Minor spoilers ahead for last night’s penultimate episode of Game of Thrones! You’ve been warned!
“The Battle of the Bastards” has come and gone on Game of Thrones, and the North is gonna take a long time to recover from this one! Remember the days when GoT would cut away from the big battles before they happened? Those days are over.
12 years ago, ABC reportedly fired its chairman, Lloyd Braun for greenlighting the $13 million pilot episode of Lost. The average budget of this season of GoT was said to be around $10 million. HBO hasn’t released a definitive budget for last night’s episode, but it’s very likely that it has passed the Lost pilot as the most expensive episode in TV history.
And where did all of that money go? Entertainment Weekly had the best breakdown of the episode. According to that report, the battle was shot over 25 days with four camera crews, 600 crew members, 500 extras, 70 horses, and 25 stuntmen and women in addition to the 160 tons of gravel that was used to give the horses traction during the challenging production.
Related: Game of Thrones ‘Battle of the Bastards’ Review
Director Miguel Sapochnik also told EW that one of the episodes’ key sequences was essentially an ab-lib created on the set when the originally planned scene was no longer feasible. “The sheer logistics of staging a battle scene this size was like a battle in and of itself, minus the life/death thing,” noted Sapochnik. “One evening I got home and I kind of knew we couldn’t finish in the time we had left so I wrote a long email to David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] 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’ for three days. That is to say, we’d be shooting without a script.”
“I think that this section of the fight — in which Jon is almost buried alive by a stampede of panicking wildings — turned out as one of my favorite little moments in the sequence,” continued Spaochnik. “No VFX, no fighting, just Kit giving a stellar performance and a crazy top shot as he pushes his way back out (we affectionately called it the “rebirthing” shot). The other reason I liked it is because of what it meant to be allowed to follow my gut and go for it. That kind of trust you can’t buy and it felt like a privilege to have been given that kind of support to go into uncharted territory by the producers in such a high stakes game.”
You can read the full interview with Spaochnik here. It’s quite interesting, and even funny at times. The season finale of Game of Thrones will air next Sunday, June 26.
What did you think about the Battle of the Bastards? Let us know in the comment section below!
