Game of Thrones: Battle of the Horses

Our Boys

Unfiltered spoilers for Game of Thrones follows

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, henceforth affectionally referred to as 'the boys,' follow a journey as old as time through their filmmaking.

A rags to riches story, with a cautionary tale attached. You see, they started off as the underdogs, adapting a monolithic, intricate piece of artwork for a medium it was perhaps not best suited for.

After passing George R. R. Martin's 'test' to justify themselves as the helmsmen to the adaptation of his work - a test it seemed about 90% of the fan community could have passed - the boys found themselves with the impossible task of adapting the confusing web of intrigue and mystery that is A Song of Ice and Fire.

Their initial shot at the pilot episode - the result of four years of work - was a disaster, and rejected immediately. Devastated, the boys must have been overjoyed when they were given one more chance. The pilot was reshot, recut, and released to massive fanfare.

It's an interesting example of authorial intent - the intent of the boys in their adaptation - isn't always the best way to move forward with a piece of artwork.

They were humbled from this experience, though, and commented often in interviews around this time regarding how carefully they treat the adaptation. You could tell, should you pay attention to their comments around this time, how much love and care was put into the show, from all parties involved.

That love produced three of the best seasons television has ever seen. True works of art, that only grew more interesting, enjoyable, shocking and intricate as they went on.

It culminated with The Red Wedding. A narrative device so unexpected in how it disregards conventional rules of writing that it should have been impossible to shoot that scene and continue the show for five additional seasons. The boys pulled it off as if they had written the twist themselves.

In retrospect, perhaps the task was impossible.

Depending on who you talk to, the quality of the show went down from there. Either drastically, or as a slow burn. The boys had clearly gained an ego, and they let it get to their heads.

More and more content was cut or changed from the source material, and as the plot went off-book, so did the characters. Without the expertly crafted motivations of George R. R. Martin to keep them going, the plot rapidly descended into nonsense, and, well, we all know how it ended.

We're not here to discuss the ending, though. That's a bit beyond my scope. Now that I've laid out the overall arch of our beloved boys, let's look deeper into one of the many stumbling blocks they faced along the way.

The Battle of the Bastards

Miguel Sapochnik is a highly talented director who had been no stranger to directing Game of Thrones episodes in the past. Still, he had big shoes to fill in the way of bringing home an excellent cinematic episode to cap off the season.

Battle of the Bastards was the climatic conclusion to multiple plot threads spanning back to the first season. While the foundation to the battle may have been a bit uneven, no one can deny that Sapochnik delivered a highly satisfying, highly brutal episode that made just about everyone feel a bit uneasy.

The episode brought, to the television screen, a colossal battle between armies of thousands. Arrows flying, men grappling, horses charging - it was a blockbuster performance, never before seen on a television budget.

It was anything but easy, though. The logistics of putting something like the battle together is, as you can imagine, a nightmare.

Movies and cinema typically have larger budgets and more flexible filming schedules, which is a factor I imagine the boys didn't consider when they were spitballing to each other ideas influenced by other big media fantasy battles.

The rough script they were putting together accounted for very little. In their heads, they imagined their nightmare of an idea would take about 12 days.

They even pitched their initial ideas to Sapochnik, who actually did some research. He came up with about 28 days of filming, accounting for budgetary and schedule restraints. They couldn't take forever filming this one episode, after all.

When D&D submitted their first official draft, the logistics of pulling it off was so complex that Sapochnik was shocked to find it would take 42 days.

What was going to take so long? I mean, for all the challenges of bringing a huge-scale medieval fantasy battle to the television screen, they had a lot of it checked off already. They had the people. They had the money. What was the hold up?

I'll tell you - it was horses.

Game of Horses

Okay. Let's get into this bag of worms. Lets find out what this is really about.

The boys, our precious boys, were on an obvious high from nailing The Red Wedding all the way back in the third season. They had pulled off a television first, and they were determined to pull of another. (Little did they know they absolutely would - just not the kind they were hoping for.)

Their major accomplishment with this one would be - drumroll please - pulling off a massive cavalry charge, with 70, that's right, seventy, live horses.

Well, that would certainly be a television first. Also an ethical and logistical nightmare, but, a first for sure.

So it turns out our boys were most inspired by Akira Kurosawa's epic samurai film 'Ran.' Said film features a notably impressive cavalry charge. It was a triumph of cinema. I suppose the boys were hoping it would be their triumph in television as well.

The fixation on this aspect of the film, of their use of live horses for a realistic feel, would almost prove to be the downfall of the entire project.

See, if they had taken inspiration from a more contemporary film, lets say, Mel Gibson's 'Braveheart', they might have set their expectations a little more realistically. Braveheart came out in 1995, when animal rights groups had made a little more progress than in 1985, when Ran was released.

So that's all to say - it's blatantly obvious that horses and other stunt animals are dying on film. Every trip, stumble, every action shot, a horse is probably getting injured or killed. We've left that time behind us now, but it means that the practicality of recreating a scene from such an old movie is several times more difficult, especially when you're a television show trying to imitate a film.

Sapochnik speaks of the moment he watched their influence, and how he immediately scrutinized the footage. To paraphrase his response - 'you can't get away with that nowadays.'

To reference my Braveheart example once more, that film that to take liberal use of well-trained stunt horses, set up elaborate safety pitfalls for the horses, and use clever editing to hide the fact that the horses were never actually charging at other horses.

That all takes lots, and lots, of time. Time that Sapochnik wasn't afforded.

A curious thought might arise from reading this context: is there perhaps some cinematic benefit to filming with live horses over CGI? Computer generated animals can look shoddy at the best of times.

The answer to that curiosity, is, no. At least, no cinematic benefit that can outweigh the stress and suffering of the creatures involved.

Anxiety and uncomfortable conditions are the least of the concerns for the horse - when the charge begins, there's a chance of collision, of tripping, of becoming maimed or injured.

Don't misunderstand me, I can absolutely understand that the complexities of certain media might call for live horses to be filmed, and the life of a film horse is no doubt more fulfilling and safe than the life of a race horse.

This is a complexity that I do not believe applies to a filmed cavalry charge, where consistent motion and clever camerawork can hide the imperfections of any computer generated image.

Still, our boys went ahead with utilizing 70 live horses. These horses could not actually be filmed charging directly at a human being or object, so the most brutal and intimate shots are done using mechanical sleds.

Mechanical sleds take time to set up.

Horses are, lovely as they are, rather unintelligent creatures. They can perform, but they need to be trained. Not in a general sense either, like you can train the horse to do a specific action and have it repeat that action across different sets. No, horses need to be trained on-location, tailored to the specific actors and props being used.

That takes time.

Then you factor in horses as actual actors. They don't understand takes. They can't perform the same actions consistently. Their feet mess up the fake snow littering the ground and the snow needs to be reapplied. They defecate on set, even audibly farting and interrupting good takes.

Dealing with all that definitely takes time.

Well, how much time did they end up having?

28 days.

It was an impossible task. Horses typically require 6 weeks to acclimate to an environment and perform for the camera. A talented director could pull it off, but the problems were compounded.

The boys had another simple request to add to the feel of the episode - film the scenes chronologically. The reason for this was so that the lead actors could look appropriately weathered and tired by the time the episode draws to an end.

Now that's a tall order. Condensing all that preparation into just under a month, and shooting the entire sequence in order? You better hope that your incredibly packed schedule goes well and that you don't need to refilm anything at the end, because you'll be out of luck by the time you actually get everything filmed.

Well...

Rain on the Parade

Rain days! Our boys didn't account for rain, and Sapochnik couldn't account for it. It would have been handy to have a couple of days at the end for any reshoots, but the schedule was so packed as it was that they weren't even done filming by the time it started raining.

Yes, the last three days of filming were met with light showers. Infrequent, and able to be filmed through - but utterly disastrous for the intended script.

The original ending to the episode may never be known now, because the entire sequence was ruined. The mud prevented the horses from moving safely, and the fake snow was ruined. Whatever our boys had intended to shoot - whatever Sapochnik had labored to put together - was now impossible.

Sapochnik wrote up a long e-mail to the boys, dreading their response when they discovered he had failed to live up to the task. Sapochnik had spent the day shooting some filler shots. The mud gave the impression of blood-soaked ground, and the actors tumbled over one-another in mass to emulate a chaotic battle.

That's right. The most impactful scenes of the episode were shot on a whim. Something to kill time. Something for the actors to do.

The 'crush pile' horrifically featured in the episode was an invention of Sapochnik. A way to bridge the practical scenes into the CGI horse charge that would follow.

There's something bittersweet about this outcome. What stuck with audiences the most wasn't an impressive horse charge featuring living horses. It was the unfortunate circumstances that followed that crafted one of the best moments on television.

The horses ended up being nothing more than a vanity project for the boys - the truly monumental achievement here wasn't the horses, it was that Sapochnik managed to make something epic, climatic and horrible, all at the same time, while dealing with 70 pooping, farting horses.

The authorial intent here - the directive from the boys themselves - was a disaster. If it had been executed as intended, would Battle of the Bastards be as renowned as it currently is? Perhaps you could call the whole thing a happy accident that lead to a challenging situation, that Sapochnik overcame in spades. At the end of the day, we got an amazing episode - isn't that what counts?

Well, again, I pose the question, what if the episode had been executed as intended? Moreover, what if the boys had gotten seemingly infinite time to train and use their vanity horses. Would the episode be lesser because of it? Would we watch horses do impressive things for 50 minutes?

Most importantly, and to flip the script - what if the authorial intent of two, ego-minded boys wasn't ever considered? Sapochnik pulled off great things, but so did the film crew, the prop artists, the actors themselves. Did they not pour infinitely more effort and talent into their project that the boys who managed to pass George R. R. Martin's test?

This whole ordeal is just an example, a reinforcement, of the idea that big-budgeted projects like film and television have so many different people working on it, that maybe 'leading' figures like 'producers' are irrelevant. Maybe not even irrelevant, but detrimental to the health of the art at hand.

Our boys went on to finish their journey and produce a truly unforgettable finale. From underdogs to top dogs. They'll certainly always be remembered - but maybe not as gracefully as they would have hoped.

More could be said about the rest of the show. Just commenting on the finale makes me feel like I'm beating a maimed stage horse. Still, it makes you wonder -

Was the finale so bad because they wanted real dragons?