Game of Thrones Director on the Fate of Those at the Wall

"The Dragon and the Wolf" director Jeremy Podeswa breaks down the filming of the epic wall catastrophe and gives us his take on Tormund and Beric.

By Matt Fowler

Warning: Spoilers for the Game of Thrones: Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf."

There were many massive and memorable moments contained within Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale - from the reveal of Jon Snow's birthright to the unceremonious execution of Littlefinger - but it was the final sequence that left fans wondering just how quickly the army of the undead would arrive on the doorstep of the Starks when Season 8 starts up.

The Night King flew Viserion into battle and leveled a huge chuck of the Wall, blasting it to bits and causing it to crash down, allowing for the dead to flow into the North. It was an epic sequence and one that might have spelled the end for the likes of Tormund and Beric, who were both last seen rather high up when everything came tumbling down. I asked director Jeremy Podeswa about their particular fates. We didn't see them actually die, so does that mean they're safe?

"I can honestly tell you that I don’t know," Podeswa said. "I’ve also chosen not to know. I’m sure Dan [Weiss, EP] and David [Benioff, EP] know and the other people working on the next season know, but we certainly wanted to keep it open by the end of the episode. Open to interpretation. We didn’t put a fine point on it about who survived and who didn’t. It certainly doesn’t look great for those who were on the Wall though."

Podeswa did offer up some insight however as to how the entire complex Wall smashing sequence came about, stating that "it was a very big undertaking just in terms of the conception."

"The script gave a certain amount of detail in terms of what we see," he added, "and then my discussions with Dan and David illuminated it even further, but a large part it was me sitting down with a storyboard artist and trying to determine how to best represent this epic event. We’d think about what to focus on and which angles would create the most drama and tension and how to convey such a huge moment. It was weeks and weeks, month maybe, of conceptualizing and drawing and figuring out, and then working with the visual effects department in terms of creating animatics."

"The execution is the next thing," Podeswa continued. "Once you decide what’s going to be visual effects and what’s going to be practical and how to achieve everything, it becomes another thing. One thing that was very helpful too is that the VFX department has concept artists too and they work from the script and create paintings that are reflective of tone and mood of what the sequence should be. When you have a very effects-heavy sequence like that, they’ll do a series of about 10 paintings that contain elements of the sequence and they were very helpful in terms of what the sequence should feel like."

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/2aJ67FB.

Let's block ads! (Why?)