Battle of the Bastards Director Opens Up About The Episode

Warning: This story contains spoilers for this Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones, titled Battle of the Bastards. You have been warned.

Battle of the Bastards is obviously, the biggest battle scene featured in Game of Thrones. The massive battle scene between Jon Snow's men and Ramsay Bolton's men has undoubtedly evoked an equally massive emotional response from audiences.

According to director Miguel Sapochnik, Season 6, Episode 9. He said it's "the most logistically complicated thing I've ever been involved in."

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the director delves deep into his intimate perspective of the episode, giving us an idea on what it's like directing an episode of such a huge scale.

Asked what elements in battles in films he tried to emulate, Sapochnik said:

I watched every pitch field battle I could find (footage of real ones too), looking for patterns — for what works, what doesn't, what takes you out of the moment, what keeps you locked in. The big reference was Akira Kurosawa'sRAN. Interestingly one of the things I noticed is that staging of these battles through the years has changed dramatically. Back in the day you'd see these huge aerial shots of horse charges and there were two big differences. First, it was all real — no CGI or digital replication. And second, often when the horses would go down, you can kind of tell they got really hurt. Nowadays you'd never get away with that, and nor would you want to.

Also, the more I watched these scenes the more I felt like those aerial shots that are now so synonymous with a final charge they kind of take you out of the moment. That is to say, you experience this moment as an objective observer in all its glory with no sense of danger from the inevitable impact of hundreds of these huge stampeding animals. I was interested in what it must feel like to be on the ground when that sh— happens. Absolute terror? A moment of clarity? What goes through your head when you are right in the thick of it?

After "Hardhome," there was a lot of happy campers in the Game of Thronesoffices. But there was also a sense that we somehow had to make "BOB" bigger and better. I personally felt the pressure in that respect and so I tried to quash it as quickly as possible by using as my mantra this response: "Let's just make it the best we can." That doesn't mean making it better or avoiding how others have done it because, let's face it, battles have been done every which way. It just means understanding the story and trying to service it the best way you can for the money and time you have. Most of all, it means choosing a point of view.

Asked about the toughest part about adding horses in the battle scene, he said:

The time factor. Everything takes about 50 percent longer. Also they need relatively solid ground to run on, and when it rains the field would turn to into a bog and we'd have to lay down tons of gravel to sure up their footing. 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 sh— and piss all the time.

In fact, one of the hardest scenes to shoot was the parlay between the different factions 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 [star Kit Harington's] lines.

The director also shared the biggest challenge on creating the major battle. He explained:

The sheer logistics of staging a battle scene this size was like a battle in and of itself, minus the life/death thing. For example: The number of days to shoot it, where we shoot it. What happens if it rains? How do you feed 600 people every day? Don't get me wrong, I personally don't have to decide that stuff. But the creative decisions I make are heavily influenced by simple practical concerns. Like every time we charge the horses it takes 25 minutes to reset all the fake snow on the field and rub out the horseshoe prints. So how many times can we afford to charge the horses each day knowing we need to give time for a reset that's 10 times longer than the actual shot? Another thing was how to make 500 extras look like 8,000 when you are shooting in a field where there's just nowhere to hide your shortfall. It becomes a bit like a bonkers math equation. And finally: How do you get these guys riled up enough to run at each other and get covered in mud and stand in the rain and then run at each other again and again for 25 days, 10 hours a day, without them just telling you to piss off?

The other real challenge was the schedule. After I first read the outline (we didn't have a script yet) and we went to take a look at the location, a privately owned peace of land called Saintfeld in Northern Ireland. The producers asked me to ballpark the number of days I thought it was going to take to shoot it. After a few hours and a fair bit of guesswork we said 28. They said we had 12.

Both myself and Charlie Endean [my first assistant director] read the script and got on the phone to discuss a revised number of days now with the actual script in mind. Rather than [my estimated number of days coming down] — which is what we all had hoped — the number had gone up to 42 days. I called Bernie Caulfield, the producer, and sheepishly told her that I wasn't even going to bother sending her that schedule because we all knew that wasn't going to happen. Suffice to say, something needed to give. Then began the process of creatively focusing on the most important aspects, searching for more effective ways to shoot the sequence and a more-or-less nonstop back and forth between myself, Charlie, Fabian (our director of photography), and the producers. Eventually — probably a few months later — we ended up with 25 days, including the parlay on the battlefield prior to the actual battle and all the scenes in Winterfell in the aftermath of BOB. Reaching that number was the biggest challenge. Finding a way to cram in and organize everything so that we would use every single minute well in order to squeeze every ounce we could out of our time was the most logistically complicated thing I've ever been involved in.

When all was said and done, we had around 500 extras, 160 tons of gravel, 70 horses and riders, 65 stuntmen and women, 7 principle actors, often 4 camera crews, 25 days to shoot it and a call sheet with often up to 600 crew members.

While Battle of the Bastards was going on in one side of Westeros, on the other, there's another one that went on in Meereen, and dragons were involved. Asked about the tricky part about shooting a triple-dragon action sequence, the director said:

...For this sequence David and Dan said that what they wanted to see was a "demonstration" of what's to come. So I tried to approach it in the most elegant, epic, big-movie way I could.

With BOB only around the corner these two sequences were in constant competition for resources and that played as a big factor in what we shot. Whereas the shooting of BOB was a bit looser due to the nature of the live-action elements, the Slaver's Bay battle had to be planned on a shot-by-shot basis.

We talked a lot about how to shoot the dragons so that they didn't stand out as too fantastical. I kept pitching the idea of designing shots that felt like they could have actually been shot in real life (if dragons were real) and based most of my choiceson footage I'd seen of WWII Supermarine Spitfires in action...

The director also gave a tease about the final episode in the season, titled Winds of Winter. He said what he's excited about it is that "it feels equally as epic as episode 9 … but for completely different reasons."

Clearly, a lot of work has been put into Battle of the Bastards, and you can see and feel that in every second of the episode.

You can read the full interview here.

One more episode to go for Season 6 of Game of Thrones. The show returns on HBO at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, June 26. You can watch the preview trailer here.

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