Final season of Game of Thrones.
Crew please clear the set!
Can actually use a whole episode
just in anticipation...
♪ She's a sexy lady ♪ - Mm.
Brienne of Tarth!
Woo!
Do we do the lines or we just look up?
Do we do the lines, right?
- "Here we are?" - Yes, sir.
Okay. Why not, right?
Background!
Well, here we are.
Yes, here we are.
Because we were spending so much of this season in Winterfell,
that meant greatly expanding Winterfell.
You can't just use the same three or four sets
over and over again without it starting to look redundant.
Winterfell has grown from what was, in season one and two,
a courtyard, into a proper castle.
When we read the outline for season eight,
it was clear that it was so big, what was required of it,
that we had to have a complete rebuild.
What was added for this season was the north gate,
and the battlements, and the north courtyard
because of the...
attack was going to come from the north.
Right, we are in, uh,
in the new courtyard in Winterfell.
The old courtyard ended where this wall was,
so it was tremendously small.
We needed an expansion of the whole castle
because we have refugees,
we have an additional army that needed feeding.
We took the old Winterfell model,
and I literally took a scalpel
and pulled that wall out in foam core.
And then it opened up the whole space.
And seeing all of the different activities
that took place in these castles is really important.
Almost the back-of-house activities in the castle,
it was like, "Well, how were these people fed?"
You know, "Where did the beer come from?"
Just come through the north gate in this area
where we have got our soup kitchen.
And we made spoons and ladles and bowls
and things that you kind of take for granted
but actually require quite a lot of work.
And we have a brewery.
We have barrels that are practical
and people can be drinking.
I do love research and the history of food
and what was available and what they would've eaten.
The other side, we have our bakery.
We would have breads that were made fresh
and ones that were, uh, treated
so they wouldn't disintegrate after a couple of days.
In working on a set that looks good in every angle,
that's what gives you the options, you know.
You could literally go from one side of Winterfell
upstairs, downstairs, into towers, out of towers,
and create these long, continual shots.
It was very, very exciting.
I mean there's so many layers, levels,
which opens up a lot of chances of moving the camera
through those after our characters.
So what Deb did and her team
was to create these incredibly realistic environments.
If the actors are in an environment
that seems real to them,
it's much easier to get a good performance.
Go inside,
and you're completely transported.
You have to remind yourself by like knocking on the walls,
and then you can hear that it's fake.
- Scene marker. - Mark it.
And action!
Turn. Go.
When I talked to the actors
concerning position of where they all sit,
episode one of the season,
I made sure that Jon sat in the front middle.
He was in a sense rallying the troops
that we have to get behind Dany Targaryen.
When Jaime comes to Winterfell,
she definitely took the role and took the queen's position.
When I was a child,
my brother would tell me a bedtime story
about the man who murdered our father.
It's an absolute trial, but it's fueled
by this fact that no one wants her there.
It's fueled by her needing to say,
"This is me in the boardroom, this is me at work.
And I'ma show you how I work."
I promised to fight for the living.
I intend to keep that promise.
David Nutter, he has the most enormous respect for actors.
I mean, as do I. I couldn't possibly do that.
Sitting in front of this camera is difficult enough.
Once we get on set,
we will have a director's rehearsal
with the actors before the scene and then we go for it.
I know Ser Jaime.
He is a man of honor.
For Brienne, I think it's in some ways
the most complicated feeling of all
because she's feeling things she can't really process.
It goes all the way back to the beginning
of their relationship when he kind of...
jumped in the line of fire for her.
Without him, my lady, you would not be alive.
Brienne's a very naturally shy person,
and she stands in front of that room
and she puts herself on the line and it's almost...
like a declaration of love.
And that means a lot to Sansa because she believes in Brienne.
It's like if Brienne vouches for him,
then that's good enough for her.
I trust you with my life.
If you trust him with yours, we should let him stay.
What does the Warden of the North say about it?
That's the first scene we see him...
after he's heard all the information from Sam.
We need all the men we can get.
So I think even the fact that Jaime Lannister is here,
he's sort of just not really in the room.
The moment that Jon found out,
he started to cool off with her.
That was really the kind of thing which...
he was avoiding her.
Cut, print.
In David Nutter's words, he was...
he was getting Winterfell ready for battle.
And by the time Miguel would arrive in episode three,
the battle was beginning.
And the thing that was really important to us
was what steps would the residents of Winterfell take
in order to protect themselves against the Army of the Dead.
So they would do as much as they could with dragonglass.
We had the caltrops that were made.
We also put shards of dragonglass
on top of the battlements, and the dragonglass logs.
I had pre-engineered how to make the dragonglass.
So, chunks of resin,
and then, we'd knap it, shape it, grind it.
Then we just, we mold that and create
hundreds of all types.
From a very prop sort of sense, we had to make
big piles of dragonglass that were movable.
Background weapons, spears, knives, daggers.
Then using the forge work, how to make a sword,
how to make an axe, how to make a spear.
So, incorporating all of those assets with Gendry.
The whole thing's fully working, you know.
The furnaces work.
The forges are all, you know, fully operational.
And so, as an actor
who's trying to look like he knows what he's doing,
that's a challenging hoax.
Gendry's, in a sense...
he's leading the guys in the fortress,
he understands all about dragonglass
and understands how to turn it into weapons.
It had to be molten dragonglass
poured by an actor into a mold,
and so obviously we had to
play around with a material that was completely safe,
pretty cool, but also appear to be molten glass.
Here we go. Ready?
And...
Arya goes to the forge,
and in a sense, "Oh, Gendry's here."
And he's lookin' good.
Gendry got a chance to kind of understand
who the new Arya was as well,
so there's a wonderful kind of a...
flirtation that went on that was kind of interesting.
You're going to be safer down in the crypt, you know.
Are you going to be down in the crypt?
She basically, she proves to him in a display of her prowess,
she takes about four or five of these dragonstone knives
and kind of throws them at the post
and kind of, you know, hits this post five times in a row,
and he's like, "Holy shit.
She's got some abilities."
I enjoy new experiences.
I look forward to seeing this one.
Well, the library in Winterfell
was something that I was very excited about designing,
and it is a beautiful space.
We wanted to make it look slightly different from
all the libraries that we've done before.
You know, they're not great readers in Winterfell.
We added little details, uh, like, you know,
these direwolf heads.
The wolf heads in the Winterfell library
were just a bonus, really.
Um, we built these beautiful hammerbeams,
and it was Hauke's idea to put the wolf heads
on the end of those hammerbeams, so...
Darren, our sculptor, sculpted those little wolf heads.
We took the sigil
and just tried to develop it into a 3D world.
And then we made a small model in clay
to look like a carved wood
'cause it was gonna go at the end of a piece of timber.
If the audience picks up on them, um, that's fantastic.
If they don't, then...
they enrich the set in another way.
- Okay, are you ready? - Yeah. Yeah.
And... action.
Lady Sansa, I was hoping we could have a word.
Alone. Sorry. Do that again.
Think we might have a word?
It was actually quite bizarre
because I only see Emilia onscreen,
and it's, like, kind of a fan moment.
I mean, I know her in real life, but as Daenerys,
I only see her on screen.
It was really, really fun to work with her.
I thought you and I were on the verge of agreement before.
It was a lioness versus lioness.
Verbally, you've got this sparring match happening.
He never should've trusted Cersei.
You never should have, either.
Like, "Oh, that slap hurt! I'ma take it!
Mm... Not gonna slap you back!"
Families are complicated.
Ours certainly have been.
You're driving it, and you have to sit first,
but as you're sitting, you could indicate like...
Yeah.
She comes to Sansa, yeah, with a bit of an olive branch,
trying to find a way inside that kind of
cool exterior that Sansa presents.
I'm here because I love your brother.
But she's just forgetting the critical matter, which is
Sansa thinks of the North in every way
that Dany thinks of Westeros.
The North is hers. It's the Starks'. It's theirs.
It was taken from us, and we took it back.
We said we'd never bow to anyone else again.
What about the North?
And... cut.
I just fancy your brother loads.
I think he's really, really sexy.
And we are cutting. We're cutting.
The way we had to light the night courtyard
meant we had to dig trenches through a very thick
World War II concrete lane for the megawatt power
that we had to pipe in from the gennies.
So, it's a bit more like preparing for Glastonbury
than it was for... preparing for a short-stay location.
Oh, for fucks sake.
This will be a bloody wedding.
And we'll cut, guys. We'll cut.
We had one night shooting.
But we had three principal cast up there,
three cameras,
background, our crew,
and we had every kind of weather.
We had clear skies, we had horizontal rain,
horizontal sleet, big fluffy snowflakes.
And so we had to cover ourselves in every kind of weather.
It's very cool when you actually look at it and go,
"Oh, that looks a lot better than we thought it was,
considering it was pissing with rain."
And you realize you got away with it.
Where are you going?
I'm not spending my final hours
with you two miserable old shits.
For us, what was interesting about this episode
was always that it's our last night together.
What people do when they know they have one...
night left on Earth
tells you a lot about who people really are.
I remember the first time we came here.
You were a golden lion, I was a drunken whoremonger.
It was all so simple.
This sequence that I love so much
was the sequence around the fireplace.
Starts off with something simple as Tyrion and Jaime
having a moment together as brothers.
My lady.
Oh, we didn't mean to interrupt.
We were just looking for somewhere warm.
To contemplate your imminent death?
You've come to the right place.
We have all invested
so many years in these characters,
that, yes, we can actually use a whole episode
just in anticipation of what's gonna happen.
And there was a good gang in the room,
we've got Peter and Daniel, myself, Brienne there,
and that wonderful atmosphere that the guys have created.
Figured that I could wait to die
freezing my balls off out there,
or wait to die nice and warm in here.
For Tormund, the best thing to do is to drink
and to try to enjoy life.
And of course, life is love,
and love is Brienne.
So he's just hanging around trying show her...
why he's the best guy ever.
They call me Giantsbane.
Want to know why?
I've now watched it probably 300 times,
but I'd still always laugh
when Tormund starts telling his backstory.
That's how I got so strong.
Giant's milk.
Partly in the way that Kristof portrays Tormund,
and partly in the reactions of the other characters
listening to him, part just in the way
that Tormund chugs the goat's milk there.
It's really pretty incredible.
And he was really chugging milk.
Maybe I will have that drink.
Cut, print.
But it does not impress Brienne, I think,
um, but you know, he does his best.
So your line, "You're not a knight?"
- Okay. - Tormund.
- You're not a knight? - Yeah, we'll pick it up there.
Put "fuck tradition" a little closer together.
Tighter. And... action.
You're not a knight?
- Women can't be knights. - Why not?
- Tradition. - Fuck tradition.
There's a scene Bryan Cogman wrote
in which Jaime decides to knight Brienne
that we... we always just loved,
we loved enough that we made it the title of the episode.
I don't care about that, and I will continue
to live my life in the best way possible,
and you will probably never acknowledge it,
but that's not what my life is about.
I'm no king, but if I were,
I'd knight you ten times over.
He may not have been meaning,
"I'll make you a knight ten times over,
but, uh, it was wonderful how he kind of said the line.
You don't need a king.
He goes, "Well, hang on a second. I can do this."
Any knight can make another knight.
There are no rules against it, it's just weird tradition.
I'll prove it.
It's a kind of validation,
a general kind of validation she's wanted her whole life.
Kneel.
One of my favorite little moments there
is the look that Pod gives her
when she tries to pretend to everybody
like she doesn't want to be a knight
when Pod knows that that's what she wants
more than any single other thing in the world.
You want to be a knight or not? Kneel.
And even though she denies it, Brienne has been more knightly
than any of the knights I think we've seen.
And the fact that she hadn't been
just because of her gender is totally unfair.
As humans like to feel accepted,
and the idea of those sorts of stereotypes
being pulled apart is incredibly important.
In the name of the warrior,
I charge you to be brave.
When we're on his coverage,
he kind of zoned out for a moment,
and what I mean by that, he was so into the character,
he wasn't self-editing
or he wasn't aware of what did,
and he goes, "I hope that was good
because I don't know what happened."
Then, this is when I know an actor's got it.
Arise, Brienne of Tarth.
A knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Living your life exclusively for the wellbeing of others,
in service of an idea greater than yourself,
I am delighted that Brienne is recognized for that.
Ser Brienne of Tarth.
Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
She deserved it. She really deserved it.
A bit of a problem that it came from Jaime, though,
but, uh, we'll see.
How about a song? Hmm?
One of you must know one.
I thought, "Could someone sing? Would Tormund sing?"
And then Dave Hill mentioned to me
that Daniel Portman has a great voice.
We haven't had an original in a while,
so, um, this felt like the place for it,
and Daniel felt like the singer.
Yeah, I was just sort of...
I was drinking a lot of herbal teas and honey
and things like that to make sure...
'cause it's very high.
I don't usually sing as high as that.
The person we hadn't seen for a few beats was Pod,
so on Tyrion's closeup, profile closeup,
Pod enters frame as the camera finds him,
and he starts to sing.
- Scene marker. - Mark it.
♪ High in the halls ♪
♪ Of the kings who are gone ♪
♪ Jenny would dance With her ghosts ♪
It was cool 'cause I wanted to shoot it in continuous shots,
it was great 'cause he kept in tune and rhythm
- for a long time. - ♪ The ones she had lost ♪
♪ And the ones she had found ♪
What I really wanted that episode to be
was a love letter to the characters
because I, um, I love them so much.
Most of the scenes in that episode,
it's really these characters in a room
sharing their humanity.
♪ The ones who'd been gone For so very long ♪
♪ She couldn't remember Their names ♪
I pledged to fight for the North, and I will fight.
♪ They spun her around On the damp old stones ♪
- ♪ Spun away... - Your father...
taught me how to do what's right.
This is right.
♪ And she never wanted To leave ♪
♪ Never wanted to leave ♪
- ♪ Never wanted to leave ♪ - My name...
- My real name... - ♪ Never wanted to leave ♪
...is Aegon Targaryen.
Form up!
Steel yourselves, men!