The Game of Thrones producers have revealed they begged HBO bosses to let them film the Battle of Blackwater.
The iconic scene features in the second season and sees Stannis Baratheon try and take King’s Landing from King Joffrey Baratheon.
And while the showrunners David Benioff, and Dan Weiss did an amazing job to make the episode as grand and dark as possible – it turns out they had to get on their knees to the network bosses in order to bring the battle to life.
In an extract from James Hibberd’s upcoming book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, released by Vanity Fair, the duo discuss the episode and how they were ‘really nervous’ to approach it.
‘There was talk of turning Blackwater into a land battle, which would have been terrible,’ Weiss explained. ‘We begged and pleaded with Mike Lombardo [former HBO boss].
‘We were negotiating. We had a big conversation about how many boats could we do.’
Benioff pressed: ‘We went down on bended knee: “Just this once. Please.”’
After considerable back-and-fourth with Lombardo the publication explains how the two showrunners were granted an extra $2million (£1.5million) to bring the battle into fruition.
But that wasn’t enough in the eyes of the show’s creator George RR Martin, who said: ‘We had to scale down Blackwater considerably from the book.
‘They told me right at the start that the bridge of boats would be impossible.’
Filming the scene put an extra week onto their schedule, even though Martin was forced to rewrite the scripts in order to downsize the scale of production.
But while the scene wasn’t up to scratch in Martin’s mind, it turns out his least favourite part of the whole eight seasons actually happened in the first season, when King Robert Baratheon went hunting.
The writer explained how there should have been hundreds of men, pavilions, huntsmen, dogs, and even horns blowing – however, in reality, their budget only allowed for four men.
‘At that point, we couldn’t afford horses or dogs or pavilions,’ Martin confessed.
Game of Thrones is available to stream on NOW TV.
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