The Massacre at Hardhome. The Battle of Castle Black. The Battle of Blackwater Bay. These massive Game of Thrones fight scenes have been among the biggest in TV history. The sheer scale of them—from the number of extras, to the location, to the choreography, to keeping the CGI to a minimum—has rivaled many major big-budget Hollywood movies. You really only get one of these major scenes per season, but damn, when they come they're epic. And every single one has pushed the limits of TV production. Now, Game of Thrones creators say they have the biggest fight in the show's history—which would also likely mean the biggest fight in TV history—in store for season six.
"It's definitely the biggest [action sequence yet]," GoT writer-producer Bryan Cogman told Entertainment Weekly. "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."
This upcoming scene, according to Cogman, will be even closer to a Hollywood film, in that it will use hundreds of actual human soldiers facing off against another army of hundreds of human soldiers. He calls this highly tactical clash, which was directed by Miguel Sapochnik who was behind Hardhome, a "proper battle."
"We wondered, 'Why don't you see more fully fleshed-out battles in movies and TV?'" said showrunner Dan Weiss. "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."
