With less than two months to go (April 14!), we’re starting to finally hear some details about the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones.
Today’s eyebrow-raiser comes courtesy of Entertainment Weekly‘s feature story on the final battle within the show, which details a 3 month-long shoot for the epic sequence.
Hints ahead for the final season.
The EW story reveals the location and many of the characters involved for what is being touted as Game of Thrones’ final battle against the Night King and his army, but what is even more notable is the scale of said battle. Game of Thrones is known for pushing the limits of epic fantasy on the small screen, but it now seemingly intends to vault past the big screen as well.
From EW:
When preparing for the shoot, [episode director Miguel] Sapochnik tried to find a longer battle sequence in cinema history and couldn’t. The closest was the nearly 40-minute Helm’s Deep siege in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers…
Except Game of Thrones has dragons and possibly a wolf army in play, as well. Are we in for the longest epic fantasy battle ever seen on screen? Maybe not. Sapochnik continues:
[Sapochnik] studied [the Helm’s Deep siege] to determine when the audience would get “battle fatigue” from too much hacking and slashing. “It feels like the only way to really approach it properly is take every sequence and ask yourself: ‘Why would I care to keep watching?’” says the British director between takes. “One thing I found is the less action — the less fighting — you can have in a sequence, the better.”
The entire intense shooting experience is detailed over at Entertainment Weekly.
