youth and walked into the sunrise, her body decomposing, to join the piles of dead.

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN (Melisandre): She saved the day, so she’s a bit of a hero in the end, which is cool, because for a long time she was hated. In a very bombastic orchestra piece, I was happy to be the soft piano notes at the end. We finally know what she came for, and it’s the end of her journey—I can go now, my work’s done. I tried to play it with tiredness but with relief.

  Sometimes a character’s last line, even a simple one, can be the toughest to say. Once you speak those words, you will never again play a role that you’ve lived for so many years.

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: I wasn’t able to nail my last sentence. I say to Liam: “You don’t have to kill me because I’ll be dead before dawn.” I got a bit cranky. I feel like I’d done sixty takes of that line. I couldn’t nail it. I don’t know why.

  Perhaps most crucially, the Night King also fell. Arya dispatched the White Walker leader with her Valyrian-steel dagger, which was introduced in the show’s first season when an assassin used it to attack Bran Stark. The dagger passed to Catelyn, then to Littlefinger, then to Bran, and then to Arya (who also used it to kill Littlefinger in season seven). Given that the Night King is not in Martin’s books, the manner of his death was a major climactic decision that was left to the showrunners. They initially considered several hero candidates to take out the story’s biggest villain.

  DAVID BENIOFF: It had to be somebody with believable access to Valyrian steel. We didn’t want it to be Jon because he’s always saving the day. We talked about the Hound at one point, but we wanted his big thing to be Clegane Bowl. Ultimately it wouldn’t have felt right if it was Jon or Brienne or the Hound.

  DAN WEISS: Then we put in Sam’s book from the Citadel how dragonglass had found its way into the design of implements when people didn’t even know what they were working with, and there’s a picture of Arya’s dagger.

  DAVID BENIOFF: That dagger had been set up from the very beginning, and we knew Arya was going to get it at the end of season seven to kill Littlefinger. It had to be Arya. It goes back to the whole “not today” thing.

  DAN WEISS: “What do you say to the god of death?” Well, the Night King is the closest embodiment of the god of death.

  There was also a prescient line uttered by Arya in season two: “Anyone can be killed.”

  MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I was going to have this sequence before she kills him showing each character in the story fighting their way to the final moment. I was going to shoot it so that we begin to intercut between them and they all begin to become the same character. I was interested in the idea they’re all the children of these kings who are all fated to become this role—including the Night King. He’s the product of something that went wrong with the Children of the Forest. It would culminate with all the characters having the same composition. But we cut that.

  Once we pared it back, I thought, “Hmm, if I see Arya running I know she’s going to do something.” So it was about almost losing her from the story and then have her as a surprise. We’re pinning all our hopes on Jon being the guy going to do it, because he’s always the guy. So we make him a continuous shot. I want the audience to think: “Jon’s gonna do it, Jon’s gonna do it . . . ,” and then he fails. He fails at the very last minute.

  DAN WEISS: We wanted to show there were overwhelming numbers and how nobody through sheer hack-and-slash could do it. The obstacle between them and the Night King was insurmountable—unless you had something magical going for you on your side, which Arya did. She’s a person the Night King wouldn’t be thinking about, and ideally the audience wouldn’t be thinking about her at the moment either.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: It was so unbelievably exciting. But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it and that she doesn’t deserve it. I told my boyfriend, and he was like, “Mmm, should be Jon though, really, shouldn’t it?” And that didn’t give me a lot of confidence. The hardest thing is in any series you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. Some hundred-pound girl comes in and stabs him. It has to be intelligently done.

  Williams’s perception of the twist changed after she shot her scene with van Houten in which Melisandre reminded Arya what she told her in season three: “I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me. Brown eyes. Blue eyes. Green eyes. Eyes you’ll shut forever. We will meet again.” The scene suggested Arya was fated to destroy the Night King, though the order of the eye colors was changed to conclude with “blue eyes” when Melisandre repeated the line.

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: I felt like that guy in the movie who gives the main character one last push to do it, like in a football game.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS: We were shooting the bit with Melisandre, and she brings it back to everything Arya’s been working for over these past six seasons. It all comes down to this one very moment. So then I was like, “Fuck you, Jon, I get it.”

  So Melisandre not only gave Arya the confidence to attack the Night King but also convinced Williams that her character could pull it off. Of course, whether Arya was truly destined to destroy the Night King or Melisandre simply encouraged the right person at the right time is—as with all prophecies on Thrones—left unclear. But thousands of years ago, the Children of the Forest created the demon by piercing a captive man in the heart with dragonglass, and the young Stark managed to stab him in roughly the same place. The Night King was unmade as he was made.

  KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): I thought it was gonna be me! But I like it because it gives Arya’s training a purpose. It’s much better how she does it. It will frustrate some audience members that he’s hunting the Night King and
you’re expecting this epic fight and it never happens, but that’s kind of Thrones.

  ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT (Bran Stark): That moment before when Bran sees the Night King is about to attack him—my reading of that was that Bran should look at him with pity because he knows how this guy was created. He’s not a monster; he’s a weapon who’s gone badly wrong. He’s an innocent man with a piece of glass plunged in his heart. And we ended up playing it like that. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  There were also dragons and giants and Jon Snow’s direwolf, Ghost, in the battle as well. But the producers ruled out adding the fabled ice spiders that Old Nan had hauntingly described in season one when telling the legend of the Long Night.

  DAN WEISS: “Big as hounds.” Didn’t we talk about that for thirty seconds? Sounds good. Looks good on a metal album cover. But once they start moving, what does an ice spider look like? Probably doesn’t look great.

  Even with all of Sapochnik’s warnings, the episode’s schedule was far tougher than any of the cast or crew had anticipated. Filming started with two weeks of night shoots in December. Then there were a couple more weeks of scattered night shoots at the start of the year. Then came fifty-five night shoots in a row. And finally, there was about two months of daytime filming inside a studio.

  Those fifty-five nights sandwiched in the middle of an already demanding schedule became like a real-life version of an eternal soul-crushing supernatural winter. The production had the added misfortune of getting slammed by two “polar vortex” storms, dubbed “the Beast from the East” in the press, as if White Walkers had literally arrived on the set. The storms brought extreme low temperatures with weather that local reports said felt as low as nineteen degrees Fahrenheit. “One night we were supposed to film Jorah defending Dany by a flaming trebuchet, and we had to call it off because it got so cold that the gas fire bars wouldn’t light,” Dave Hill recalled.