♪ (UNSETTLING MUSIC PLAYS) ♪ ♪ (DISCORDANT MUSIC) ♪ (HEAVY BREATHING) It was a real back and forth about who would beon this mission, who wouldn't be on this mission.
The Dirty Dozen obviously came to mind.
Everybody has a good reasonto hate everybody else.
DAVID BENIOFF: I mean, it's definitely got that, you know, gathering togetherthese kind of misfits.
A bunch of ourfavorite characters, many of whom have never beenonscreen together, but who all find themselves at the end of the world for one reason or another.
So, getting Tormund back in the picture, The Hound, and Jon and Beric and Jorah, uh, it's a fun group.
D.
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WEISS: The sequence of it is sowell-conceived on a visual level by Alan and his team.
To do that with hundreds of people and weather and visual effects and fire, with lots of moving parts and still.
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have that sense of artistry about it, takes a different level of directing it.
ALAN TAYLOR: Three, two, one.
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action! TAYLOR: Our story is seven guys on a rock, being attacked by Whites, and trying to tell a clear story of.
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you know, your task is to defendthe perimeter and as you lose, your perimeter is gonna fall back and fall back.
And how do you kind of hold order against just pure chaos? It's, you know, hurting kittens.
It's, um.
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(LAUGHS) You can't see anything except people whacking each other, um, and it takes some effort to.
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talk to the cast to sort of say, “No.
The story is, here's a line and we have to show thatit's not being broken, or that it is being broken.
It was important to createa situation where you, I'm hoping, the audience will think that one of ourbeloved characters is gonna die.
I mean, we wrote it and we werewatching it, and I was thinking, I was like, “Holy shit!Tormund's gonna die.
” But it, somehow, he managedto override my rational brain and make me think that Tormundwas gonna die.
No matter how great yourvisual effects are, or your.
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your art departmentand everything, there's just nothing quite like the real thing, if you can find it.
Iceland exists and it's realand it's cold as hell and it's beautiful and.
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there's just nothing like having that reality onscreen.
WEISS: It doesn't look like anywhere else.
Half the time, it doesn't even look real and I worry that peopleare gonna think the blues of those glaciers are some kind of cheap special effect.
The more spectacular-looking it is, the more difficult it is to shoot there.
KIT HARINGTON: I think there's, um.
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it's a sort of kick-bollocksscrambleness to.
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filming out here where you, you have such limited daylight.
And you have conditions whichare like this or worse.
It just gives it a sense of reality, you know.
In the world of Thrones, it's great coming intothese landscapes that just really kind of.
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are back in time and take you to something very, very brutal and barren.
There's an extent to whichnothing ever surprises youon this job anymore.
But this, you still can't helpbut be impressed by this.
I mean, it's nuts.
You can't get to this locationwithout literally monster jeeps.
It's a hell of a way to go to work.
The Icelandic technical crew, setting up the base camp, have to have everything, uh, ready and they have to do that, obviously, under cover of darkness.
So, the crew, when they arrive, everything is ready to go.
BENIOFF: We're shooting the glacier, everyone's got the crampons strapped onto their bootsbecause otherwise, you'll slip and, even with the crampons, we had a bunch of guys falling and banging themselves up, but luckily no major injuriesthis year.
TAYLOR:Three, two one, action! What we had to go throughto get the zombie polar bear was writing the zombiepolar bear into every season of the show for aboutfour seasons.
We thought they'd be so excitedto do a zombie bear.
And uh.
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And it was kind of like, “Oh, my God, they're serious about doing thisfucking zombie bear.
” Only to have Bernie andthe visual effects guys tell us, in the nicest possible way, “Fuck you.
We cannot afforda zombie polar bear.
” This year made perfect sense that you could have one of these things out there, and we really putour four feet down and we said, “Goddammit, we want a zombie polar bear.
” -(GROWLING)-(MAN SCREAMING) RICHARD BRADSHAW: We looked at some of the, uh, the.
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the beats, the way the polar bear.
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in the.
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in the previews thatwe've got, how it swats the guys away, how it picks someone up and shakes him around, um.
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and then we get our wires inand start rehearsing with guys, using different methods to pull some around and get me the right body shapes and the right energy.
Everything's made sureit's super safe first.
We test everything overand over again, um.
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usually with a white badge and when we're happy that it's safe to havesomeone on, we get someone on.
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-(ZOMBIE POLAR BEAR GROWLING)-(SWORDS CLANGING) BRADSHAW: We were holding the flaming sword in the jaws of this thing, so the big guy was able to move the head around, which was something for our actor on the floor to work against.
I've never really workedwith this.
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ping pong ball thing and pretend that's a bear and.
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I've had people going, “Oh, when I come towards you, I'm a bear.
” No, you're not.
(LAUGHS)Your name is Toby.
TAYLOR: And.
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action! (ZOMBIE POLAR BEAR WINCING) Most of the heavy-liftingof the sequence, that was all in Wolf Hill Quarry in Belfast.
It's one of those things where, you know, when you film somethingin another location, then you're responsible for finishing that location off somewhere else.
You have to really do your homework and try and make sure that you match it as best you can so that then Alan would havean entrance for the characters.
When you stand up on the top and look down, it was like we were building, I don't know, an airportor something.
The scale of it is enormous.
We built nature.
(LAUGHS) You know, sometimes I walk out there and think we're crazy people.
We had a very tricky timetrying to work out what a frozen lake looks like, and how we can achieve that.
And that went from compacted quarry floor to.
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putting concrete down, to nice, flat finish, and then there had to be hues of color that were added to that.
Then we had to work out how the ice would look, trying to make that look three-dimensional, and as if it was transparent ice.
All these things were really, really tricky.
(ICE CRACKING) Stop! (PANTING) (ICE CRACKING) We paint the cliffsa little bit, and then we snowthe cliffs a lot.
Three and a half thousandbags of snow through six machineswith 15 guys.
We're constantly re-dressing it and adding to it, and every day we have to scrape it off and start again the next day and.
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Yeah, it's full-on.
It's a really cool set.
Like, it's a bit– It'san amazing set.
They.
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They cementeda whole quarry to flatten out to make it look like an ice lake.
The amount of workmanshipis incredible.
and I mean it really.
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We've had to run across the ice.
It just looks so real, it's fantastic.
I thought it was a real lake, and then I understood that they have made this for this sequence.
I– It blew my mind.
This amount of people.
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When.
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When the camera rolls, everything just sort of comes together precisely at the right time.
JOE BAUER: Original intention was to dig out the areas on location where people would need to fall through the ice, and then it became clearto everyone that probably the temperatures were gonnabe so terribly cold.
We figured out if we usemotion control, then we could achieve it on stage.
When the Whites fall throughthe ice, we– we're doing it as a separate set pieces, and then building rigs to drop underneath the ice to take away the actors and then allowing them to drop through.
BAUER: You know, even though we've got ten guys falling in while the camera is moving, by the time we're finished, we've got a hundred guys falling in and the camera's moving five times as far.
Everyone's always like, “Aw, you get to shootin a tank.
Great!” No.
It's end of the season and I get plunged into cold water with full costume on.
It's been miserable.
(LAUGHS) (GRUNTING, GROANING) KRISTOFER HIVJU: When you're in the middle of a fight, you need to have all your adrenaline on a maximum, so I had to keep pumped upand ready, uh, in five to ten seconds, and then calm the fuck downvery fast.
(LAUGHS) You've got to loosen up.
You got to be ready for a fight with a big Norwegian.
They were both looking.
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(SCREAMS) (GRUNTS, GROWLS) Even the actors were so into it.
They were.
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(GRUNTS, GROWLS).
(LAUGHS) One of our heroes getschased to the top of the island.
The higher edge is about eleven foot from the frozen lake.
Big trust thing goes on, falling into the guys, the guys are catching meoff the end of the rock, opposed to, uh, where you'd normally be falling into boxes or an airbag.
(SNARLING) (ROARS) STEVE KULLBACK: Well, it's funny how times have changed.
In season two, the dragon was riding on Dany's shoulder, and now Dany's ridingon the dragon's shoulder.
And when Dany gets on and offthe dragon, it's sort of like wheelingup the stairs to a 747.
We've modelled the dragon and then laser-cut this full-scale, giant piece of polystyrene to create a section of the dragon'sback that is living on the island at the frozen lake.
I've got a bit of claimingto do on that contraption, with a person on my shoulder, and I just thought I can do it.
Well, I've never flown a dragon before.
I'm sure we're fine.
Just hang on.
(GRUNTING) KULLBACK: This year, things are a little bit beefier.
We have a bigger motion base, we have a bigger bot.
WEISS: It's a lot harder, especially for Emilia.
It's one thing to actin a room with somebody, and to draw on this–your considerable resources as an actor.
It's another thing to have a situation that's supposed to incorporatethe same level of emotion, but in the mostartificial environment you can possible imagine.
It's the opposite of walking in costume through Iceland.
EMILIA CLARKE: You know, the harder the challenge, the more I relish it.
But this.
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This, really, you're like, “Can I just even maybe have, like, you know.
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like a screen.
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with, like, cloudsor something?” Like, I've never flown on a dragon! And to just harness that power.
I mean, can you even imagine? BAUER: The fire column slicing the ice, we wanted to make sure that it looked like a cutting torch, and it's exploding the ice, um, atomizing the ice immediately, so we worked with Sam's team again, and when you see it, you know, it really.
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is awesome.
(DRAGON WHIMPERING) (DRAGON GROWLS) We knew that the Night Kingwould see and seize this opportunity, and like to think that when the dragon dies, that it's kind of a nice 1-2 punch.
Because on the one hand, you're just seeing the horror of one of those three.
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The three only unique, amazing beings like thisin the world, uh.
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going under the waterand not coming up again, and you're processing that, then you're processing something that's even worse, which is when it comes back out from the water again, the eyes of the White Walkers and the Whites have been such a prominent feature of the show, and a lot of workhas gone into the specifics of how the eyes look, and.
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And to see that hopefullyiconic image, at this point, blown up to the size of, you know, a beach ball, uh, that seemed like it wasan inherently, crowd-pleasingly “Oh shit!” moment for everybody.
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