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"\n\nTwo decades ago, when the author and screenwriter George R. R. Martin began work on A Song of Ice and Fire\u2014the best-selling fantasy series that would become the HBO hit Game of Thrones\u2014he didn't think anyone in Hollywood would be crazy enough to adapt it. \"The reaction to many of my television scripts had been, 'George, this is great, but it would take five times our budget. You have to cut it down,' says Martin, who spent the '80s writing for TV shows like Beauty and the Beast. \"A Song of Ice and Fire was a reaction to that. I said, 'I'm going write something as big as my imagination, and not worry about budget.'.\"\n\nCase in point: The Battle of the Blackwater, a six-chapter-long land-and-sea war in book two, A Clash of Kings, in which disparate fiefdoms converge on King's Landing, the capital of Martin's imaginary world. With its teeming warships and castle-wall clashes, the battle is the sort of sprawling epic that would seem to be impossible to capture on screen. But Game of Thrones co-creators Dan Weiss and David Benioff were determined to make it all work in 55 minutes. \"Everyone knew this was the episode that was going to make or break the season,\" says Benioff.\n\nThe resulting episode, titled \"Blackwater,\" with a script by Martin himself, was the year's most glorious hour of TV. But getting it right required a war-room mentality all its own. Here's the story of how Martin, Benioff, and Weiss did it. Spoilers abound, obviously, but come on: At this point, how are you not watching this show?\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGeorge R.R. Martin (author, screenwriter): Dave and Dan gave me the hardest episode of the season. I think it was their subtle revenge for creating such a difficult-to-produce show. If you did everything as it was in the book, you'd have a budget approaching one of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. There's a sea battle, a land battle, a bridge of ships that the army pours across, a chain that Tyrion builds to keep the boats on the river, many sequences on horseback...all of this would be gigantically expensive. But my philosophy as a screenwriter has always been, \"Put it in. You can always take it out later if you can't afford to do it. But if you don't put it in to begin with, then it'll never be in.\"\n\nDan Weiss (co-creator): After you get the script, you get a sense of the reality of what you're going to be able to get on-screen. There was a call a month after he gave us the script, where we said, \"George, we hate to tell you this, but the chain's not going to be in it.\" And then we had to call and say, \"George, we just don't have time for so many horses. They slow things down.\"\n\nMartin: I wouldn't say I get frustrated. But it's a loss. It would be harder, if not for my previous experience in TV. I love the show, but I wish we had a couple more episodes every season.\n\nWeiss: The battle specifics were constantly evolving to meet our budget. We wanted as much as we could possibly get, but obviously not more than we could afford so it was all about tailoring the budget. [Note: Though HBO won't divulge specifics, the show's budget is estimated at between $60-$70 million per season]\n\nDavid Benioff (co-creator): We had one really intense conference call with the HBO brass. It was awkward: They said, \"So, what are you guys talking about, an extra $500,000?\" We said, \"Noooo....\" \"You guys need a million dollars?\" \"Ummmm....\"\n\nWeiss: I think we asked for $2.5 million. We got $2 million-something. That's a lot of money in TV. It was a big ask for them, and they understood it was really important. Our point was that the entire season was pointing toward this confrontation. To do what's normally done on television\u2014the Shakespearean model of talking about battles off-screen\u2014would completely kill the season.\n\nBenioff: We'd known for about a year that the ninth episode was going to be \"Blackwater,\" and a disproportionate amount of our resources were saved for this episode in terms of time and schedule. It was by far the biggest episode that we've ever done. Then, [before filming], we lost our director. His father got sick, so he had to be home. And we got into panic mode.\n\nWeiss: We were looking at a list of directors who happened to be available because they were in between projects. At any given time that's going to be a pretty small list. And it's a special skill-set to be able to do a convincing battle, even on a generous budget. But this one name popped out, almost in neon: Neil Marshall.\n\nBenioff: I can't actually mention [Marshall's 2007 low-budget thriller] The Descent in front of my wife. That movie freaked her out so much, she can't talk about it, even years after we saw it.\n\nWeiss: So we knew how far Neil could stretch limited resources, and how great he could make them look.\n\nNeil Marshall (director): I got a phone call on a Saturday morning from one of the producers: \u00A0\"Would you like to do an episode?\" And I said, \"Absolutely. When is it\u2014in the next month or something?\" And they said, \"Oh, no. We need you Monday morning.\" I hadn't seen the series, so I had to watch the first season back-to-back on a Sunday, get a flight [from London] to Belfast, and be in the office on Monday morning. I was given a week and a half to prep before shooting, but having come from a low-budget-feature background, I know what it's like to work fast.\n\nBenioff: Most directors, looking at what Neil had to look at, would have absolutely shat their pants.\n\nMarshall: I'm a keen reader of military battles, and I apply a lot of that thinking when I'm trying to choreograph a movie battle. How would it logically take place? What's the target? What am I trying to achieve with my strategies here?\n\nBenioff: [Still], we were worried. We certainly admired his past work, but coming onto the show is a very different kind of thing. When you're directing a movie, you're the boss of everything, and you're looking at months of prep-time. He was coming into someone else's show with no prep time. He didn't know the characters' names, he didn't know anything ...I'd say we were nervous.\n\n (Though it starts at sea, on the invading ships of Stannis Baratheon [Stephen Dillane], much of \"Blackwater\" takes place on land, in and around the castle at King's Landing, now ruled by the shifty Lannister clan, including psychopathic teenage king, Joffrey Baratheon, and his mother, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). The war begins when a single flaming arrow ignites a green-hued, napalm-like explosive called Wildfire, which destroys much of Baratheon's fleet. When the smoke clears, Baratheon and his surviving men storm the shore with battering rams.] \n\nMarshall: One of the main things I watched [before filming] was The Vikings, the 1958 Kirk Douglas movie. At the end, there's this big battle, and the perception is that there's hundreds of extras, but I rewatched the scene over and over and you never see more than maybe thirty or forty in a shot. That reassured me that, since we were going to have only 200 extras, I could make it look bigger than it actually was.\n\nBenioff: We decided to change it [from the book] and make the whole battle at night, because our FX guys said it'd be much easier. You can hide a lot in darkness.\n\nWeiss: It's also just so much moodier. It's easier to be hopeless at night.\n\nMarshall: We had two weeks of night shoots in October in Belfast [the indoor scenes were shot in Croatia]. It was cold and windy, and during segments of the battle, it rained solidly for three or four nights. But they're hardy people over there.\n\n Benioff: The extras in Northern Ireland are tough fuckin' dudes, and they're into it. These guys grow out their beard and their hair to be extras.\n\nWeiss: [They're] getting better at sword-fighting. They're going to be a full-fledged medieval army by the time this show's finished.\n\nMarshall: I designed a large rowing boat that held a battering ram in it, and when it got to the shore, the people inside flipped the boat over and used the boat as a sort of tortoise-shell. The battering ram kind of hung from a chain underneath it, so the soldiers were protected as they smashed the door down. I don't know if anything like that ever existed, but they built it in a week or two, and it worked. That was fun.\n\nWeiss: The moment I relad was when I saw the dailies from the first couple of days, and saw the sheer quantity and quality of footage Neil was getting. That's when I realized things were probably going to be okay. And there was a very good feeling on set, even though 36-degree rain was falling down on you for eight hours.\n\nBenioff: We script every scene so that it has a shape and a small story to tell, even the battle scenes. Neil shot so much amazing footage that we had an embarrassment of riches, and many different options for telling each story.\n\n(Midway through battle, King Joffrey Lannister cowardly retreats from the frontlines, forcing Peter Dinklage's Tyrion to make a desperate, rain-splattered, troop-rousing speech. \"Those are brave man knocking at our door,\" he says. \"Let's go kill them!\"]\n\nWeiss: At the pace we were shooting, we didn't really have that much time for dramatic scenes. For this monologue, if Peter didn't get it right in two or three takes, he had to move on. And he nailed it.\n\nBenioff: Initially, we didn't know if anyone would watch Game of Thrones, but if they did, we knew they'd be drawn to Tyrion because he's such a great character, and Peter's so perfect to play him. When we were courting him, we said, \"You will win an Emmy for this.\" I'm sure he thought we were bullshitting. (Dinklage won the Emmy in 2011.)\n\nWeiss: There's something heroic about Tyrion, but he's not heroic through violence. And he's getting dragged into these situations against his will, and still coming out alive at least with some form of triumph.\n\nBenioff: In some ways, he's the most modern character. Tyrion's view of the world might be closest to ours. It's almost like he's reached the Enlightenment a bit before everyone else. He has a skepticism about things, he has a sense of humor, and he has a disproportionate share of the best lines.\n\n(\"Blackwater\" isn't short on digital-effects shots\u2014including several awesome Wildfire explosions\u2014but many of the episode's grisly decapitations and sternum-slices were completed using traditional man-made models.]\n\nBenioff: In planning the battle scenes, we were influenced by Saving Private Ryan, but we also watched a lot of older films\u2014Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, El Cid, Zulu\u2014because in many ways those films cleaved closest to the aesthetic of the show. They didn't have access to visual effects to achieve their aims. We did, but our budget was limited and we used VFX on things we couldn't possible achieve without them, like the naval elements and the Wildfire explosion. That said, they did create approximately ten million flaming arrows.\n\nWeiss: Doing [digital] effects with the violence is tempting, because it doesn't take up shooting time, which is so precious. But if you can get the prosthetics-and-makeup version right, it tends to look better.\u00A0 And Neil had this kid-in-a-candy-shop joy.\n\nBenioff: He came in and said, \"What if we added a shot here?\" And we'd say, \"That's great, but I don't think you're gonna have time.\" And he'd say, \"We'll find the time.\"\n\nMarshall: I was determined to get some gore in there, some heads getting lopped off. That's part of the fun. In medieval battles, they're always throwing rocks off walls, and I wanted to see what would happen if a rock actually smashed into somebody's head. So I came up with a moment when a character runs through the gauntlet of archers and manages to make it to the wall. He breathes a sigh of relief, and then this big rock falls on his head. We made a very realistic dummy\u2014his head had brain-like matter inside\u2014and on action, dropped the rock on it. Blood sprayed everywhere. It was great.\n\nWeiss: Everybody's gonna have a different line you cross when it comes to violence. You can only go with what feels right.\n\nBenioff: Dan doesn't have a line. I'm the squeamish one. And [figuring out what's too much] is a learning process. In the joust episode from season one, when the newly knighted Sir Who's-his-face is dying with the tip of the lance in his throat, there's five seconds of him gurgling blood. If we had to do it over again, we'd have cut two seconds.\n\nWeiss: So much of it is really editorial: \"Do you have twelve frames too much of gore here?\" Because the line between really powerful, visceral effectiveness and unintentional comedy or gorefest is thin. You don't want it to cross over to Evil Dead territory.\n\nBenioff: We employ a lot of amputees, actually. So when a guy gets his leg chopped off, that's a guy with one leg, wearing a prosthetic.\n\nMarshall: In the original script, Stannis Barantheon didn't get any further than the bottom of the ladders [at the wall of King's Landing] and then he sort of disappeared from the script. I thought, \"We have to have him do more than that. If he's the polar opposite of King Joffrey, then he should be the first one up the ladder. Let's have a fight with him on the wall.' We choreographed a whole sequence which was never scripted, of Stannis having a sword fight on the wall, chopping a guy's head off, and then basically watching his army's defeat from a bird's-eye position before being dragged off by his own men.\n\nMartin: I am protective of the characters, but at the same time, I recognize the books are the books, and the show is the show, and there are gonna be differences. The scenes David and Dan add are generally great. They're almost scenes that are implied in the book.\n\nBenioff: Many of the scenes we've written are basically just taking George's characters and putting them into situations they hadn't been before. (The episode's concluding scene\u2014where Cersei is about to poison both herself and her younger son\u2014was also not in the book. The inspiration, according to Benioff, came from the wife of Adolf Hitler follower Joseph Goebbels, who poisoned her kids after Hitler committed suicide.)\n\nMartin: David and Dan will say, \"We're thinking of eliminating this character, and I tell them, \"Well, you can eliminate that character, but in Book Six, he has this big thing that he does, so you're going to have to deal with that later.\" And then maybe they change their mind. Or not. [laughs] There's still two gigantic books to go (five have been released; Martin is halfway through the sixth of seven), and there are many things David and Dan don't know about the eventual fates of some of these characters. I have the main beats of the books in my mind. But there's a lot that I discover in the process of writing. The devil is in the details, as they say. And there are a lot of devils in these books.\n\nBenioff: There's another battle bigger than this one coming up, but not until the end of season four. So we're preparing our speeches for how we're gonna ask for more money."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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