Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  Gillen was later asked about Littlefinger’s sex-symbol allure during an interview with Collider. “I’m not aware of being a sex symbol,” he said. “I’m kind of surprised by that. . . . It’s interesting given that some of the strands in the story are unsavory or could be seen that way and Littlefinger’s relationship with Sansa Stark is quite unorthodox.”

  In 2018, HBO became the first network to require a new type of crew member for all scenes involving sex and/or nudity—the intimacy coordinator, a person tasked with ensuring the well-being of actors when filming sensitive scenes. But during Thrones’ early years, actors in nude scenes on TV shows were largely left to advocate for themselves.

  ESMÉ BIANCO: Back then, none of that usually entered the conversation. But Daniel Minahan had worked with us the day before shooting to create some choreography to figure out exactly how it would be shot so we’d be more comfortable—that’s basically what an intimacy coordinator does now. And I think we need to be having those conversations prior to throwing actors into the deep end and letting themselves figure it out on set.

  Shooting brothel scenes wasn’t always awkward or strenuous, however. There were moments of levity as well—such as the time Diana Rigg stepped into Littlefinger’s house of ill repute.

  DAVE HILL: We were preparing for a scene where Olenna meets Littlefinger at the brothel. And Dame Diana Rigg looked around and went, “Shouldn’t there be more sex toys? Shouldn’t there be sheepskin condoms scattered about?” I’m all, “You’re absolutely correct, Dame Diana!” We appreciated her knowledge of ancient sexual devices.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Battle of the Battle of the Blackwater

  The first season of HBO’s Rome focused on two legendary military leaders, Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, and their journey from allies to warring enemies. Just before their climactic battle, Caesar, with familiar-sounding insight, declared, “We must win or we die.” What followed was a few seconds of blurry close-up images, such as a sword hitting a shield in slow motion. In the next scene, Caesar returned wearily to his tent. “Send to Rome,” he said. “Tell them Caesar won.”

  Then Caesar took a nap, exhausted from all his fighting we did not see.

  Before Game of Thrones, the workaround used by Rome was pretty typical of how battles were shown on television—a lot of buildup, then perhaps some fragment of the larger conflict.

  The climax of Martin’s A Clash of Kings, however, was precisely what the book’s title suggested: a monumental campaign, detailed across five chapters, where self-declared king Stannis Baratheon led an invasion of King’s Landing from the sea while Tyrion took charge of King Joffrey’s capital defenses. Like many of Martin’s conflicts, the battle was weighted so there were reasons to support both sides. You wanted Tyrion to prove himself as a leader and survive, but you also wanted the illegitimate and psychopathic King Joffrey to lose. Stannis wasn’t likable, but he admittedly had a rightful claim to the Iron Throne, and his armada included the ethical Davos Seaworth.

  In Martin’s novel and the show, Tyrion set Stannis’s approaching ships aflame using a stash of napalmlike wildfire. But in the book, Tyrion also constructed this massive chain that was hoisted across Blackwater Bay so that when . . . well, let’s have Martin tell it.

  “There’s a giant chain strung across the bay so Stannis can’t get away and they are trapped in the flames,” explained the author, his eyes excitedly alight. “Boats are slamming together and get locked together so they form a temporary bridge across the river. Stannis has a huge army on the south side of the river and he’s trying to get them across. So when the bridge of boats is formed, his men start rushing across. And the defenders have built three huge trebuchets flinging wildfire across at them. Then Joffrey starts flinging the bodies across the river of traitors who were planning to sell the city out. . . .”

  It was all supremely epic, highly complex, and precisely the sort of sequence that Martin thought was only possible to stage in a reader’s imagination.

  Up until that point, Game of Thrones had avoided filming battles. But season one’s the Battle of the Green Fork and the Battle of the Whispering Wood had not been crucial to portray in the story. “Some battles work fine off-screen,” showrunner David Benioff said. “Season two was so much about a country at war, we felt like if we didn’t see the most important battle of this entire war on-screen, we were going to be shortchanging viewers.”

  There was just one problem. Actually, there were many problems, but one particularly huge problem: There was no possible way to stage a major battle sequence with the show’s season-two budget. The showrunners had also promised HBO their series didn’t need big wartime sequences and had even put that pledge in the public record. “It’s not a story with a million orcs charging across the plains,” Dan Weiss told The Hollywood Reporter in 2008. “The most expensive effects are creature effects, and there’s not much of that.”

  “Not much”—except depicting thousands of ships on fire and armies clashing on sea and land in a sequence that would blow out the budget of a feature film, let alone a TV show.

  Game of Thrones had reached a pivotal moment, and it was before the production was truly ready. The outcome of this challenge would define the series. The showrunners knew Blackwater was only the first of several increasingly massive spectacles in Martin’s books. Thrones was either going to continue as a character-driven drama with an occasional sword fight or direwolf, or it was going to evolve into a television-cinema hybrid unlike anything Hollywood had seen. At the time, an episode of Thrones was typically shot in about two weeks, but even a downsized version of Blackwater would need a minimum of three, plus additional funds for staging the on-the-ground action, extra cast, and special effects. The producers needed a multimillion-dollar stipend and, just as critical, to establish a clear precedent with the network and their fans that would make future battles not only possible but expected. The Thrones team didn’t want Julius Caesar taking a nap.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): We were nervous, really nervous, going into the second season, about that episode. There was talk of turning Blackwater into a land battle, which would have been terrible.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Or doing it off-screen.

  DAN WEISS: “M’lord, have you heard? They’re at the bay!”

  DAVID BENIOFF: We went down on bended knee: “Just this once. Please.”

  DAN WEISS: We begged and pleaded with Mike Lombardo. We were negotiating. We had a big conversation about how many boats could we do.

  MICHAEL LOMBARDO (former HBO programming president): The question was, could you have a sophisticated, grounded drama, [with] fantasy tropes, and have epic battles? Could you do it all?

  After considerable back-and-forth, Lombardo agreed to give Thrones an additional $2 million to stage a version of the battle, which included an extra week of filming. But the battle was still unworkable on paper. The episode’s writer was Martin himself, so the author was tasked with the painful duty of downsizing his own vision while trying to maintain the fight’s most crucial aspects—to keep the horses and Stonehenge, so to speak.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): We had to scale down Blackwater considerably from the book. They told me right at the start that the bridge of boats would be impossible.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): What you see on the screen is ten times removed from not just the book but the first outline. Compromise was set in pretty early on.

  One easy adjustment was setting the battle at night instead of day. Nighttime filming meant the production could save on having to pay for special effects to render detailed backgrounds and also helped the battle’s visual storytelling (it made the flaming arrows and exploding boats look cool, in other words).

  The producers also decided to make the battle as subjective as possible. Scripting scenes around the perspective of a single familiar character would help keep the audience engaged in the stor
y while reducing the number of expensive wide shots of the battle that would require showing masses of ships and soldiers. Though this filming style was born from solving a budget problem, it would become a unifying element across all Thrones battles.

  DAVID BENIOFF: There’s the vast, epic way of shooting a battle, where you see an army of a hundred thousand and an attacking army of two hundred thousand. There’s also the more ground’s-eye view, where you’re an infantryman and just seeing what’s directly in front of you. And that can be a really visceral way of shooting a battle. We were trying to get it to feel real and gritty and dirty.

  DAN WEISS: Any time you read any military account of an actual soldier’s experience of battle, whether it was in ancient Rome or all the way up to Vietnam and beyond, it’s never, “Then this flank moved over here and that flank.” It’s always, “This was a chaotic clusterfuck and I didn’t know which way I was going and I was half the time not sure if I was shooting at my own guys.”

  And yet, even with the Blackwater battle cut down to its barest necessities, the plan still didn’t fit their schedule.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: We had a director who kept saying, “Cut this! Cut that! I can’t make the day.” I kept removing elements, and it was getting to the point where it was getting as bad as the jousting tournament.

  And then, just a few weeks before filming, the director had an unexpected family medical emergency and had to drop out. “I’d done quite a lot of work prepping that episode,” the director said. “Very sadly, I had an illness in the family and I had to leave. I knew I was leaving them with a difficult time, but it was absolutely unavoidable.”

  Now the production had another problem. After all their pleading and negotiation with HBO for the money and latitude to stage a climactic battle, they were less than a month from shooting and didn’t have a definitive plan or a director.

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): That was my first year on the show and probably my first fight with David and Dan. They were like, “Oh, let’s get so-and-so.” I said, “Ninety percent of this is action. We need somebody who really knows action. It’s not easy. We should really look at Neil Marshall.”

  DAVID BENIOFF: Neil did Centurion and Dog Soldiers, movies where the guy is doing an incredible amount of really impressive action on a very thin budget.

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: And other directors kept being mentioned, and I kept saying, “I’m telling you, we need an action director!” Then David calls me up. At the time we didn’t know each other that well. And he goes: “Okay, Bernie, we’re going with your idea to hire Neil.”

  I swear to God, my stomach dropped. I’m like, “Wait, my idea? This is a community decision!” I hung up the phone, and I thought, “Shit. Now it’s my idea. I’m responsible for this guy doing our first battle.”

  NEIL MARSHALL (director): I was aware of Game of Thrones when season one was happening. I thought, “This is really my kind of thing,” and had my agent contact HBO and say, “If there’s any chance, I’d like to be able to direct an episode.” Their response was like, “We have our directors, thank you very much.”

  Then a year or so later on a Saturday morning, I got an emergency call from Bernie to come and fix a situation that, from what I gathered, was a bit out of control. She asked if I would like to direct an episode. I was like, “Absolutely!” I’m thinking this will be in few months’ time. Then she said, “It’s on Monday morning, and you’ve got one week to plan.”

  DAVID BENIOFF: Neil had never seen the show before. We gave him a crash course on season one and talked to him about the story constantly. But he was such a fast learner and so enthusiastic and just fell in love with it. He ended up being a great choice.

  NEIL MARSHALL: Dan and David weren’t like, “This is it and you just gotta do it.” They wanted ideas. Military history is a hobby of mine, so I brought a sense of strategy to the battle. Because in the script, forty thousand people arrive on a beach and they stand around a door. They had all this stuff at sea and the green fire, but once they got to the beach, it wasn’t really clear who was trying to achieve what. Stannis basically marshaled the whole battle from the beach. I felt that that wasn’t really in character and wasn’t interesting. I was like, “They can’t just stand around; they have to be doing other things, and we have to get Stannis in on the action.”

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Neil Marshall reversed everything the previous director said. Marshall was like, “Put in more.” He put so much back that I’d previously taken out and even added some stuff I hadn’t thought of. He was the hero of that episode.

  NEIL MARSHALL: I invented the boat that came in and was turned upside down with a battering ram suspended underneath to batter the gate. By bringing the ladders and the grappling hooks, it gave the scene more sense of purpose. And we had Stannis climb the wall and have a good fight up there and cut somebody’s head off.

  Once filming began, the challenges did not let up. The episode marked the first of several grueling nighttime battle shoots for the Thrones team. Such sequences would test the cast and crew’s physical and mental stamina, and their ability to perform at their best in an environment that was universally described as torturous.

  NEIL MARSHALL: With the exception of the action on the boat, it was all shot in Magheramorne quarry, where it was pouring with rain in October, freezing cold with mud up to our knees. There was an overall draining factor for everybody involved. Particularly for the extras, who just have to stand around in the rain. I was worried it would look like we were doing the cliché of a battle in pouring rain, but it’s real rain, and we couldn’t do anything about it.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: It was moving like a locomotive. There was no way of stopping. Whatever we didn’t finish on time wasn’t going to be in the film. And the conditions were horrendous.

  EUGENE MICHAEL SIMON (Lancel Lannister): We had three days of rain. On the fourth day it stopped. Suddenly everybody was like, “Oh shit, what are we going to do?” Because the continuity wouldn’t match and we had tons of stuff to do. What happened was the most elaborate example of adapting I’d ever seen on a film set: There was a natural salt lake at the bottom of the quarry, but the water in it was below freezing—it didn’t ice over because it was salt water. They ran a fire hose from the bottom of this freezing cold lake, and had a man hold a fire hydrant at the top of the wall for that scene where Tyrion is giving his speech—“If I’m half a man, what does that make you!?” The deadly cold water from the lake was fired up into the air so it would rain down on us while Peter had to expertly give this pro speech. You can see our breath evaporating since we’re all freezing and it looks like we’re in the North.

  DAN WEISS: Peter Dinklage in those scenes didn’t have to act tired because by four o’clock in the morning, he’d had rain pouring on him for eight hours straight. He was bleary, weary, and tired. It was miserable.

  NEIL MARSHALL: But Peter was quite giddy that he was going to get out and start hitting people with an axe. He was really excited about leading this army and chopping a guy’s legs off and stuff like that. It was a nice change for the character rather than, you know, drinking and whoring and whatever else.

  PETER DINKLAGE (Tyrion Lannister): Some people rely on drunk, funny Tyrion. Funny and drunk lasts only so long.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Tyrion’s speech on the steps, pretty much verbatim from the books: “There are brave men out there, let’s go kill them!” I love that scene.

  PETER DINKLAGE: You gotta have a certain amount of confidence to pull that type of stuff off. I make it not my confidence, but the character’s confidence. So maybe that might seem like I’m confident? It’s really just the fact that this character, Tyrion, is sort of confident. I guess.

  The battle scenes were intercut with Cersei awaiting her fate in Maegor’s Holdfast, with the queen regent becoming intoxicated and mocking Sansa.

  LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): It was one of the first times we see Cersei so brazen. She’s u
sually pretty snaky. Being drunk and thinking she may die, she’s just letting Sansa have it direct. It’s like this masochistic mentor relationship where she can’t help but torture Sansa. And I think that’s driven by envy and frustration that, as women, we’re stuck. You know what I mean? She thinks she’s helping her. But yeah, she’s just horrid.

  NEIL MARSHALL: I remember talking to Lena and saying, “Cersei is basically acting like the drunk aunt at a wedding. It’s like she’s had a few too many drinks and can’t control her mouth.” She was like, “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Headey could empathize with Cersei’s envy. Her character told Sansa, “I’d rather face a thousand swords than be shut up inside with this flock of frightened hens.” Headey likewise longed for bona fide action scenes.

  LENA HEADEY: I kept begging them for a sword and a horse.

  For the scenes in Blackwater Bay, the team constructed a boat in an entirely unremarkable “car park” (a.k.a. parking lot). The sea was added later with visual effects. The boat is probably the show’s biggest and most repeatedly used visual effects cheat. Every sailing boat seen in the show—Baratheon, Targaryen, Lannister, or Greyjoy—is actually the same boat (except for the bow of Euron Greyjoy’s Silence). So while most of the Blackwater cast was filming in a quarry, Cunningham was in a car park, eyeing an approaching “barge” filled with deadly wildfire.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth): In reality that barge was just a little thing [about six feet long] with two pipes leaking green liquid out of it while two guys pushed it up the car park.