Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1126636
DGA QUARTERLY 55 these things in combination create something that tricks the eye." Betting on the idea that roaring blasts of orange-red fire would help sell the effect of a dragon blitzing the Sons of the Harpy soldiers, Nutter and stunt coordinator Rowley Irlam used a 45-foot flamethrower affixed to a motion controlled crane—a stand-in for the dragon's combustible breath—to set 17 costumed stunt people ablaze, at the time a history- making effect. In "Loot Train," Shakman broke Nutter's record by ig- niting 20 stunt people simultaneously. This time, however, instead of a flamethrower, Irlam came up with a system involving pyrotechnic charg- es buried in the ground that were programmed to explode sequentially so it looked like the dragon's whoosh of fire traveled along the battlefield, then engulfed the Lannister soldiers. Later, an additional flamethrower burst was shot with a motion-con- trol rig in-studio. On location, though, Shakman says he made sure each stunt person was well rehearsed, because he wanted to avoid overly ex- pressive melodramatic reactions "where people run around waving their hands in the air and it always looks incredibly silly." But he also knew he needed to shoot the scene with eight cameras, because he only had a quarter of a minute to get it right. Stunt people are "coated in layers of cooling gel and [wear] protective flame-retardant gear, then ultimately they all put on a silicon mask," says Shakman, adding that once the fire stunt begins, the performers have to hold their breaths as Irlam counts loudly to 15, then wait for 15 or more safety officers to snuff out the flames with fire extinguishers. N E A R LY S E A S O N S of Game of Thrones, a violent face-off was typically the short, bloody adrenaline boost in an episode otherwise packed with Stark vs. Lannister palace intrigue. As the series pro- gressed, the budget swelled and battle sequences began to take up more space, becoming seasonal climaxes. One such climactic fight in Season 5's "Hardhome," when an entire village is occupied, de- molished and reanimated by the Night King and his army, would establish director Miguel Sapochnik's reputation for upping the show's battle ante. By the time Sapochnik got the script for the 6th season's "Battle of the Bastards," he realized that its armed struggle—Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton going at it over who will control Winterfell—had become more than a burst of action in an otherwise talky episode. "My personal process is to break down [the script] by first trying to understand the overall point and distill that into a sentence like 'Jon's de- scent into hell,'" says Sapochnik about the 23-plus minutes of warfare in an hour-long episode. Sapochnik recreated elements from famous histori- cal battles for the sequence, which took 25 days to shoot using four camera crews, and involved 600 crew mem- bers, 500 extras, 60 stunt people and 70 horses. "It was probably one of the only times the extras were actually pinned in, and they felt it," says Sapochnik of staging a double-envelopment or pincer move, which defeated the Romans during the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C. "We'd push it a little bit and let the action run a tad longer each take so that no one got comfortable. It feels like that's Matt Shakman Scenes from Season VII: "The Spoils of War"