“I tried to imagine what would be coming; in my wildest dreams it was a battle between a live dragon and a dead dragon,” admits “Game of Thrones” sound designer Paula Fairfield about her expectation for the final season of the Emmy winning show. She continues, “I did not imagine an air fight between all three. That was insane.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
That three-way dragon battle took place in “The Long Night” episode, for which she’s nominated for an Emmy for Best Sound Editing (One-Hour Series). The episode centers on a monumental battle between human forces at Winterfell and the Night King’s army of the undead. It is the biggest battle ever filmed for the medium and the episode runs 80 minutes. Including Fairfield, it has been nominated for nine Emmys.
In putting the episode together Fairfield explains, “The White Walkers created this storm which thwarted human efforts to help one another. With this sense of being lost in the darkness, the viewer had to rely on sonic elements. Sometimes you literally could not see anything, which seemed to make a lot of people very uncomfortable. But if you were in that battle that was part of it. It was the disorientation. It was the night. It was the way the White Walkers were using the forces of nature to beat everybody down.”
She adds, “One of my favorite sequences in ‘The Long Night’ is one of the quietest. The dragons come above the clouds and all you hear is light wind and the flapping of wings, before they dive back down. Those moments were so gorgeous. We go from really delicate beauty to crazy raging power. This is how the dragons were. In the It culminated with Drogon’s scream and tender carrying of Dany at the end of the series. It was a huge ride this season.”
Fairfield, who joined “Thrones” in its third season, now has six Emmy nominations for the show and ten overall. She won an Emmy in 2015 for her work on the show’s fifth season episode “Hardhome.” Looking back at her time on “GOT” she reveals, “I was going through some deep personal trauma when I started. Several of my family members had passed away of cancer very close to one another, my sister in particular. I was in such deep pain I had nowhere else to put it. I discovered the power of being vulnerable and emotional in the work. The final season was about laying it all on the table. And it culminated in Drogon’s screech to the sky and his burning of the throne. For my journey it was fabulous closure. It broke my heart. I remember cutting the last wings of Drogon as he flew off and going ‘that’s it, never again.’”
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