After three seasons,
Game of Thrones has firmly established the penultimate episode of each season as
the one to watch, and that tradition will continue in season four as director Neil Marshall (
Dog Soldiers,
The Descent) returns for his second episode after season two's action-packed 'Blackwater'. We've already heard a
few comments from Marshall about his next episode episode, during which he promised "a bit of drama and tragedy", and now he's offered a more detailed insight into what we can expect during an interview with
IFTN.
"What I can say is that it’s a huge episode - a huge production. As far as I know the episode hasn’t been named yet but someone online suggested it might be called ‘Castle Black’ but all I know is that it’s called episode nine! It’s kind of the same as ‘Blackwater’, in a sense, in that these episodes are bigger than most of my films! They’re on the same scale as something like ‘Centurion’, if not bigger. We have huge sets that they build - in the case of ‘Blackwater’ it was a section of King's Landing. For this episode we didn’t have to build Castle Black, we already had it. But it’s an amazing set. They built another inside the Paint Hall for the top of the Wall, and that was so big it took up the entire studio. We got a special backdrop made for it and one of the things about Paint Hall that makes it quite unique is that it’s much taller than most film studios. The backdrop went around almost 360 degrees and it turned out that it’s the biggest backdrop in Europe. The outside stuff for the battle was shot at the Castle Black set, which is built on the side of a huge quarry North of Belfast. We had about 200 hundred or so extras. We also had a very large team of stuntmen including this amazing bunch of Hungarian stunt guys, and they were absolutely fantastic! Really great. This episode is loaded with stunts, effects gags and visual effects. It’s a very, very action-packed episode!
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"There are a few beheadings in there, as is my wont! And yeah, we got to blow some people up, set people on fire and do quite a few high falls. There’s a lot of very physical action and a lot of fighting - sword fights and physical fights. We pack quite a lot of stuff in there... In a weird way, ‘Blackwater’, despite its scale, was kind of simpler than my fourth season episode. It was kind of linear in that we started on the ships and then we went to the beach landing, the battle on the beach and the castle assault. It was like moving the army from place to place, but the Castle Black episode has three different battles going on at the same time in different places. So it’s a bit more complex from that point of view. But ‘Blackwater’ was a challenge in many respects. Some of the prep was in place already, so I wasn’t starting from scratch a week before the shoot. Obviously the sets were already well on the way. When I came in, I restructured the battle more than anything and made logical sense of that and the strategy of it all. I brought in things like siege ladders and designed this kind of boat that turns upside down and becomes like a shell for the men storming the castle. That wasn’t included in the script but I brought that to the table. And I certainly think that my coming in late did give it an impetus. It gave it a certain speed, even with only a week’s prep. By the end of that week, myself and the director of photography were itching to start shooting it! Whereas with the Castle Black episode, there are a lot more visual effects involved which take a lot more time to prepare. We had a good four weeks to prep for this one, which is like feature film time. My DOP this time was a fantastic guy named David Franco, who worked on a lot of episodes of ‘Boardwalk Empire’. He was a real pleasure to work with."
Game of Thrones returns to HBO for its fourth season in the Spring.
