There was a great exclusive in the new Empire Magazine on
Game of Thrones: Season 2. I've just sent a message to
WinterIsComing.net but last time I sent them a message I got no response, so, I thought I'd just post it here. There is some great talk about the Battle of the Blackwater, and interviews with D.B. Weiss, David Benioff, Liam Cunningham, and Neil Marshall:
MIGHT AND MAGIC. With a new king on the Iron Throne and war raging, HBO's Game of Thrones turns truly epic. Neil Marshall had always wanted to see what happens when you're hit by a trebuchet-hurled boulder. He'd watched many castle-siege battle scenes in which rocks fly over walls with devastating effect, but was always denied the full, brutal point of impact. Until, that is, writer/producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, creators of HBO's Game of Thrones, asked him to step in and direct the ninth episode of Season Two, titled Blackwater.
"We had a full-size dummy with a head," explains the man behind Dog Soldiers, The Descent and Centurion. "And that head had brains in it. And we dropped a real rock on it. And the damage it caused was really impressive..."
Game of Thrones is a bloody phenomenon. Even for those neophytes in the war-torn realm of Westeros, unfamiliar novelist George R.R. Martin's sprawling series A Song of Ice and Fire, the promise of a 'fantasy Sopranos' or 'Lord of the Rings...with tits!', was enough to be drawn in. Then ten episodes of high drama, extreme violence, explicit sex and devastating twists hooked them. The fantasy genre was hatched anew and here was a novelty: it was genuinely adults-only.
"I don't think I'd describe it as a 'fantasy'," says Liam Cunningham, seasoned veteran of big-screen sword-and-sandals campaigns (Marshall's Centurion, Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans) and a fresh addition to the Thrones cast, in the shape of conflicted smuggler-turned-courtier Ser Davos Seaworth. "It's an incredibly intense human drama with betrayal, jealously, love and intrigue. This is really grown-up stuff that as a viewer you need to invest in. You need to make sure the phone's off the hook, the kids are in bed and you have a nice bottle of Shiraz ready to open. I think it's some of the best television ever made."
This season the pressure's on to make it even better. it's a pressure loaded on two men in particular, showrunners Weiss and Benioff, who also had to wrestle with the fact that, following the tumultuous events of Season One, two things have returned to Westeros: war and magic. Two things which any producer will tell you are one thing above all: expensive.
"Yes, we were worried," admits Benioff. "In the original pitch to HBO we said it was this fantasy world, but also one where magic and the supernatural are on the fringes. You're not seeing armies of orcs descending. But in the second season it starts coming more into play. What we love about A Song of Ice and Fire is that magic is so often used as a deus ex machina in fantasy novels, where characters can get out of anything by the use of a spell or being resurrected, but in this, characters die and stay dead..." He gives a conspiratorial smile. "With a few notable exceptions."
That's the storytelling concern. But what about making the inevitable visual effects sing on a TV budget? While Season Two isn't strictly following book two, A Clash of Kings ("We brought in some elements from the third book and pushed some elements from the second book into the third season," Benioff says), we will see, among other things, infant dragons, murderous shadow demons and possibly a giant or two. "The last shot [of Season One] was nerve-wracking," says Benioff, "because if the dragons didn't look good, it would just make the entire first season look cheesy. Luckily our VFX team did a sensational job. We actually have a new team this year and they've been extraordinary. We've seen some of their work on the shadow demon and it really is fantastic. Even on stuff as seemingly simple as guys on ships, which became so crucial for the Blackwater battle, they did a remarkable job."
Ah yes, Blackwater. The pivotal moment of the entire season, when the brewing 'War of the Five Kings' comes to a spectacular head.
There have been battles in Game of Thrones before, but Benioff and Weiss cleverly dodged having to actually show them. In one instance, we were following dwarf Tyrion Lannister (Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Pete Dinklage) into the fray, when he was knocked out by one of his own troops, waking to find his side victorious.
"That was kind of a desperation move, if I'm honest," says Benioff. "We had always planned to shoot that battle, and we were excited about it because we were clear on how it was going to look: we would wade in from Tyrion's POV on a handheld camera about four feet off the ground, with The Mountain (Conan Stevens) cutting a bloody swathe through the enemy directly in front of us. Everything looked good. The problem was that as the season progressed, we were running out of money and time."
Benioff and Weiss were aware they couldn't pull the same trick for The Battle of the Blackwater, a furious naval conflict which spills onto the beaches of capital King's Landing while green, combustible alchemical weapon 'wildfire' is liberally hurled about. So they "literally begged" HBO to sufficiently beef up the funds. Also, as Benioff points out, "We had a wonderful director in Neil Marshall, who's really good at maximising his budget and time. I think it's a spectacular battle."
Marshall's involvement was a stroke of luck. Originally another director was prepping the Blackwater episode when they were called away to a family emergency. Fortunately, some of the crew had worked with Marshall, and recommended him to the producers. (It helped, too, that George R.R. Martin himself was a fan, of The Descent and Centurion in particular) They called him right away, on a Friday, from the Belfast set. "I asked them when we were going to start filming, thinking it would be in a few months," remembers Marshall, "and they told me, 'We star on Monday!' I said, 'Okay,' straight away."
The Blackwater episode, as the director puts it, "is pretty much one long battle, on a much bigger scale than anything in Centurion. I couldn't believe the scale of production value I had. It was as big, if not bigger, than most features I've done: 400 extras, costumes, horses, stunts, fires... We had a full-size galleon to play with and a green-screen set that was doubling as several other ships, and we were setting that on fire and throwing people overboard. Then there's a Saving Private Ryan-like beach battle, with all these guys getting shot to pieces, an attack on a castle."
As his inclusion f the aforementioned head-squishing suggests, Marshall hardly had to rein in his predilection for inventive gore. "Oh, of course not. There's people being hacked to pieces left, right and centre. Some great violence. And one of the things I find cool about this episode is sometimes you forget who you're rooting for - the people attacking or the people defending."
In the midst of this fierce, green-flame-swirling storm, braving the freezing temperatures and constant rain of a Belfast winter, stood Liam Cunningham. Even though he's a new arrival in Weiss and Benioff's Westeros, Empire wonders if, on the deck of his flame-licked galleon, he sense the intensified ambition of this second series. "It definitely feels bigger, with a wider scope," Cunningham confirms. "It has more majesty to it. They're pushing the f**king boat out for this one."
