Game of Thrones Season Six Promises Biggest TV Battle Ever

Hit Show Sets Its Sights Even Higher

♦Game of Thrones Season 6 doesn’t start until 24 April but our friends over at Entertainment Weekly have news this week that the new season will feature the biggest battle ever staged on TV…

Game of Thrones is about to once again raise the bar for depicting battles on TV. For the HBO drama’s sixth season, the producers have filmed the show’s most epic battle sequence yet.

“It’s definitely the biggest [action sequence yet],” Thrones writer-producer Bryan Cogman told EW. “We’ve always wanted to get to a place – story-wise and budget-wise and time-wise and resource-wise – where we would be able to do a proper battle, with one army on one side, one army on another side.”

Previous major clashes on the Emmy-winning series arguably already set a new standard for television productions. It wasn’t that long ago that HBO’s Rome depicted battles by having characters describe what happened afterwards. And while Starz’s Spartacus had some wildly ambitious scenes, the series used a core group of fighters and stuntmen while filling the background with CGI. The previous benchmark was most likely set by HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, both of which staged some truly impressive wartime sequences.

On Thrones, the mandate is to keep computer effects to a minimum, using real actors on location with practical effects whenever possible. Previous battles have included an army in ships storming a castle (“Blackwater,” season 2), a group of men defending a wall and castle (The Battle of Castle Black, season 4) and an undead army swarming a seaside outpost (“Hardhome,” season 5). The upcoming sequence, however, is more like a classic campaign that you typically only see in major films: Hundreds of human soldiers on one side of a field, another army on the other side, and then there is a clash that is highly tactical, yet character-driven, and shown from start to finish – a “proper battle,” as Cogman put it.

“We wondered, ‘Why don’t you see more fully fleshed-out battles in movies and TV?’” said Dan Weiss, is a showrunner on the series along with David Benioff. “Then you get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to actually shoot these things in a way that isn’t just helter-skelter chaos but actually gives you a sense of battle geography and the ebb and flow, and you realize why.”

The sequence is in an episode directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who won widespread praise last season for staging “Hardhome.” Shooting the battle took about a month of principal photography. “Miguel did such a fantastic job with ‘Hardhome’ we thought we should bring him back – this time with horses,” Benioff said. “Horses are not easy, at all. And certainly in terms of numbers – number of extras, number of stuntmen, number of shooting days – it’s the biggest we’ve done.”

On Monday, Benioff and Weiss revealed they believe season 6 will rank as the show’s best season.

www.ew.com

Game of Thrones – Season 1-4 [DVD] [2015]