(GRUNTING)

Episode three was... Oh, my God.

As a fan I thought, "Wow." As a DP, I thought, "Fuck." (CHUCKLES)

If you take Hardhome

and you take Bob, and to take the lake,

and you add them together, add a five-by-four,

you have episode three.

DUNCAN MUGGOCH: We had 11 weeks of night shooting,

so that was quite a feat for any crew to go through.

DAVID BENIOFF: We knew this episode was gonna be almost entirely battle.

It's well over an hour and it's mostly action.

And part of what we cared about a lot here

was getting Miguel on board

and forcing him to shoot 55 straight nights.

Look at it this way: I never ever want to do that again.

I don't think anybody who did that ever wants to do it again.

Yeah, that was tough.

And I don't think it was something

that anybody really realized just how hard it was gonna be.

EMILIA CLARKE: "The Long Night."

When I was doing it, it was minus 14.

Just chilling. Minus 14.

In a field.

You know, it's too cold to snow.

When it's too cold to snow, you know you got trouble.

BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: Chris and the rest of the team, they were there day in, day out.

We would start your evening at six o'clock at night,

and then you'd go home at five o'clock in the morning

and it just-- That's brutal.

Your body never acclimates to that 100 percent.

JACOB ANDERSON: By, like, week three, they...

people looked slightly haunted.

The cast, stunts, background, crew,

everybody just looked like, this is...

This is, like, getting into us. (CHUCKLES)

This is, like, getting into our spirits.

I-- I'm not gonna lie, it was horrible. (CHUCKLES)

We enjoyed the work and I said to my guys,

"You know, you might not want to do it again,

but you won't regret doing it the first time,

because the product, what you've achieved, is amazing."

CHRIS NEWMAN: I think the crew, they enjoyed the--

The result is, you know, you didn't do all this and think,

"That's not really impressive." There's no doubt about it.

It's really an impressive sequence.

And I think the nights are just one of the things we're gonna get through this.

It's just another notch in the belt

of the crew on Game of Thrones that they'd done things that feel quite unique.

MAISIE WILLIAMS: I'm proud of everyone.

I'm proud of the work that was put in.

I think it was a mammoth task that we were faced with.

And we did it, and it just feels incredible.

That first week after night shoots,

seeing the crew, like, smiling at the sun.

What they went through was pretty stunning,

and, look, it's not-- You know,

there's no special prize for being the toughest crew, but there probably should be.

D.B. WEISS: Working in the pitch dark in the rain, in the mud,

it's a real testament to the entire Belfast crew,

who... gave us something that no amount of money could ever buy.

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS) ♪

The task that we had, which was the primary task on three,

was how do we keep this interesting?

'Cause simply, battle fatigue, you know.

You just get bored, you get exhausted.

We really wanted to make sure we were telling

a coherent story with the whole thing and not just having...

battle-beat, battle-beat, battle-beat.

There needs to be a shape to it and a propulsion to it.

DAVE HILL: It became clear when we started planning it,

that the battle was gonna be a series of concentric circles.

It would be walls of defenses failing,

and the dead getting closer and closer to the center,

into the heart of Winterfell and taking over everything.

The way that I concepted episode three visually,

was to create a color scheme that developed throughout the whole episode.

So, it starts with a moonlit night...

because the Night King brings the storm and the clouds.

The moon becomes dissipated and the moonlight takes over,

but in a very diffused kind of way.

(SHOUTING)

And then the next stage would be the trench going up.

(INDISTINCT DIALOGUE)

We wanted the trench to be this overpowering light.

And in prep for a long time, Miguel always mentioned hell to me.

It's turning into Hell for each character.

So the blood-red fire of the trench takes over the image and...

completely drains out the blue of the moon until the end,

because the trench is dying down.

The moonlight suddenly gets introduced again.

So that was kind of the way for me to...

To break it up into sections.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: So, you have something that's visually different,

so it's refreshing in that respect.

But how do we take it one step further?

So, what we decided was to give each act a genre.

So, basically Act I is suspense and it's buildup.

And the best way to do buildup is--

In any sort of kinda monster movie,

which is what this is, is to not see the monster.

Act II is actually,

from the moment that Arya is on the back foot

and enters into the castle, that's the horror movie.

And then Act III is an action movie.

(GRUNTING)

And so, by breaking it into genres,

it allowed us to change rhythm and go off on tangents

when we followed specific characters

for a longer period of time rather than worried about

what was happening to everyone else.

NEWMAN: The core of it is the people you care about.

You wanna care about the people fighting,

so every effort is made to make sure that

you center that conflicts around the people you know.

BENIOFF: So, whether it's Arya's storyline,

or Sansa and Tyrion down in the crypt,

or Jon Snow and Dany up on the dragons,

it's kinda like all these separate little battles within the greater battle.

(YELLING)

(BREATHES HEAVILY)

(INDISTINCT DIALOGUE)

Light the trench! Light the trench!

Ah, fuck!

(CHUCKLES) Sorry, I'm really sorry.

♪ (UP-BEAT MUSIC PLAYS) ♪

BENIOFF: The living do have some time to prepare for this battle.

And one of the things they know going into it

is that they're gonna be outnumbered,

and another thing they know

is that the wights don't like fire.

So, they dig a massive trench around the entire castle, and fill it with kindling.

DEBORAH RILEY: To read the word "trench" on the page doesn't sound like anything,

but it took such a lot of work to try and resolve it to a point

that it was a convincing method of defense.

It was important that this trench

not be something that anybody could jump over.

So, we needed to construct these bridges

that would then collapse and create another barrier.

The trench had real wooden spikes,

real wooden logs lining throughout the trench.

Then the real logs were replaced by steel logs

that could burn over a number of weeks

without burning away.

We had to accommodate a whole special effects rig.

So, the considerations are enormous.

Then, yeah, the trench sort of encompasses...

pretty much the whole of the castle.

As trenches go, it was a good trench. (LAUGHS)

And I've done some trenches. (CHUCKLES)

MAN: Light the trenches!

And then the reality of how do we light a...

nine-hundred foot-long thing full of bitumen,

with hundreds of people running at it

and stunt people in it.

Oh, I mean...

♪ (ROCK MUSIC PLAYS) ♪

So... (LAUGHS)

The complicated process of the trenches began

with the concept of it being a first line of defense.

Therefore, it had to be impressive, it had to be very big.

So, we had to devise a way we could produce a flame

which is big enough for the outside environment.

So we came up with a system,

which is just a simple water trough.

It makes the most economical flame out of propane.

And then, of course, you've got to think about the consumable part of it.

You can't have real logs in there, it has to be a steel thing.

It has to be able to endure the heat and the fire.

I think we did 900 steel logs, and we did 16 steel troughs.

And then you have to work out how you get that amount of gas to each trough.

We've got one four-ton tanker with a mobile unit,

which is five ton.

So, with the combination of the two,

we convert liquid into the gas,

and that's what gives us our gas of life.

We run it off an electronic

valve system that's tied in with a firing box.

And each one is ignited by an individual gas bank in a sequence.

It uses a lot of gas. A lot of gas.

-Got your gas bill yet? -Haven't got my gas bill. Dreading that one.

(BOTH LAUGH)

When you see the Red Priestess come out and light that trench,

that that would be such an extraordinary moment,

as it just... (BLOWS) ...lights around Winterfell.

In terms of imagery, I always thought that was such a fantastic thing.

So, you really were seeing for the first time the ice and fire meeting.

So, that was something that I thought was a really lovely image to establish.

-(FIRE ROARING) -(SNARLING)

(SNARLING)

WILLIAMS: I got a call from Miguel, like, a year before we started shooting.

Basically, he was like, "I can't tell you anything

but get your endurance up now, I want you to be training.

You have a lot to do. It's gonna be night shoots.

We're gonna do three months of night shoots."

And I was just like, "Okay!"

Like, I think I was in Boston at the time,

like, eating cheese fries, like, "Cool!" (CHUCKLES)

(YELLING)

(GRUNTING)

Her entire fight through the battlements

was just a real great moment,

and everything that I have learned really did come down to that

and I did use every sort of skill that I'd learned in that fight.

ROWLEY IRLAM: It's one thing to go on the battlements,

but then over the top of Winterfell,

you've got these two staircases that go up to the middle section of castellation.

So, we thought it would be really claustrophobic

and dark and scary to be in there with wights,

but that's when the full staff doesn't really work.

We all know these tunnels are very small

and the last thing you want is a five-and-a-half

or a six-foot quarter staff going through small, little alleyways.

So, what I decided to do on this one,

be able to cut it in half so it'd be able to disassemble

within the fight sequence, and then have two,

-so she could use both in each hand. -(GRUNTING)

Which is great, and it gave Arya then the stunts,

something else to play with and to train with.

Yeah, 'cause if I concentrate on doing the move,

one of them does it, and then the other one doesn't.

And it's like...

One of the incredible things about Maisie is that she's a righty.

Because Arya in the books is left-handed,

she decided she was gonna learn how to fight left-handed.

So, in season one, when she's training with Syrio Forel,

she's training with her left hand

and it was incredibly challenging, but what it does mean was that

she's learned how to fight left-handed and she's actually right-handed,

so she's become an ambidextrous fighter.

Maisie does almost all of this stuff on her own.

She has an excellent stuntwoman for the dangerous stuff,

but most of it is actually Maisie.