page_title: Battle of the Bastards
section_title: Battle of Winterfell
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of the Bastards / Production / Filming / Battle of Winterfell
caption_attribution_description: English: Miguel Sapochnik speaking at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.
context_page_description: "Battle of the Bastards" is the ninth and penultimate episode of the sixth season of HBO's fantasy television series Game of Thrones and its 59th episode overall. It was written by series co-creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and directed by Miguel Sapochnik.
  Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton face off in a battle for control of Winterfell. Jon's force, mostly composed of Wildlings, is nearly defeated by the Bolton army, but the latter is overcome when Sansa Stark and Petyr Baelish arrive with the Knights of the Vale. The battle culminates in Ramsay's defeat and capture. Meanwhile, Daenerys Targaryen defeats the Masters in Meereen and begins making new alliances.
  "Battle of the Bastards" received immense critical acclaim, with several reviewers calling it a "masterpiece", and being praised as one of the series' best episodes as well as one of the greatest television episodes of all time. Critics described the battle in the North as "terrifying, gripping and exhilarating", Harington's performance received high praise, and Daenerys' reunion with her dragons at the beginning of the episode was deemed "thrilling".
context_section_description: "Battle of the Bastards" was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who had directed the fifth-season episodes "The Gift" and "Hardhome". In an Entertainment Weekly interview before the episode aired, Sapochnik said he was brought on board by Benioff and Weiss after his previous-season success; "Hardhome" won several awards, including Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. About how the episode should be shot, he said: "Every battle on Thrones is unique. I think that's why Benioff and Weiss keep doing them. In the case of 'Battle of the Bastards' – or 'BOB' as we affectionately called it in production – David and Dan wanted to do a thing of spectacle, a strategic pitchfield battle they hadn't had the resources to do back in season 1 or 2. I was particularly interested in depicting both the horror of war and the role of luck in battle." Benioff called Sapochnik's work on the episode some of the best in the series' history.
  It took 25 days to film, requiring 500 extras, 600 crew members and 70 horses. Benioff described the difficulty of coordinating horses in battle scenes, which is why they are rarely used except in "big budget war films". Weiss added, "Miguel's really outdone himself. Fully fleshed out medieval battles require a tremendous amount of resources and choreography to get them right. It feels like we're doing something fresh that you don't see on TV and movies very often." Four camera crews were used for the battle scene. The 500 extras were largely the Snow and Bolton armies as Wildlings, archers, swordsmen and spearmen. Each army was trained separately to create off-screen rivalry between the two groups, and visual effects were used to expand the army to thousands. Kristofer Hivju, who plays Tormund Giantsbane, said about the intensity of filming the scenes: "It was pretty intense, actually. When you have 20 people running around getting squeezed together, and you're trying to chop at another bearded guy with a sword, you are not out of danger. You're laying down in the mud, and one wrong step, you won't have a face anymore. It was very intense, and Miguel insisted on making it that muddy and messy. War is not beautiful. Sometimes you see action sequences where battles seem organized. I know that from how the Vikings fought. It's not beautiful. It's hard. It's hard work. We had to shoot moment-to-moment, chronologically. We would shoot one sequence 80 times per day."
  In an interview after the episode aired, Sapochnik detailed the process of filming the battle and called Akira Kurosawa's Ran an inspiration in shooting the scenes: "I watched every pitch field battle I could find (footage of real ones too), looking for patterns — for what works, what doesn't, what takes you out of the moment, what keeps you locked in. Interestingly one of the things I noticed is that staging of these battles through the years has changed dramatically. Back in the day you'd see these huge aerial shots of horse charges and there were two big differences. First, it was all real — no CGI or digital replication. And second, often when the horses would go down, you can kind of tell they got really hurt. Nowadays you'd never get away with that, and nor would you want to."
  Asked about the greatest challenge in filming the battle, Sapochnik said: "Every time we charge the horses it takes 25 minutes to reset all the fake snow on the field and rub out the horseshoe prints. So how many times can we afford to charge the horses each day knowing we need to give time for a reset that's 10 times longer than the actual shot? Another thing was how to make 500 extras look like 8,000 when you are shooting in a field where there's just nowhere to hide your shortfall. It becomes a bit like a bonkers math equation. And finally: How do you get these guys riled up enough to run at each other and get covered in mud and stand in the rain and then run at each other again and again for 25 days, 10 hours a day, without them just telling you to piss off?" In an interview, he said that the single most difficult thing he was asked to depict was "having 3,000 horses runnin
caption: Miguel Sapochnik directed the episode, his third of the series.
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