The cold blast combined with freezing rain, gusting wind, and an intensively physical and technical job that stretched from early evenings to the mornings. The Thrones crew prided themselves on being resilient, but the “The Long Night” very nearly broke them. The cast had to become actor-athletes, enduring week after week of physical endurance challenges while continuing to give their usual acclaimed performances.
IAIN GLEN: I don’t think people can comprehend what eleven 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.
JACOB ANDERSON (Grey Worm): Grey Worm doesn’t say much, so I had to put a lot of feeling and expression into how he fought. You’re trying to keep all the meaning in your face yet also remember the technical details—then do that twenty times.
JOE DEMPSIE (Gendry): Every night there was a tipping point around two A.M. where everybody started behaving a little bit weird.
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: It was utter madness. It’s the crew I felt for. They were the ones who were truly at the face of brutal suffering when it came to the relentlessness of the schedule.
RORY McCANN (Sandor “the Hound” Clegane): Everybody prays they never have to do that again. You could recognize crew members [during the day] who were on it because they looked gray.
LIAM CUNNINGHAM: It wasn’t an exercise in creativity. It was a lesson in discipline. Not getting tired, not getting bored—if you get bored you take your eye off the ball and you mess it up.
MAISIE WILLIAMS: 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. And 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.
CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): It was just the unremitting nature of every day knowing that you’re going to be working in the cold until five in the morning. You’re fighting your brain and trying to take it one step at a time. The person you admire the most is the director, because he can’t take it one step at a time and default to simply doing his job. He’s the one building a jigsaw puzzle without the box to look at.
DAVE HILL: I don’t know how Miguel did it, because I was not sane, and I didn’t have to be fixing things every second of every day. You became a shell of a person.
IAIN GLEN: How Miguel managed to hold it together is beyond my comprehension.
RORY MCCANN: There are some directors who don’t speak much, and if you’re doing your job there are no words. Sometimes younger actors do a scene and there’s a feeling of “want” on their face: “Did I do good?” And some directors, there’s not a word from them, not even a nod. He’s not thinking about you, but his other fifty jobs.
But with Miguel, even when you think you’re not in a scene much, he’d go to every actor and go, “Do you know where you are?” You’re in the middle of a battle and he came up and went: “Why are you here?” Why am I here? . . . It gets you thinking. Then he’ll go to another actor and go: “What are you fighting for?” I’m fighting for life. I’m fighting for good.
JOHN BRADLEY (Samwell Tarly): Miguel was very keen on making us think about it in terms of our own narrative all the way through. “What is going on with your character when the camera is not on you? We may not have shown you for ten minutes, but something has happened to you in those ten minutes—you’ve been constantly fighting, or you’ve been running, or you’ve been hiding. How has your story through the fight developed? You have to hold it in your mind, what’s happened to you since we saw you last.” He’s got such a forensic sense of detail, the way he can hold the points of view of each of these characters in his head and know what each individual beat means to them.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: Stuff I’ve done previously was generally from Jon’s perspective. Here I had twenty-four cast members and everyone would like it to be their scene. So that was complicated, because I find the best battle sequences are when you have a strong point of view. Here the point of view was objective even when you made it subjective, going from one person’s story to another, because you’re cutting back and forth, so it all becomes objective whether you want it to or not. I kept thinking, “Whose story am I telling right now? And what restrictions does that place on me that become a good thing?”
At one point on set after the night shoots, Sapochnik was darting between supervising three different units filming at the same time: a scene capturing fire-trench action, another with Daenerys on her dragon rig, and still another of field battle action. Yet even Sapochnik, who also directed the final season’s fifth episode, “The Bells,” reached his limit.
BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): Miguel originally wanted to direct episodes three, four, and five. I said, “That’s crazy, we’re going to have a tough enough time having you do two episodes.” Then he kept yelling, “I was supposed to have a bigger break [between episodes]!” But all I remember was him saying, “I don’t want anybody else to do the other battle.”
DEBORAH RILEY: He was so exhausted. I was trying to get Miguel to focus on making decisions for “The Bells” while he was shooting “The Long Night” and he couldn’t.
The punishing delirium of making “The Long Night” was compounded by director David Nutter simultaneously shooting episode four, “The Last of the Starks,” which also used the Winterfell set. So the Thrones team wasn’t just working nights but running twenty-four hours a day, with many essential crew members tasked with servicing both day and night units. Some crew members were clocking up to forty thousand steps on their pedometers, walking roughly twenty miles every day.
DEBORAH RILEY: All you ever hear about is the crew shooting at night, but we were working on two episodes at once. For people like me, I had to service both. We would have to turn the whole set over to Miguel in the afternoon, then at four A.M. we would start receiving emails about how it was all going to change for David Nutter. You’re always trying to stay ahead of a moving train, and there were times I felt like the train was running over the top of us. Season eight sucked every piece of energy that we had.
CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: It was like fighting a battle. It’s sheer force of will that you’re telling people, “This is what we’re doing.” The minute people doubt that you know what you’re doing, you are sunk. You can’t have, for instance, a stunt coordinator roll his eyes at what he has to do. No weakness at any level, so everybody below you just follows you. The minute they feel your resolve is not up to it, that spreads like cancer.
Amid the exhaustion, every decision mattered. Here’s an example of the level of detail that went into just a few swings of a sword. During a “Long Night” shot, Samwell Tarly was fighting wights. Watching the scene on set, I said to Cogman, “Sam looks like a badass.” Cogman looked perturbed. “You hear what he just said?” Cogman said to the other producers. “That’s the problem. Sam’s not supposed to look like a badass.”
Bradley was asked to adjust for a second take to appear a bit more confused and unce
rtain. Now he skittered back as each wight attacked. After another take, Weiss tweaked Bradley’s performance further. “He’s always facing the right direction for each attack, like he’s anticipating it,” Weiss noted, and reminded Bradley that Sam doesn’t know where the next wight will come from. Then it all came together, and Bradley looked precisely like a terrified novice action hero reacting to an unpredictable onslaught of wights.
JOHN BRADLEY: You get carried away sometimes when doing these huge fight sequences. You can see yourself [on the monitor] and want to make yourself look as good as possible. Miguel kept having to say to me: “Remember your character, he’s not that good at this. I know that you want to show you’re quite good at this, you want to show you’re better than Sam is at this. But you have to play him because that’s what’s going to be truthful. So stop being so good!” You never look as good as you think you do anyway. You always think a scene is going to be a game-changer. Then you watch it and it’s just you.
There was, however, one actor who actually liked the night shoots—unlike every other person interviewed for this book.
You can probably guess who it was.
KRISTOFER HIVJU (Tormund Giantsbane): I enjoyed the night shoots! It’s a special atmosphere. It’s cold and dark, and you have almost a thousand people every day staying up at night to make this happen. You have people just being bodies for twelve hours. It was magical. I killed so many zombies. I was dreaming about killing zombies.
Not every actor in “The Long Night” had the same grueling schedule. Performers whose characters were in Winterfell’s crypts, like Peter Dinklage, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Sophie Turner, were spared the worst of it.
SOPHIE TURNER (Sansa Stark): I only had two night shoots. It wouldn’t have been in Sansa’s nature, really, [to have been fighting]. But I wanted to work with the stunt guys so much—they’re an Emmy-award-winning stunt team—and the only time I worked with them was when I was being slapped or beaten, which wasn’t so fun. Then again, if I did have stunts, I’d probably have had to do seventy night shoots, so it probably worked out.
When filming scenes inside the studio, the cast was kept far warmer. But generating the episode’s “fog of war”—a blinding blizzard of mist cast by the Night King—required either fog machines or CGI. Naturally, Thrones opted for real smoke, which meant burning paraffin and fish oil inside the studio. But as they inhaled smoke day after day, crew members began coughing up fish wax. Face-covering breathing masks multiplied on set. At least one crew member was taken to the hospital for an asthma attack. The studio hangar’s massive doors were opened periodically to clear the air, and red-eyed crew members poured outside into the Belfast rain and cold seeking relief from the “comfort” of the studio.
One of the studio rooms was the motion-capture suite (or “mo-co”). There, Harington and Clarke took turns on the dragon rig, which looked like a large green mechanical bull that tilted and swiveled against a green screen. There Sapochnik tried to find ways to add more storytelling into what actors called the show’s most monotonous on-camera task, and what one director dubbed “Emilia’s own mini theme park roller coaster.”
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: You put an actor on a rotating buck and you blast them with wind and they’re on a green-screen set, so the last thing they’re thinking is they have to do a performance. My focus was on getting a performance from the actors so their story continues even though they’re on a dragon.
KIT HARINGTON: I was slightly pissed off I was on a dragon. It stopped me from fighting in a crowd. In some ways, as Jon does, I wanted to get back down on the ground. The fact he can fly a dragon means he has to, but his place is down there amongst the sword swingers.
MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I pitched the idea of designing shots that felt like they could have actually been shot in real life, and [I looked at] footage of World War II Supermarine Spitfires in action. I also pushed for the idea of allowing the dragons to constantly break frame. That is to say, frame shots slightly smaller than the actual dragon is so that it felt more like wildlife “on the fly” photography. The dragons should be so big and fast that it’s hard to keep up with them.
As Williams pointed out, the cast and crew didn’t have the luxury of getting sick. But, of course, some got sick anyway.
EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): Mo-co was called “the infirmary” because everybody got sick with a most intense flu. Everybody in the room was fucked. I was incredibly ill on the back of the dragon. So I’m being thrown around on the back of this dragon going “Aaaaahhhh-chew!” Then the dragon started to malfunction a bit and you’d just try to hold on. I like to say that Kit broke it.
“The Long Night” almost certainly ranks as the most filming hours ever dedicated to a single episode of television. After shooting was complete, there was a massive feeling of accomplishment among the Thrones team, though some said it took them six months to fully recover from filming. Crew members proudly donned “I Survived the Long Night” jackets.
MAISIE WILLIAMS: The sense of achievement after a day on set is unlike anything else. [Even on] one of those really tough days, you know it’s going to be part of something so iconic and it will look amazing. The hard work pays off on this show.
IAIN GLEN: You had an absolute fucked bunch of actors, but on-screen it looks horrible and dirty and dark and cold. Without getting too Method about it, it bleeds onto the screen.
DAVID BENIOFF: Maybe my proudest moment from this show was when screening “The Long Night” at the Mann’s Chinese Theatre. When Arya gets the Night King, the whole theater erupted. I was sitting next to my wife and her best friend, Sarah Paulson. My wife was grabbing my arm, and Sarah was screaming. I’ll never forget that feeling.
The critical reaction to the episode was quite positive, if less effusive than the team had hoped. “‘The Long Night’ certainly lived up to being the show’s biggest rumble yet, and it was extremely effective,” wrote Empire’s James White. “We felt the emotional impact of those who died, cheered at various near-misses, and watched as the conflict evolved between skirmishes, grand conflicts, and some true horror stalking the halls.”
Many viewers at home, however, struggled with the episode’s intentional dimness, which was used to literally dramatize a long night. The issue was likely made more noticeable when the episode first aired due to video compression (some cable providers significantly reduce content resolution, particularly during peak usage). Subsequent viewing of the episode, especially on Blu-ray and on properly calibrated TVs, show the episode’s action clearly. But it’s also fair to say that fans shouldn’t need the highest-quality video stream, or to change their TV settings, in order to watch their favorite show.
Game of Thrones insiders point out the production has always used “source lighting,” meaning lighting that’s justified with a visible illumination source in the scene (such as sunlight, moonlight, candles, or torches). Many previous dark scenes in the show were lit the exact same way as the shots in “The Long Night,” but there were never so many in one episode before.
BRYAN COGMAN: There’s a famous story about the director of photography for The Lord of the Rings. Sean Astin asked him about a scene [in Shelob’s lair], “Where’s the light coming from?” And he said: “The same place as the music.” Perfectly valid answer. And if you watch The Two Towers, there’s light coming from everywhere; the battle is lit up like a Christmas tree. And that’s fine; I’m not dissing it. But that was never Game of Thrones. You write a battle at night, then this is how you light it.
Another complaint was about the length of the final season; some wished Thrones had filmed more episodes to further flesh out the story’s final arcs. Those who work on the show insisted they could not have shot additional hours for season eight, especially after making “The Long Night.” Each year, the Thrones team pushed their limits. In the final season, they reached them.
CAROLYN STRAUSS (former programming president at HBO; executive producer): People a
re like, “Well, they should’ve done more.” The truth of the matter is it took so long to make the episodes that we made, I don’t know how it would have been physically possible. There are a lot of factors that go into making this, practical ones and storytelling ones. These guys did a masterful job of considering all those questions.
Could the show have made a ninth season instead of more episodes for season eight? In addition to the showrunners’ belief that there wasn’t enough story for another round, some claimed delivering the spectacle of season eight was only possible because the cast and crew knew it was the finale.
BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: Several of our hero team players were like, “I almost quit.” People were willing to go that extra mile for season eight only because they knew it was the final season and they knew it had to be spectacular.
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: If that hadn’t been the last season, there would have been a mutiny halfway through the night shoots.
BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: David and Dan did not hold back. They wrote the biggest that they could. We tried to reduce some things, and David and Dan and Miguel were like, “Nope, we need it.” Every department was stretched beyond where we should have stretched them. Like, we had two visual effects teams—which we never had before—working seven days a week for a year trying to keep up with the shot list. Everybody said: “I never want to do that again.” It was the hardest thing all of us have ever done. It was definitely the maximum we could do.
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