Get excited, Game of Thrones fans, because at last, War is Coming. In a new interview, Benioff and Weiss tease next Sunday’s big Battle of Blackwater episode penned by George R.R. Martin himself.
Speaking to EW, the showrunners share their excitement for the episode, admitting that, “we didn’t know if we’d be able to pull it off. It’s a massive battle.”
Speaking about making this battle as big as it can be without the same budget as, say, Lord of the Rings, Benioff says:
One great advantage we have over the movies is that when one of our characters wades into battle, we’ve spent almost 19 hours with these characters. You know them so well and hopefully you’re worried for them. And some of them are gonna die.
That said, they still felt they needed more money to bring the epic naval battle from the books to life. Benioff reveals how close they were to not having a battle at all:
For budgetary reasons we came very, very close to having all the action take place off-screen, the way plays have handled battle scenes for a few thousand years. The idea was [MINOR SPOILER ALERT] that we’d set most of the episode in Maegor’s Holdfast. Cersei and Sansa would be cooped up in there with the other noblewomen and children, hearing occasional reports from the battlements. Given how good Lena and Sophie are, we could probably have made a decent episode, but we didn’t want to do it that way. To our minds, the entire season builds to this clash, and if we didn’t see any of it, we were undercutting the story and short-changing the audience.
Read the full, lengthy interview with Weiss and Benioff here at EW.
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