-WARRIOR: Ahh! -(BLADES RESONATE)

♪ (ENTICING MUSIC) ♪

(WARRIORS YELLING)

(STRIKING)

(CRASHES)

As soon as we wrote up episode nine,

we knew that it was gonna have to operate on a scale

that we never operated before.

DAVID: We had a number of night time battles,

we had a number of sieges but this is the first

pitched battle, or at least the first large pitched battle.

And so, something different for us.

All of it is action with almost no dialogue and lots of horses

and many extras and the giants...

The amount of supporting artists and the size of the crew,

how many cameras they got going.

IWAN: The magnitude of all the sets and everything,

it's unbelievable.

It was hard, it was a long, long slog.

DAVID: Luckily we got Miguel Sapochnik back

who is our meister from Heart home in Season five.

That was basically a massacre.

D.B: This is a battle, this is the story of a battle.

We never done that before.

They really wanted to kind of get into the mindset of what

it would be like to be in a battle like that.

KIT: It was fluid all the way through.

It morphed, it changed

but the most important thing all the way through is...

it can't just be a battle. If it's just a battle...

the audience don't have stakes in it, you know?

KIT: You have to be following someone

so we decide to follow to Jon.

♪ (ENTICING MUSIC) ♪

Ramsay...

weapon all the way through is antagonizing people.

-(BLADE RESONATES) -KIT: Drawing them into a trap,

and Jon completely falls for it.

D.B: He doesn't account for Ramsay's...

...gift sets-- psychological manipulation,

which Sansa warns him about!

He's kind of thought, ah, this guy gonna do some

stupid and honorable... because he's not gonna be able

to control himself, so I'll shoot his brother with

a bow and arrow.

KIT: There's no way he can't gallop towards

his brother, who is-- been shot up with arrows

and try and save him.

So he falls into that trap.

But he's-- waited until Jon Snow...

...is within archers range.

So that they can start shooting him immediately.

KIT: He seen his brother been killed,

so he falls into the next trap

galloping towards Ramsay.

Yah! Yah!

Every step of the way he does exactly what he wants him to do.

Yah!

-(HORSE TRIPS) -(NEIGHING)

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC) ♪

Probably one of my favorite shot of the whole season is...

DAVID: when we're behind Jon Snow and he sees that...

Calvary wall galloping towards him,

and part of the reason it's such a great shot,

is that it's all real.

(BLADE RESONATES)

DAVID: That's 40 horses charging full speed at Kit Harington.

Until the last minute, I stood there facing off against this

Calvary charge, which is really scary.

KIT: We're a bit annoyed

cause we think everyone is gonna think it was CGI...

...and it wasn't.

Camilla, our horse mistress kept asking every year,

DAVID: she say, "Give me some more stuff to do.

Like, this year was boring it's just people trotting

from here to there on their horses."

So finally we gave her enough to do.

I remember the outline, I went, "Wow, ok, this is adventurous,

how are we gonna deal with this?"

MAN: (YELLS) Charge!

(INDISTINT CHATTER)

CAMILLA: It's the biggest amount of horse requirement,

I ever had on Games of Thrones.

We flew over in May to kind of start discussing

How are we gonna prep it,

CAMILLA: well, how many horses we're gonna use.

(WARRIORS YELLING)

CAMILLA: We decided on 80 in the end.

So when we first see both armies we'll use 80 on the Stark side

and let me see, 80 on the Boltons,

so we're using the maximum.

CAMILLA: Then when we start the clash,

we'll split it in half.

KIT: When we had horses charging pass me,

those were all real horses.

CAMILLA: I obviously worked really closely with Rowley

putting it all together.

And we make channels, so it looks like

they're clashing but they're not the horses are actually

just passing through, you know...

...like two foot channels so that they could clear out.

ROWLEY: We are gonna to make that look as close as possible

to a collision without actually colliding the horses.

ROWLEY: So in very tight formation

we'll have those guys cross

and they'll pull the horses as they cross through.

We're falling them onto a very thick falling bed,

so we don't injure the horses or injure the guys.

Um, but we're gonna try to make that something

that's not really been done before.

-DIRECTOR: (YELLS) Action! -(WARRIORS YELLING)

ROWLEY: You want it to feel crowded

and mayhem and like, you know...

anything can happen any time.

But I really don't want anything to happen any time,

I want what we planned to happened,

and it looked really cool

and let's not hurt anybody.

-(HORSEMEN YELLING) -(BLADES RESONATING)

-(WARRIORS SCREAMING) -(YELLING)

To get across the field and follow the horses,

the speed at which the moving horses,

move really, really fast.

MIGUEL: You need a special rig and the rushing arm is such

a fun machine...

...to work with cause its gives you such dynamic shots.

(TRAVELLING)

FABIAN: Especially, a camera tracking vehicle,

it's a remote control arm.

FABIAN: That sits on a Land Rover in our case.

Throughout "The Battle of the Bastards",

we had a number of tracking vehicles, one of which was...

...the vampire bat with the rushing arm on it.

On a muddy slippery field over about five or six hundred

yards of very fast horses that was the vehicle to chase them

properly, and get the results we wanted.

SEAN: It worked very well.

The results were amazing.

(INDISTINT DIALOGUE)

JON: Go! Go! Fellow your commander!

(WARRIORS YELLING AND SCREAMING)

You've got two giant armies that are opposing one another.

STEVE: You know you're not gonna have more than

a few hundred extras on one side or the other

so you got a lot crowd replication.

JOE: We had a lot of Calvary, a lot of infantry.

Wun Wun, the giant is involved.

Most of it would be photographed but it also needed a lot of

digital enhancement.

STEVE: You've got things happening that you can't shoot

in any real way. You got a giant punching out

a horse.

We shot horses falling and charging toward one another

that we can use as elements,

but we start to get into complex areas that we haven't

really broken ground with on the series before,

where it's fun

and exciting but also, very challenging.

(COMMANDS)

(WARRIORS GASP)

(HORSE NEIGHING)

(GRUNTS)

"The Battle of the Bastards" becomes incredibly compact

all these combatants force into this incredibly tight space

on the battlefield, partly crammed in by bodies.

You got horses, you got... you know, men by either side

just piled up on this massive hill.

The body pile was absolutely enormous in terms of it's

scale and ambition.

DEBORAH: All of those prop bodies had to dressed

in the appropriate uniforms.

DEBORAH: We had to have the shields and the flags.

You then need to dress the horses and their saddlery.

You need to make sure that the correct sigil

is on the horse.

Even though I know that all of these bodies are fake.

DEBORAH: It was deeply moving.

It's pretty grim, it's very brutalizing to look at.

DEAN: I never seen that before ever.

DAVID: It comes from reading real accounts of these

various battles both medieval-- and even more modern ones.

DAVID: You read accounts of battles in the Civil War,

where their bodies were piled, so they become an obstruction

on the battlefield.

I think what I was finding throughout filming this was

moments of giving up.

KIT: And the first moment we found that was

when the crush starts

happening and he just stops for a moment.

KIT: And then he tries to fight his way back but he gets

pushed over, he gets trampled.

-(JON GASPS) -(WARRIORS ROARING)

Jon is almost literally buried alive.

DAVID: Beneath the bodies.

KIT: He was being almost killed by his own men,

not on purpose but just in this wave of fear

that kind of overcomes everyone as they try to get out

of the way of his incoming wall of shields.

And then something drives him to fight out,

and in that moment where he comes up and he goes for breath

he's reborn, again in a way.

-(BREATHES) -(DISTANT HORNS)

-(WARRIORS CHARGING) -(WARRIORS YELLING)

(CLASHING)

D.B.: Winterfell is a place that really mean so much

in the context of the show, and the episode is really about

bringing things home.

(COLLISION)

D.B.: The final act takes place in the Winterfell courtyard

and it ultimately boils down to Jon against Ramsay,

and Sansa against Ramsay.

IWAN: Always wanted to do a scene with Jon Snow.

It's really nice to get to sort of...

...have the two bastards there together facing off.

KIT: It's a horrible moment when you see your hero

go a bit too far.

ROWLEY: The only direction I gave to Kit was,

"He's not human anymore.

He doesn't feel any sympathy, empathy for this guy."

-(YELLS) -(GASPS)

(GRUNTS)

We actually spent an entire day,

ten hours with Kit on top of Iwan

beating him. (CHUCKLES)

I just shot it in every single angle I possibly could.

KIT: What we wanted to try to get with that was--

that he just needing bread,

he's just flatting this person's face

and that's what changed in Jon for me.

KIT: A monster has risen in him a bit, which

I think should be unsettling for the viewers.

There's nothing he wants more then to beat Ramsay to death

with his own fists and then he sees his sister.

I think Jon then realizes, you know, as he's about to

kill him. He's on the verge of death.

SOPHIE: He realizes this is your fight this your guy to kill.

Because he understands what she's been through.

Where is he?

IWAN: It's a very justified ending, so that Sansa has

the power in the end.

Your house will disappear, your name will disappear,

all memory of you will disappear.

It's such a strong moment for her because all her life

she's been affected by these men who have just done such terrible

things to her.

IWAN: It's nice to get to do a final scene with Sophie,

after last season.

And this is the first moment that you actually hear her say,

"This won't affect me and I'm stronger than that".