Game of Thrones Showrunners Had To Beg HBO To Do This Epic Battle
Game of Thrones was, at one point, considered to be the pinnacle of fantasy shows in terms of its special effects, costumes, sets and overall spectacle. But that point was not reached at once.
Early on, the crew struggled with portrayal of the more grandiose scenes from George Martin 's books, and had to fill as much time as possible with sequences of a few characters talking or with fights between handfuls of men.
Any attempt to film, say, a big battle, encountered difficulties. Back then, it was uncommon for TV series to try approaching feature-length movies in visual quality and spectacle.
For example, as showrunners David Benioff and D.B Weiss admit in their book, excerpts from which recently appeared on the web, filming the Battle of Blackwater in the second season of the show was a real challenge, even though the scale of action was scaled down drastically from what it was on the pages of A Clash of Kings (George Martin himself wrote the script for the Blackwater episode, and he did his best to preserve the key points, but much had to be sacrificed).
It required begging Mike Lombardo, HBO programming president at the time, for more money.
"Weiss: We were nervous, really nervous, going into the second season, about that episode. There was talk of turning Blackwater into a land battle, which would have been terrible.
Benioff: Or doing it off-screen.
Weiss: "M'lord, have you heard? They're at the bay!"
Benioff: We went down on bended knee: "Just this once. Please."
Weiss: We begged and pleaded with Mike Lombardo. We were negotiating. We had a big conversation about how many boats could we do." (via)
Even after Lombardo agreed to give them extra $2 million for this episode, difficulties did not end. Only after Neil Marshall, who had experience with filming action scenes on a limited budget, was appointed as the episode director, things started working out.
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In addition to limiting the scope of the battle, several more tricks were employed, such as setting it at night, as to hide any production errors and save money on special effects.
But the end result was sufficiently impressive, and sufficiently applauded by the audience that it became one of the reasons for allocation of bigger budgets to later seasons, which allowed Game of Thrones to eventually include more and grander battle scenes, involving armies in full view, dragons and hordes of undead.