Natalia Lee has been working as an armorer and weapons expert on Game of Thrones since the very first season, and now finds herself at the end of a very long journey. “For me it was a masterclass of filmmaking,” she told Metro. “It is the best of the best. The hardest thing is that we have set a benchmark, and we are not going to top anything like this again in our careers.”
But before it’s all over, Lee and her team still have one more season to pull off. Can she give away anything about what’s to come? “All I can say is think big and multiply it by a billion.”
We know the storylines now. It is survival of the fittest. There’s only a few left standing. Anyone and everyone can die.
We’ll try and picture “big times a billion” as best we can.
Lee, an old hand at this, is careful not to reveal too much. “Indeed, she and her fellow crew members live in mortal fear of revealing spoilers. “I am so scared that a swat team is going to fly through the window,” she said. “I am really convinced that there is a branch of Homeland Security that is in charge of ‘Game Of Thrones’ leaks. I have no idea how they do it. It is crazy how they stop anything from being leaked in this day and age.”
Apart from specific spoilers, we know that filming on season 8 is taking longer than on any season before it. This makes sense, as each season has topped the last in terms of spectacle. Does that mean an increased workload for Lee? According to her, not really:
It feels like the same. We have a rhythm and a pattern when we pack up…It still took on the same length of time for us. Might just be editing and with CGI or something else like that that has taken longer. Realistically we still have a routine and worked all the way through.
In fact, Lee had the most difficulty early in the show’s run, before she and her crew “perfected how to produce tens of thousands of soldiers for battle and stuff like that.” In the early days, there was more of a mountain to climb. “You might have 5 or 10 different houses, and you had to visually differentiate between them, all from scratch, we had to build them up. Plus there was like 10 or 20 new characters, who all had to have something unique.”
But now, Lee sounds confident. “We have learnt how to do huge TV battles, and win Emmys, and make them bigger and bigger.” We’ll see all that pay off when season 8 drops next year.
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