In Season 1, we didn't have any major battles.
We had a lot of little skirmishes
and kind of one-on-one fights, but no major battles.
There was supposed to be one,
and we had to cut it pretty much at the last minute
because we didn't have the money for it, we didn't have the time.
When the battle commences, you and your wildlings
will be in the vanguard.
It didn't really hurt the story there, though.
As much fun and as unique as it would've been to see a battle,
it wasn't really essential to the story.
That's not true in the second season.
We all felt we had to have the battle.
It's very complicated, it's very expensive, it demanded a lot of us,
but we felt it was something we had to try to put on the screen.
From the beginning, we knew that the second season builds to Blackwater.
The whole story is about these various forces coming into conflict with each other
and culminating in a battle sequence.
BENIOFF: Blackwater was always what we were aiming for,
was always gonna be the ninth episode.
It was always gonna be the episode that George scripted.
MARTIN: I knew going in that the battle of Blackwater Bay
was going to be the most expensive episode of the season,
and that it was potentially a budget-buster no matter who wrote it.
BENIOFF: This time we wanted to make sure we saved our money
and saved the days in the calendar
so we didn't lose the battle the way we did with the first season.
This was a big battle even in the books.
You could spend $100 million on it to capture everything that's actually in the books.
So how could we possibly get it on film?
George Martin delivered a great script.
Expensive, ambitious, full of all the things that are so characteristic of his books.
And our "gob was to try to figure out a way to get them on the screen.
We have a wonderful director, Neil Marshall, who's an expert at these sort of things,
and we're very, very lucky to have him.
NEIL MARSHALL: When you're planning a battle,
you have to do it very much like a general would,
of trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of the geography.
"What is the logic of this battle? Who's trying to achieve what?
"Where are they going? How are they going to do it?"
And it is a really complicated sequence.
And we have to do three battles in the space of one.
Starts out as a naval battle,
and then there's kind of a beach landing and then there's an assault on the castle.
So it's a huge undertaking.
(MEN SHOUTING)
WEISS: It was really a long process of iterations where we came up with a version
and we talked to production, to Gemma
and to visual effects and our stunt team even before Neil came on board the show,
about how much set we would need to stage this, and where we could stage it.
FRANK WALSH: We started preparing for this project in March,
and this Episode 9 was one of the first things that was thrown up
because it is a very complex bit of storytelling.
WEISS: Building a functional ship set with an above decks and a below decks,
the aftcastle and the forecastle and all the pieces of a ship that you need
to actually shoot men on board a ship.
And that was an enormously expensive thing to do for a television show.
As you can see, we are on a large portion of the budget
for the entire series on this.
It's not too often that sets this big get made anymore.
The detail is just absolutely amazing. It looks like it's been here 200 years.
The one ship they built is incredible. They did an amazing job.
I just love walking on that ship and kind of just walking around,
it just all looks so real.
So, that made our jobs a lot easier in terms of the storytelling,
just because it feels like they're really on a ship when they're on a ship.
We looked at Viking ships, we looked at feluccas,
we looked at galleons, the lot. We went right through history.
And then we sort of thought, "Now, what do we want
"and what do we need?"
We have one boat set, which is a full-size galleon.
It's a massive thing.
And it will be used as both Stannis' boat, Davos' boat.
An abandoned barge, once we take all the rigging off.
And we film it from all different angles to get these new and different looks to it.
WALSH: The design is kind of loosely based on a 14th-century ship.
We put the fo'c'sle on to make a battleship out of it.
They had the ballistas on the foredecks,
added shields to it to try and make it a little more military.
TOM MARTIN: We started off looking at the storyboard
and figured, "How do we build this boat?"
After a very short period of time,
we realized we've got to build a whole boat.
We don't have to make it float, (CHUCKLES) that's the only advantage.
We used the same methods as building a real timber boat.
Timber ribs, clad the same way as you build a real boat.
It's being built on an exterior set, but up against two huge green screens,
so that allows us to replace and rebuild all of the background,
which allows us a little bit more freedom of camera positions
and camera heights and camera cranes.
And it was important that visual effects were working with us
'cause the ship can only be built to a certain size
and they're gonna have to take it on.
We built the sails to a certain height
so that we knew that when they were shooting on the decks,
they could contain a lot of the shots within our set
and not have to rely on visual effects.
But then when you kind of pull back to the big shot,
they would add in the sails to the full height and so forth.
We had to build the interior of Stannis' cabin on a gimbal.
WALSH: Originally, Neil wanted to make use of the hold inside the real deck,
and the way we'd constructed the ship at that stage,
it was just too difficult to give him enough space to shoot it down there.
We built one set where all of the sailors are downstairs, preparing for battle.
They're terrified, they've been sick.
Then they get the call to battle and come running up the stairs on the interior,
then they arrive on the exterior of our boat on the back lot and up onto deck.
(MEN SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
There was a need to be able to have stunt men in the water
on fire, dying, being shot with arrows.
And actually shooting here in the quarry lake at night would've been too dangerous for that
'cause it gets very deep very quickly.
So we proposed building a tank alongside the ship.
So, we build this tank and set the water depth at four feet deep.
And that gave them enough depth there for guys to jump into the water safely,
for the guys to be in the water and appearing to be drowning.
Which was a great help, to be able to do it in a controlled environment
alongside our ship build.
We made a fiberglass hull that we can put in upside down
and the guys could be hanging onto that.
One of the great advantages of modern TV now
is that with high definition, all the detail comes out,
so we have to be very critical about what our finishes are like
and the amount of detailing we put into things.
Almost everything works on this.
You could almost take it to the sea and disappear off into the sunset.
It's a complete joy, and as an actor, when you do have this level of detail,
it just makes my job so much easier.
That's actually a boat. Like, that is a full-on boat.
You hardly need to do any work whatsoever.
Like the moment when archers run out from underneath,
like all this thudding on the wood and everything,
and they're all in their chainmail,
and they make water flow over you and everything.
It is absolutely every boy's dream. (CHUCKLES)
Boats are actually relatively easy to build.
The battlements were more of a challenge
because the sheer acreages of finishes you have to try and achieve
and plaster departments and paint departments,
and all those things, people are working together...
I'll do a boat any time. (CHUCKLES)
When it came to building the battlement set, we've used a real section of water
in a disused quarry that we build in.
We built at Magheramorne, which is the same place where we built Castle Black.
MARSHALL: It's been designed to fit in with the architecture
that they're also filming over in Dubrovnik,
the certain battlements and turrets and various bits and pieces.
So, it'll seamlessly blend into one at the end of the day,
but it's an impressive structure.
Early on, we knew we would have to have some establishing shots
to explain where things were in the battle, because it's at night
and it's difficult to get an orientation of where things are happening.
So, we created a pre-visualization of the battle, actually,
early on, before we went out to shoot it.
We could sort of see it as it would look eventually on screen in a very primitive form
and decide if that was working.
The previz was very helpful.
We have an insanely good VFX department this season,
and they outdid themselves with this episode.
We had a rough idea which angles we would need
and what we wanted to show for how long
and where we would have to help with visual effects.
Rainer will be putting in King's Landing and the Red Keep
and all these sort of things sort of in the distance.
But we're hoping that, again, the night's gonna be really on our side.
And so there'll be places where you can do a lot of shooting
without having to always visual effect, visual effect, visual effect.
It just really puts you in the setting, just perfectly, of the scene.
When you walk in, it's surprisingly big, and then, obviously, when you get up,
you can see the battlements and the archer's point.
So, yeah, it feels like a proper castle.
I've just walked on,
but this is big enough to believe that it is the real thing.
By the nature of having battlements, we had to put surfaces high up,
which was great, 'cause then you have a chance
to kind of shoot down and shoot up into it.
So, it was great fun to kind of design a space
that had a lot of kind of potential for angles and looking through spaces into other areas.
We've got the towers, we can get at it.
We've got the inside, all the preparation areas.
We've got two turrets with braziers coming up above.
So, when they're shooting oblique shots, we can actually look down into the water.
So, it's a really, really good spot.
When we finish the main construction of the set,
then set decorating come in with all their dressing.
And then we come back in again and do a lot of the aging on top of the dressing,
and where we've got our torches on the wall,
have the burn marks going up in the proper places.
It takes many layers to get there.
WALSH: This is the moment where you'll sit back and say,
"Well, yeah. it looks good. It's perfect."
Or as perfect as you can make it.
You can always improve it,
but it's whether you'll make it on the day they're gonna come and shoot.
MAN: Action.
Pretty early on, we were talking with the VFX team about this episode,
which is gonna be the most VFX-heavy of the season.
And we'd be much more likely to pull off what we wanted to pull off if it was nighttime,
because in the broad daylight, you're gonna see everything
and so much of it would have to be CG,
whereas in the darkness, darkness hides your sins better.
WEISS: it was a production decision, but it was also an aesthetic decision.
Since there was such a strong fire element, both with the wildfire
and how the fire plays into the Hound's storyline
and leads him to vacate the premises, which leads Joffrey to vacate the premises,
which leaves Tyrion to be the last man to stand and to lead them into battle.
There are psychological implications of these physical production elements,
and of course, fire at night is going to be a lot more impressive than fire during the day.
The entire thing is set at night, so the whole shoot is a night shoot.
Even the studio stuff we're doing as a night shoot,
just to keep the crew on the same kind of timelines
to avoid any kind of jetlag.
You can get a sense on the set here,
the work that's being done is being done incredibly quickly.
But there's a wonderful atmosphere on set. Morale is incredible.
I think it adds a level of realism to the whole thing.
As Peter, I think, has said many times,
he didn't need to pretend to be dirty and cold and tired.
He was dirty and cold and tired.
It's really tough on the crew, though, to have a month straight of night shoots,
standing out there in the rain for weeks on end.
At 3:00 in the morning, Belfast in October
is not always the best time to be outside for 10 hours in a row.
It was very cold and very wet, and not always the most pleasant,
but there was such a sense of excitement and fun about the whole thing.
It just felt right, and it ended up looking great.
There are lots of things in the book that we loved.
The wildfire element to the battle and Tyrion's maneuverings
to bring that new game-changing element into play.
This season, he actually gets to fight the battle.
He didn't get to fight in Season 1.
That was the heart of it for us, so we knew we needed that.
And to really sell that and to make that work, we needed a sea battle.
So, for the many shots with ships, with the fleet approaching King's Landing,
we had a layout of how we wanted to use the ship that was built
in front of a green screen
and how we're going to have the different setups
with this specific set build that we could use in the sequence.
The ship is going to be reproduced and then turned into a CG model
that will be multiplied many times to create Stannis' and Davos' fleet.
GOMBOS: We wanted the 3D ships that we would add in the distance
to look similar to the ship in the foreground.
And we also knew we would have to extend the set ship in some of the shots.
We also had to put it in CG water.
It was built on land and we would have to put some water around it.
For the CG fleet, we created duplicates of the foreground model
with slight variations in it.
Then we created this layout of Stannis' attacking fleet.
Davos' ship is right at the beginning and Stannis' ship is in the center of it.
But with the fire ship and the leaking out,
there was a shot showing the stern of the ship passing Davos' ship.
It was gonna be a combination of a small set build for us
and a CGI shot.
MARSHALL: There's one shot looking up at the main ship,
and in the foreground, there's this barge going past,
which is pouring out wildfire.
And it was always planned to be a visual effects shot.
And I came into that one and I said,
"Well, why don't we just do this as a foreground miniature?
"We can do the whole thing in camera and not have visual effects for it."
So, we came up with the idea of actually putting the whole rig on wheels for him
so that we could easily position it
so he could get the right angle on it and the proper position.
And then, because we had it there, it seemed like a good idea
to maybe put it on rails and have it moving through the shot.
What we used there was we had a tank in the back.
We had three outlets and we had a liquid in there that we made up.
And we had a fluorescent dye in it.
So we have that coming out the back of the ship.
There was an ultraviolet light hidden behind the rudder of the ship,
just so it would make the green liquid really kick.
It was one of those kind of stopgap solutions that turned it into a better shot in the end.
MARSHALL: Wherever possible, if I can, I'd much rather do stuff in camera,
and I'd rather spend the visual effects budget
on the really big stuff that we can never do in camera.
Wildfire.
When we're going to create the explosion and the wildfire,
we're gonna use fire setups that we have worked with in the past,
and we're going to enhance on that.
And changing the color,
change the character of the fire and the explosion
to make it look like something slightly different, something more magical,
something that has the power, the force, to take out that amount of ships.
BENIOFF: The big explosions could not be done in camera
because we didn't have that much dynamite,
we just... It was impossible to pull off.
GOMBOS: We went through a bit of an R&D process,
"How should the wildfire look? How luminous should it be?
"How much green?"
We looked at some napalm explosions.
We thought that that was the kind of fiery energy that we wanted there.
And there we also see these tentacles coming out of the core of the explosion.
The flames also have to have a certain coloring and a certain quality
and a certain height.
We want to have a little spectacle
and we want to show a little bit of a magical element in the wildfire.
The explosion of the hulk is a combination of
a lot of different visual effects tricks.
BRISDON: The explosion is created in the CG world,
but the effect of it, we're trying to create for real.
So, we're trying to give the impression of what's really happening on the boat.
GOMBOS: The plan is that we're working with a lot of special effects
for the medium and close shots on the explosion.
Stuart is going to plan to blow some things up there on the ship,
real things, real debris coming towards camera.
And then, because we're doing this in front of the green screen,
it allows us to add our CG explosion in the background
and integrate it in the whole destruction of the fleet in that sequence.
BRISDON: What Neil wants is a big force field to come out from that,
so you've just got the shock of that coming through.
To create that effect, we use air mortars.
We put balsa wood, we put lightweight debris, we use cork, we pile it in there.
And we're using 12 of these to create the explosion in different parts of the ship.
You get the effect of a lot of debris in close-up and the foreground,
whilst you've got the big CG explosion in the background.
So, you just get the sense of the shock really coming in, just as the ship starts to break up.
When Stannis sees the explosion,
what Neil wanted was to give a real dramatic shot of Stannis reacting to the explosion,
so what we did for that is a big flash of light at the same time.
We had a big tube which is called an air mover, so you can just switch that on,
you get a big rush of air,
and it moves the hair, it moves his face, and it moves his costume
and he just falls out of frame.
So, it's just a moment that Neil wanted,
just to show him reacting to the force of this massive explosion.
BENIOFF: There are these scenes of mayhem on board one of the ships
after the wildfire explodes,
and you see a burned man running by and screaming
and you see this turnbuckle kind of come and clock a guy in the face.
And that's all timed, and we don't have that many takes,
so it just had to work right.
I think it's to the stunt team's credit and to Neil Marshall's credit,
that turnbuckle hit the guy right in the face right when it was supposed to.
(SCREAMING)
Neil wanted a lot of fire, sort of a big fireball effect on the ship.
And to create this so that it was very safe and very controlled
with the stuntmen in front of it,
we put three propane gas outlets stuck up through the deck,
so when we fired the electric valves, you got a big fireball very quickly.
On the ship, when you've got the chaos of all the explosions
and everyone running around the ship,
we designed these catapults, which fire a ball of a special gel.
When it hits the ship, it bursts, and you get fire spreading out all over the deck.
C.C. SMIFF: The guys have got Nomex suits on underneath.
We use a gel, which is a silicon-based gel that goes on their skin.
It was great seeing people running around alight on a boat.
It really adds to the panic of it.
For our explosions on Davos' ship,
we rehearsed two elements.
There's Davos, who is played by Liam Cunningham, he did that himself.
CUNNINGHAM: The stunt people just popped into my trailer the other day
and just said, "By the way, Liam, you're gonna be wired on this."
Agh! I'm a bit old to be doing this sort of stuff.
We put him on a jerk rig, just lightly pulled him out.
Well, I've got a very tight corset on at the minute
to make sure none of my organs get burst.
I've done a few pulls to get the timing right,
and these guys that we've got are the best in the business.
So, it's all clone incredibly safely.
And it's wonderful to be an old man doing stunts, I love it.
MAN: Three, two, one. Action!
He did really well. We had a double, just in case.
But the actor did superb.
HERBERT: And then on the ship aft, we had a large explosion with half a dozen guys,
some of the guys are pulled on wires.
BRISDON: For that, we had 12 air mortars, so we had a hell of a lot of debris coming out.
And also, there's a lot of water vapor in with it as well.
So, you get a really good effect.
Matthos, he did the first reaction, then we put our double in,
and we pulled him about 15 feet through the air.
Landed onto a box rig, nice and safe.
MAN: Two, one. Action!
HERBERT: We managed to do that in one take. That's very good.
As this massive explosion spreads through the fleet,
we then have to incorporate men on fire in the explosions.
We do this in conjunction with the special effects and visual effects.
In the battle, there will be a sequence of shots where there are men in the water on fire.
And we're gonna be shooting actual stunt people in a water tank on fire.
HERBERT: We've had people on trampettes, firing themselves over the side.
So, once they exit the ship into the water,
we can then carry on the action within there of men drowning,
men trying to swim to safety, arrows flying into them on fire.
We need to create quite big waves, so we use a big 45-gallon drum on levers.
And then we push that down into the water repeatedly
and gradually you start to build up quite a big chop, quite big waves.
We fired arrows into stunt guys.
What we actually have is a steel plate underneath their costume,
which then has a wooden board.
And then this is fired by a special effects guy on a high-pressured gun.
And they dial in the pressure depending on how far away we are from our subject.
And that would just be fired straight into him,
and then we'd give him a cue for reaction to time it.
'Cause sometimes, with all the action going, you don't actually feel the arrow hit.
Around the ship set, we have smoke tubes. That's run all the way around the set.
Because it's mixed with air, it comes out as a soft smoke.
We put a bit of spray, put a wet-down,
really looks good as the guys come over the edge of Stannis' ship.
GOMBOS: We'll see how much we're going to get in camera.
We're gonna have some drowning soldiers, soldiers on fire, wreckage on fire.
These things still look very good when they are done for real.
And we'd like to have the real water interaction in the foreground
and then we extend that with digital water and digital fire.
They're coming ashore. There are too many.
Well, obviously Episode 9 is one of our biggest battle scenes
between Stannis Baratheon and the Lannister Empire.
So, in this, we've got, I think approximately about 250 extras.
It's probably one of our biggest days, not including cast.
Two hundred and sixty-five may not necessarily sound like a lot,
but once we have them all piling into boats and jumping off and running up the beach,
and some of them being shot and falling down,
that will look like a lot of people.
And I'll make it look like a lot of people. (CHUCKLES)
GLEESON: Having loads of extras around creates a nice atmosphere of bustling around.
There are disadvantages with a large amount of extras,
just logistically, putting, you know, costumes on them and feeding them,
but I think, for my job anyway, it looks great and it really helps get you into the scene.
In that battle scene, there's gonna be about 200 extras.
That's gonna be fierce, that's 200 extras fighting away. That's gonna be pretty intense.
HERBERT: The extras need to be trained in fighting.
So you can imagine teaching archery, teaching swordplay, fencing arts...
So, we're very, very lucky that we've been given full control over making and designing
all the weaponry for the show.
There's nothing that's been taken off a shelf somewhere,
everything's handmade, designed.
We're not trying to copy something, we're not trying to replicate something.
We're trying to make our own unique type of weaponry for this.
Choreographing a large group of people in an action sequence,
quite a lot of work goes into that, and a lot of concentration.
WEISS: If there's a fight where one person is killing three people,
then you've got like three or four beats that you need to hit.
The stunt team came up with hundreds of specific little pieces
that were a part of this puzzle because in any battle of thousands against thousands,
you need the variety to make it feel real.
We'd break each scene and each section down into small parts.
This way, we get the best out of everybody,
and also there's a safety element comes into it then.
You don't have to worry about it too far ahead.
What you need to do is look deep and make sure every piece works,
not just your lead actor.
You need all the pieces around him to supplement him.
SMIFF: We've had our special extras in for two days.
They've been rowing, they've been fighting, shouting, having a lot of fun.
And we've whittled them down to a core of extras that get extra training with us,
to supplement the stunt department.
We'll spend a number of hours training the guys, getting them used to the routines
with the stunt guys they're actually gonna fight on the day.
Making sure that their hits are accurate and they know where they're going
and make sure they look like they're a professional killing machine.
Come with me and take this city!
(CHEERING)
GOMBOS: So, for the beach landing, we had 10 skiffs,
but 10 skiffs were still not enough for us,
so we did some on-set crowd replication.
We had some shots where we just see skiffs on the water,
then in those shots we're gonna add additional skiffs
and then we shot the 10 skiffs approaching in the foreground
and then we shot them again approaching in the background,
and later we put these two together.
So we have a nice foreground with at least 20 skiffs.
And then we retime it so we have a bit more in the distance
and we add some CG skiffs so there are even more skiffs.
That's how some of the wider shots came together for the landing.
This week, we have done the actual landings.
We had two days of training the skiff teams, getting them up to speed.
BRISDON: As they're coming in to land,
the skiffs are coming in, all the guys are jumping out,
there'll be flames all around them, burning.
And we also have flames underwater,
so we'll have gas bars underwater so you can't see the source.
So, that works really well.
Once the guys have disembarked, they're broken up into archers and troops.
The archers generally fall behind the troops
and a number of the guys, we choreographed that they make it to the wall,
so you cover the whole area.
There's going to be a lot of close-combat fighting,
especially outside the castle, so that will involve a lot of arrows flying around.
We have a lot of flaming arrows in this episode on the Lannister side.
I think I'm up to about 5,000 arrows at the moment and we're still fletching.
I have poor old Fergus sitting behind me at the moment, laboring away,
sticking feathers onto the shafts.
And if you think that if you have 5,000 arrows,
that's 15,000 feathers that have to be stuck onto those wooden shafts.
Once the troops arrive on the shoreline,
they jump off the skiffs, they run towards the walls,
and they're being shot at with flaming arrows.
So we had some extras and some stuntmen miming hits.
So they would run, and they would then turn and fall down,
and then we are tracking their body motion and putting the arrows just in the right place,
so it looks like they were shot at and hit by an arrow.
In some scenes that are full CG, where you just see arrows flying,
there were definitely hundreds of arrows that were added.
We were asked by Neil Marshall
to recreate various scenes as we hit the beach,
various dummies they want burning.
BRISDON: In the battle, we have a lot of fire, a lot of fire in the water,
bodies on fire just on the ground.
They're silicon bodies which are made by our prosthetics department,
and we put flame onto them.
Sometimes we use Petrogel, which is a thick gel
that burns nicely, gives off black smoke.
Once they reach the castle, Neil wanted to see various action shots,
like a rock crushing a man's head
or a kind of samurai cut from shoulder to waist,
various effects like that.
Some of these were totally done in camera
and some of them will be augmented by CG visual effects,
and some of them we worked closely with special effects.
And so, Neil's asked for a lot.
HERBERT: For the initial fight scene, the Hound runs out of the gate,
meets the attackers.
He slices a number of Stannis' men in half,
this is done together with prosthetics.
So, we replaced the actual men he's fighting with a prosthetic dummy.
O'SULLIVAN: Basically, he cuts the body in half.
It's hinged, and the whole body falls backwards and the guts all spill out.
The guts are basically sausages. They can be quite realistic.
They were really realistic, they were really right in my face,
and they were trying to tell me it wasn't the real deal,
but I think they were real, to be honest.
One of the scenes we have in the battle
is where one of the guys gets crushed by a rock.
The way we did this is
Prosthetics have made a prosthetic head, which has been made out of silicon,
filled With blood.
We've got air tubes going up inside it.
We had to work out a rig where the head could collapse,
and then the actual body of the dummy to fall out of frame.
We got a real rock, and put a ring into the top of it,
fixed up an electric release overhead,
and then drop it from that on cue and that lands on the head,
and you just get a big burst of blood.
It's a very quick shot, but it's very effective.
I think, probably, the greatest challenge on Episode 9 is Tyrion's wound.
I think that's probably the biggest issue that I have.
He gets seriously wounded, permanently wounded, in a way.
Tyrion is gonna get a sword blow across the face.
Neil Marshall wanted to see the action
and Tyrion standing there, and the blood appear in camera.
It'll go diagonally across his forehead,
right down across the bridge of his nose, and down his cheek.
We might just expose his face and then just have the blood just coursing down his face.
So, we make a false cheek and a false forehead to apply to Tyrion.
It has to fit perfectly, otherwise, you're gonna see it.
Behind that is a bladder, and the blood will be delivered to the bladder
just as the cut happens, and the blood will color the cut,
and the cut will appear to open.
ENGELEN: It happens at the end of Episode 9, and we establish it in Episode 10,
and then, for Season 3, it'll carry on as being a lasting scar.
So, that's gonna have to be something I'm gonna have to sort of work out.
He's definitely not good at battle, but he gives a brave effort,
and he is still alive. That says a lot in this show.
(GROANS)
(WHINNYING)
At the end of Episode 9, we have this big charge,
and Renly's ghost appears with Tywin Lannister's army behind him.
We're using 13 horses for this part of the battle,
then visual effects will take it on, and make multiples, you know, 100 horses,
and make it all work.
With the horse charge, we break down the moves very slowly,
and we start working the horses through, gradually hitting sticks,
banging shields, getting them used to the noise.
There I'm using half local horses and half stunt horses.
So, the stunt horses take the lead, and the local horses follow the stunt horses,
so we're kind of teaching them today, and getting them used to it,
and making sure everyone knows their routes, and planning all the action out.
HERBERT: This way, we're getting the horses used to being around people,
and in confined spaces.
At the same time, we're getting the extras used to being around the horses.
NAPROUS: Everyone's got their lines, everyone knows their action,
everyone knows where to go, there's escape points,
and the stunt guys have to know which of the other stunt guys in the crowd to hit,
and which of the extras, obviously,
'cause they're fighting the other stunt guys.
SMIFF: We make channels to go through.
I'll have a certain area with stuntmen around me.
They know where I'm going, they know where I'm hitting.
Obviously, when you're working with animals, things can change.
So, people need to be on their toes.
Then we build this up by putting more and more men in,
and gradually, the speed of the horses build up and build up.
So, it's kind of keeping on top of them, and training them constantly.
We're very short of time, and we've got a lot to do.
So much of the second season
was about protecting that time and that money for the battle.
At a certain point, we didn't even know if we'd be able to do it, period,
because it was gonna cost so much.
HBO gave us the opportunity to do something that we are very proud of.
BENIOFF: Episode 9 was like the favorite child,
and it was a different color on the calendar from all the other episodes.
WEISS: The story really wouldn't feel right without it,
and we couldn't imagine the season without it.
BENIOFF: We're really happy with the results,
and I think we put together a pretty nasty bit of business.
The battle is over. We have won.