CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Longest Night
Winterfell’s courtyard was covered with snow, dirt, and blood. Wood logs burned in fire pits, throwing off heat and smoke. Stiff corpses bearing all manner of gruesome mortal injuries lay in crumpled piles. From the castle walls, the Stark banners hung limply.

I mounted the slippery stairs and walked along the castle’s creaking ramparts, passing through cramped battlements. Near the top of the main gate, there were gaps in the parapet wall offering a dizzying view of the battlefield stretched out below. On the field were hulking trebuchets, deep trenches lined with wood stakes, and hundreds of uniformed men preparing to fight. My breath was icy. The freezing rain had begun again. Somewhere an assistant director yelled for extras to reset on their marks: “This is not a tea party, c’mon!”

Ser Davos walked past. “I signed up for a character piece,” he sighed.

During the first season of Game of Thrones, a Winterfell set was constructed in the middle of a sheep field. The castle was impressive, but in 2017, the production rebuilt it at nearly three times its original size for the final season and the great battle between the living and the dead. You could now wander in any direction on the grounds and maintain the illusion that you were at the Stark home. It was the ultimate medieval fantasy playground, young George R. R. Martin’s turtle castle brought to life.

DEBORAH RILEY (production designer): Part of expanding Winterfell was being able to show spaces that had never been shown before. We never understood where the food came from, where the beer came from, where the bread came from—all of those back-of-the-house activities. I was actually able to understand it more as a living, breathing castle.

But had anybody understood in season one where the show would be heading, Winterfell would have been put in a different spot and not a boggy sheep farm. Just making it so soldiers could run back and forth, let alone bringing in machinery, without being knee-deep in mud, was a huge ordeal.

Closer to Belfast, there was another enormous Thrones set that reconstructed several streets in the Old Town of Dubrovnik. That was built for the other final-season battle, the one set in King’s Landing, and it was impressive in a different way—a mini-maze of cobblestone streets that looked precisely like their Croatian counterparts. It was necessary to make a meticulous copy of an existing city because, as showrunner Dan Weiss pointed out, “we cannot blow up Dubrovnik.”

The showrunners had long imagined these two battles for the show’s final season: one war against the dead, and another where the survivors turned on each other. Both were unthinkable on the show’s previous budget and schedule. The production also spent nine months filming six episodes instead of the six months they normally took to shoot ten episodes. To put that in context, principal photography on most Hollywood films typically takes around three or four months.

When you factored in the amount of time the Thrones team spent filming the final season, the intensity of staging the action scenes, the global pressure to deliver a satisfying ending, and the show’s brutal outdoor working conditions, the obstacles faced by the show’s cast and crew during season eight were, as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau put it, “unheard of.”

“A scene that would have been a one-day shoot two years ago was a five-day shoot,” Kit Harington said. “They wanted to get it right. They wanted to shoot it every single way so they had options. And because it was the finale, after eight seasons most scenes are emotional. Consistently having to have your emotions that high, it became fucking exhausting.”

The production’s biggest challenge—not just for season eight, but throughout the entire show—was the episode titled “The Long Night.” The threat of the White Walkers had been teased since the pilot’s opening scene. Everybody working on Thrones knew the Winterfell battle had to pay off years of anticipation.

DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): We’ve been building toward this since the very beginning, and it’s the living against the dead, and you couldn’t do that in a twelve-minute sequence.

DAN WEISS (showrunner): The idea from the beginning was there were all of these squabbles going on that seemed so important and global and earth-shattering and were happening against the backdrop of much larger and more momentous events that very few—people who lived on the fringes of the political world—knew about. It always was the overarching structure of the series that these things in the far east and far north would come together and decide the fate of everybody in the middle.

Typical battle episodes on Thrones would contain about fifteen minutes or so of calm-before-the-storm discussion scenes before all hell broke loose. In season eight, the writers devoted an entire episode to the characters’ preparing for battle, Bryan Cogman’s playlike “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (we’ll discuss some of the major moments from that episode later). That way, “The Long Night” could hit the ground running with arguably the longest consecutive battle sequence ever filmed—an eighty-two-minute episode consisting entirely of various types of action sequences (by comparison, the famed Omaha Beach assault that opened Saving Private Ryan was twenty-seven minutes, and the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers was forty minutes). To lead the project, producers brought back “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards” veteran Miguel Sapochnik.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK (director): There was a bit of trepidation because there was now this expectation that you have to beat yourself, which I loathe.

DAVID BENIOFF: Having the largest battle doesn’t sound very exciting. It sounds pretty boring. Part of our challenge—and really Miguel’s challenge—was how to keep that compelling. If it’s just humans hacking and slashing at wights for fifty-five minutes, it was going to quickly become dull.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: At some point you exhaust an audience. I watched The Two Towers, and it’s actually three different battles in three different places intercut. I was trying to get a sense of when do you tire out. It felt like the only way to really approach that stuff properly was to take every sequence and ask yourself: “Why, as an audience member, would I care to keep watching?”

The battle’s not-so-secret weapon was the show’s ensemble of beloved characters. The team figured if the episode focused on fan favorites having different kinds of battle adventures, then a variety of character-driven stories would pull the audience through all the requisite hack-and-slash.

DAN WEISS: The action is driven by character, not by how many swords and spears you can swing around. We’ve been lucky enough we’ve had seventy-plus hours of showing who everybody is. There were so many individual stories you bring to that situation.

DAVE HILL (co-producer): Most battles are the last fifteen minutes of a movie for a reason. People lose interest. So we’d have a big field battle. Then we’d have Arya in a haunted-house sequence in the library. We’d have Tyrion and Sansa in the crypt, which would become like a horror movie. We have Dany and Jon on the dragons. Each story had different textures so it wouldn’t just be the same thing.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: The process of whittling down the script took a lot longer this time because David and Dan wanted to keep everything. We all wanted everything but were up against the reality of what we could achieve. And one of the things I found interesting was the less action—the less fighting—you can have in a sequence, the better. And we switched genres from suspense to horror to action to drama, and that way we’re not stuck in killing upon killing, because everybody gets desensitized and it doesn’t mean anything.

The original production plan for “The Long Night” was to break up filming into small segments, which would require fewer cast and crew members to be on the set at any given time. But that would make the filmmaking heavily structured and limit Sapochnik’s ability to improvise or to have as many shots that included large groups of cast members. As Sapochnik had learned on “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards,” nothing ever goes precisely according to plan—especially when filming outdoors in hostile weather—so it was essential that he could quickly pivot in response to changing circumstances.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: We built this massive new part of Winterfell and thought, “We’ll film this part here and this there,” and basically broke it into so many pieces it would be like a Marvel movie, with never any flow or improvisation. Even on Star Wars, they build certain parts of the set and then add huge elements of green screen. Everything would be broken into little morsels to be put back together. And that makes sense. There’s an efficiency to that. But there’s something that you lose when doing it that way, and you lose the spontaneity of being able to move the camera anywhere. And I was walking around the set thinking, “This is really cool, I can walk around and find angles I would never have found beforehand.”

So Sapochnik suggested an alternative schedule that would include eleven weeks of consecutive night shoots.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I turned to producers and said, “I know it’s shitty and going to be cold. I don’t want to do eleven weeks of night shoots, and no one else does. But if we continue the way we’re going, we’re going to lose what makes Game of Thrones cool—that it feels real, even though it’s supernatural and we have dragons.”

Thrones had filmed plenty of nighttime action sequences over the years, but the rain-drenched battles for the Battle of the Blackwater and the Battle of Castle Black had taken about three weeks each. To the producers’ knowledge, no movie or show had ever attempted a filming schedule like this before.

LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth): They brought us into a tent and broke the news to us. They ran through the episode’s pre-viz—a slightly animated storyboard in visual form. We saw this extraordinary series of images. Miguel was saying we’re going to do this over fifty-five nights, and there was a lot of people looking at each other. There were those of us who were on “Battle of the Bastards,” which was less than half of what this was attempting, and during the day. I immediately thought, “Fucking hell. This is a nightmare. It’s like a deliberate attempt to fuck the whole thing up.” On paper, it’s madness. But they wanted everybody to be aware of the shit they would put us in so nobody could say they didn’t know.

DAVE HILL: Miguel sent out an email to all the cast: “Please get on a night schedule ahead of time, because you’re going to be so tired and wet and cold you need to give yourself every advantage you can.”

GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth): I requested a meeting with Miguel. It was very important to me that we saw Jaime and Brienne’s relationship expressed throughout the battle. That what we should see is this relationship has been going on and building for a long time, and they’re in a rare situation where they can completely trust and depend on each other. You take that complicated and solid relationship and take that into brutal, mind-blowing, apocalyptic war. Does it break them apart or force them closer together?

MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): I had skipped the battle every year, which is bizarre since Arya’s the one who’s been training the most. Then Miguel called me a year before and said: “Start training now, because it’s going to be really hard.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah . . .”

The episode would include the death of several characters, such as Theon Greyjoy, who finally had a selfless and heroic moment when trying to protect Bran from the Night King. . . .

BRYAN COGMAN: It was difficult for Alfie because there was a degree of physical stunt work and effects and things that were out of his control. And for him to have to play his final moments amidst all that chaos and craziness was tremendously challenging for him. I remember the night we shot it, and it was just one of those things you had to do in addition to a bunch of other things. It’s only when it came together and you see beautiful subtlety and anguish in his performance, but also that kind of catharsis that Theon’s finally at peace going out protecting Bran. For all the talk of redemption arcs, fulfilled or not, his was certainly fulfilled.

 . . . and Jorah Mormont, who died protecting Daenerys from the Army of the Dead.

IAIN GLEN (Jorah Mormont): You either conclude as a character, or you get to the end of the whole thing and people try to project forward of what’s the future of your character that you’ll never know. I was happy to conclude. He would absolutely sacrifice his life for her to succeed. In a way, he was given the conclusion he wanted.

DAVE HILL: For a long time we wanted Ser Jorah there at the Wall in the very end—the three coming out of the tunnel [in the series finale] were to be Jon, Jorah, and Tormund. But the amount of logic we’d have had to bend to get Jorah up to the Wall and get him to leave Dany’s side right before [her tragic turn]—there’s no way to do that blithely, and Jorah should have the noble death he craved defending the woman he loves.

Another casualty was young Lyanna Mormont. Actress Bella Ramsey was originally only cast for a single episode in season six, but she was such a ferocious scene stealer, the showrunners kept bringing her back. (Ramsey’s favorite of her character’s feisty lines: “I don’t care if he is a bastard, Ned Stark’s blood runs through his veins!”)

BRYAN COGMAN: Bella’s first scene could’ve been a disaster. It could have easily ended up on the cutting-room floor if some cute kid actor came in. But she was utterly credible. And at one point Kit blew a line and she fed it to him because she had memorized every line in the scene.

MARK MYLOD (director): Kit was all, “I wished I’d learned my lines better. I’m being shown up!” It was one of those times when you called “cut” and there was a spontaneous round of applause.

In “The Long Night,” Lyanna faced off against a zombie giant. She was crushed in his fist, yet still managed to take him down by stabbing him in the eye.

BELLA RAMSEY (Lyanna Mormont): There was one thing Miguel said to me that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I wasn’t sure if she would be really scared or just a slight bit of scared. We tried it several ways. He said, “It’s like someone removed her fear gene.” And that was a really great bit of direction. Her story maybe had the potential to grow, but she was going to go at some point because everyone does, and the way she went was the best way she could have. I wanted to either end up on the Iron Throne or have a really good death. So I’m happy.

Melisandre perished as well. The Red Woman returned to help defeat the forces of darkness, then stripped off her necklace granting eternal youth and walked into the sunrise, her body decomposing, to join the piles of dead.

CARICE VAN HOUTEN (Melisandre): She saved the day, so she’s a bit of a hero in the end, which is cool, because for a long time she was hated. In a very bombastic orchestra piece, I was happy to be the soft piano notes at the end. We finally know what she came for, and it’s the end of her journey—I can go now, my work’s done. I tried to play it with tiredness but with relief.

Sometimes a character’s last line, even a simple one, can be the toughest to say. Once you speak those words, you will never again play a role that you’ve lived for so many years.

CARICE VAN HOUTEN: I wasn’t able to nail my last sentence. I say to Liam: “You don’t have to kill me because I’ll be dead before dawn.” I got a bit cranky. I feel like I’d done sixty takes of that line. I couldn’t nail it. I don’t know why.

Perhaps most crucially, the Night King also fell. Arya dispatched the White Walker leader with her Valyrian-steel dagger, which was introduced in the show’s first season when an assassin used it to attack Bran Stark. The dagger passed to Catelyn, then to Littlefinger, then to Bran, and then to Arya (who also used it to kill Littlefinger in season seven). Given that the Night King is not in Martin’s books, the manner of his death was a major climactic decision that was left to the showrunners. They initially considered several hero candidates to take out the story’s biggest villain.

DAVID BENIOFF: It had to be somebody with believable access to Valyrian steel. We didn’t want it to be Jon because he’s always saving the day. We talked about the Hound at one point, but we wanted his big thing to be Clegane Bowl. Ultimately it wouldn’t have felt right if it was Jon or Brienne or the Hound.

DAN WEISS: Then we put in Sam’s book from the Citadel how dragonglass had found its way into the design of implements when people didn’t even know what they were working with, and there’s a picture of Arya’s dagger.

DAVID BENIOFF: That dagger had been set up from the very beginning, and we knew Arya was going to get it at the end of season seven to kill Littlefinger. It had to be Arya. It goes back to the whole “not today” thing.

DAN WEISS: “What do you say to the god of death?” Well, the Night King is the closest embodiment of the god of death.

There was also a prescient line uttered by Arya in season two: “Anyone can be killed.”

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I was going to have this sequence before she kills him showing each character in the story fighting their way to the final moment. I was going to shoot it so that we begin to intercut between them and they all begin to become the same character. I was interested in the idea they’re all the children of these kings who are all fated to become this role—including the Night King. He’s the product of something that went wrong with the Children of the Forest. It would culminate with all the characters having the same composition. But we cut that.

Once we pared it back, I thought, “Hmm, if I see Arya running I know she’s going to do something.” So it was about almost losing her from the story and then have her as a surprise. We’re pinning all our hopes on Jon being the guy going to do it, because he’s always the guy. So we make him a continuous shot. I want the audience to think: “Jon’s gonna do it, Jon’s gonna do it . . . ,” and then he fails. He fails at the very last minute.

DAN WEISS: We wanted to show there were overwhelming numbers and how nobody through sheer hack-and-slash could do it. The obstacle between them and the Night King was insurmountable—unless you had something magical going for you on your side, which Arya did. She’s a person the Night King wouldn’t be thinking about, and ideally the audience wouldn’t be thinking about her at the moment either.

MAISIE WILLIAMS: It was so unbelievably exciting. But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it and that she doesn’t deserve it. I told my boyfriend, and he was like, “Mmm, should be Jon though, really, shouldn’t it?” And that didn’t give me a lot of confidence. The hardest thing is in any series you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. Some hundred-pound girl comes in and stabs him. It has to be intelligently done.

Williams’s perception of the twist changed after she shot her scene with van Houten in which Melisandre reminded Arya what she told her in season three: “I see a darkness in you. And in that darkness, eyes staring back at me. Brown eyes. Blue eyes. Green eyes. Eyes you’ll shut forever. We will meet again.” The scene suggested Arya was fated to destroy the Night King, though the order of the eye colors was changed to conclude with “blue eyes” when Melisandre repeated the line.

CARICE VAN HOUTEN: I felt like that guy in the movie who gives the main character one last push to do it, like in a football game.

MAISIE WILLIAMS: We were shooting the bit with Melisandre, and she brings it back to everything Arya’s been working for over these past six seasons. It all comes down to this one very moment. So then I was like, “Fuck you, Jon, I get it.”

So Melisandre not only gave Arya the confidence to attack the Night King but also convinced Williams that her character could pull it off. Of course, whether Arya was truly destined to destroy the Night King or Melisandre simply encouraged the right person at the right time is—as with all prophecies on Thrones—left unclear. But thousands of years ago, the Children of the Forest created the demon by piercing a captive man in the heart with dragonglass, and the young Stark managed to stab him in roughly the same place. The Night King was unmade as he was made.

KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): I thought it was gonna be me! But I like it because it gives Arya’s training a purpose. It’s much better how she does it. It will frustrate some audience members that he’s hunting the Night King and you’re expecting this epic fight and it never happens, but that’s kind of Thrones.

ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT (Bran Stark): That moment before when Bran sees the Night King is about to attack him—my reading of that was that Bran should look at him with pity because he knows how this guy was created. He’s not a monster; he’s a weapon who’s gone badly wrong. He’s an innocent man with a piece of glass plunged in his heart. And we ended up playing it like that. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

There were also dragons and giants and Jon Snow’s direwolf, Ghost, in the battle as well. But the producers ruled out adding the fabled ice spiders that Old Nan had hauntingly described in season one when telling the legend of the Long Night.

DAN WEISS: “Big as hounds.” Didn’t we talk about that for thirty seconds? Sounds good. Looks good on a metal album cover. But once they start moving, what does an ice spider look like? Probably doesn’t look great.

Even with all of Sapochnik’s warnings, the episode’s schedule was far tougher than any of the cast or crew had anticipated. Filming started with two weeks of night shoots in December. Then there were a couple more weeks of scattered night shoots at the start of the year. Then came fifty-five night shoots in a row. And finally, there was about two months of daytime filming inside a studio.

Those fifty-five nights sandwiched in the middle of an already demanding schedule became like a real-life version of an eternal soul-crushing supernatural winter. The production had the added misfortune of getting slammed by two “polar vortex” storms, dubbed “the Beast from the East” in the press, as if White Walkers had literally arrived on the set. The storms brought extreme low temperatures with weather that local reports said felt as low as nineteen degrees Fahrenheit. “One night we were supposed to film Jorah defending Dany by a flaming trebuchet, and we had to call it off because it got so cold that the gas fire bars wouldn’t light,” Dave Hill recalled.

The cold blast combined with freezing rain, gusting wind, and an intensively physical and technical job that stretched from early evenings to the mornings. The Thrones crew prided themselves on being resilient, but the “The Long Night” very nearly broke them. The cast had to become actor-athletes, enduring week after week of physical endurance challenges while continuing to give their usual acclaimed performances.

IAIN GLEN: I don’t think people can comprehend what eleven weeks of continuous night shoots does to the human body and brain. It destroys your system and your thinking. We just had to get so wet and so dirty and so cold and do it again and again that it really was the hardest thing in all eight seasons for all departments. You kind of try and retain a gallows humor, but it was absolutely brutal.

In storytelling terms, it made sense because of who they were up against. But it was a real test. It completely fucked your body clock. You have no life outside it. On day shoots you’ll go have a meal in the evening and do a bit of something. On nights those down hours are removed. You get to sleep at seven in the morning and then you get up in the midday and can’t really do anything. It was the most unpleasant experience in all of Thrones.

JACOB ANDERSON (Grey Worm): Grey Worm doesn’t say much, so I had to put a lot of feeling and expression into how he fought. You’re trying to keep all the meaning in your face yet also remember the technical details—then do that twenty times.

JOE DEMPSIE (Gendry): Every night there was a tipping point around two A.M. where everybody started behaving a little bit weird.

GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE: It was utter madness. It’s the crew I felt for. They were the ones who were truly at the face of brutal suffering when it came to the relentlessness of the schedule.

RORY McCANN (Sandor “the Hound” Clegane): Everybody prays they never have to do that again. You could recognize crew members [during the day] who were on it because they looked gray.

LIAM CUNNINGHAM: It wasn’t an exercise in creativity. It was a lesson in discipline. Not getting tired, not getting bored—if you get bored you take your eye off the ball and you mess it up.

MAISIE WILLIAMS: Nothing could prepare you for how physically draining it was. It was night after night and again and again, and it just didn’t stop. And you can’t get sick. You have to look out for yourself because there’s so much to do that nobody else is going to. You get wet and then at four A.M. the wind comes and your leather outfit is soaking and you just have to keep going. It’s bizarre because when you see the movies it looks so glamorous. And there are times when it is. But there are times when it goes the other way so far that it’s not even recognizable as the same industry. There are moments you’re just broken as a human and just want to cry.

CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): It was just the unremitting nature of every day knowing that you’re going to be working in the cold until five in the morning. You’re fighting your brain and trying to take it one step at a time. The person you admire the most is the director, because he can’t take it one step at a time and default to simply doing his job. He’s the one building a jigsaw puzzle without the box to look at.

DAVE HILL: I don’t know how Miguel did it, because I was not sane, and I didn’t have to be fixing things every second of every day. You became a shell of a person.

IAIN GLEN: How Miguel managed to hold it together is beyond my comprehension.

RORY MCCANN: There are some directors who don’t speak much, and if you’re doing your job there are no words. Sometimes younger actors do a scene and there’s a feeling of “want” on their face: “Did I do good?” And some directors, there’s not a word from them, not even a nod. He’s not thinking about you, but his other fifty jobs.

But with Miguel, even when you think you’re not in a scene much, he’d go to every actor and go, “Do you know where you are?” You’re in the middle of a battle and he came up and went: “Why are you here?” Why am I here? . . . It gets you thinking. Then he’ll go to another actor and go: “What are you fighting for?” I’m fighting for life. I’m fighting for good.

JOHN BRADLEY (Samwell Tarly): Miguel was very keen on making us think about it in terms of our own narrative all the way through. “What is going on with your character when the camera is not on you? We may not have shown you for ten minutes, but something has happened to you in those ten minutes—you’ve been constantly fighting, or you’ve been running, or you’ve been hiding. How has your story through the fight developed? You have to hold it in your mind, what’s happened to you since we saw you last.” He’s got such a forensic sense of detail, the way he can hold the points of view of each of these characters in his head and know what each individual beat means to them.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: Stuff I’ve done previously was generally from Jon’s perspective. Here I had twenty-four cast members and everyone would like it to be their scene. So that was complicated, because I find the best battle sequences are when you have a strong point of view. Here the point of view was objective even when you made it subjective, going from one person’s story to another, because you’re cutting back and forth, so it all becomes objective whether you want it to or not. I kept thinking, “Whose story am I telling right now? And what restrictions does that place on me that become a good thing?”

At one point on set after the night shoots, Sapochnik was darting between supervising three different units filming at the same time: a scene capturing fire-trench action, another with Daenerys on her dragon rig, and still another of field battle action. Yet even Sapochnik, who also directed the final season’s fifth episode, “The Bells,” reached his limit.

BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): Miguel originally wanted to direct episodes three, four, and five. I said, “That’s crazy, we’re going to have a tough enough time having you do two episodes.” Then he kept yelling, “I was supposed to have a bigger break [between episodes]!” But all I remember was him saying, “I don’t want anybody else to do the other battle.”

DEBORAH RILEY: He was so exhausted. I was trying to get Miguel to focus on making decisions for “The Bells” while he was shooting “The Long Night” and he couldn’t.

The punishing delirium of making “The Long Night” was compounded by director David Nutter simultaneously shooting episode four, “The Last of the Starks,” which also used the Winterfell set. So the Thrones team wasn’t just working nights but running twenty-four hours a day, with many essential crew members tasked with servicing both day and night units. Some crew members were clocking up to forty thousand steps on their pedometers, walking roughly twenty miles every day.

DEBORAH RILEY: All you ever hear about is the crew shooting at night, but we were working on two episodes at once. For people like me, I had to service both. We would have to turn the whole set over to Miguel in the afternoon, then at four A.M. we would start receiving emails about how it was all going to change for David Nutter. You’re always trying to stay ahead of a moving train, and there were times I felt like the train was running over the top of us. Season eight sucked every piece of energy that we had.

CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN: It was like fighting a battle. It’s sheer force of will that you’re telling people, “This is what we’re doing.” The minute people doubt that you know what you’re doing, you are sunk. You can’t have, for instance, a stunt coordinator roll his eyes at what he has to do. No weakness at any level, so everybody below you just follows you. The minute they feel your resolve is not up to it, that spreads like cancer.

Amid the exhaustion, every decision mattered. Here’s an example of the level of detail that went into just a few swings of a sword. During a “Long Night” shot, Samwell Tarly was fighting wights. Watching the scene on set, I said to Cogman, “Sam looks like a badass.” Cogman looked perturbed. “You hear what he just said?” Cogman said to the other producers. “That’s the problem. Sam’s not supposed to look like a badass.”

Bradley was asked to adjust for a second take to appear a bit more confused and uncertain. Now he skittered back as each wight attacked. After another take, Weiss tweaked Bradley’s performance further. “He’s always facing the right direction for each attack, like he’s anticipating it,” Weiss noted, and reminded Bradley that Sam doesn’t know where the next wight will come from. Then it all came together, and Bradley looked precisely like a terrified novice action hero reacting to an unpredictable onslaught of wights.

JOHN BRADLEY: You get carried away sometimes when doing these huge fight sequences. You can see yourself [on the monitor] and want to make yourself look as good as possible. Miguel kept having to say to me: “Remember your character, he’s not that good at this. I know that you want to show you’re quite good at this, you want to show you’re better than Sam is at this. But you have to play him because that’s what’s going to be truthful. So stop being so good!” You never look as good as you think you do anyway. You always think a scene is going to be a game-changer. Then you watch it and it’s just you.

There was, however, one actor who actually liked the night shoots—unlike every other person interviewed for this book.

You can probably guess who it was.

KRISTOFER HIVJU (Tormund Giantsbane): I enjoyed the night shoots! It’s a special atmosphere. It’s cold and dark, and you have almost a thousand people every day staying up at night to make this happen. You have people just being bodies for twelve hours. It was magical. I killed so many zombies. I was dreaming about killing zombies.

Not every actor in “The Long Night” had the same grueling schedule. Performers whose characters were in Winterfell’s crypts, like Peter Dinklage, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Sophie Turner, were spared the worst of it.

SOPHIE TURNER (Sansa Stark): I only had two night shoots. It wouldn’t have been in Sansa’s nature, really, [to have been fighting]. But I wanted to work with the stunt guys so much—they’re an Emmy-award-winning stunt team—and the only time I worked with them was when I was being slapped or beaten, which wasn’t so fun. Then again, if I did have stunts, I’d probably have had to do seventy night shoots, so it probably worked out.

When filming scenes inside the studio, the cast was kept far warmer. But generating the episode’s “fog of war”—a blinding blizzard of mist cast by the Night King—required either fog machines or CGI. Naturally, Thrones opted for real smoke, which meant burning paraffin and fish oil inside the studio. But as they inhaled smoke day after day, crew members began coughing up fish wax. Face-covering breathing masks multiplied on set. At least one crew member was taken to the hospital for an asthma attack. The studio hangar’s massive doors were opened periodically to clear the air, and red-eyed crew members poured outside into the Belfast rain and cold seeking relief from the “comfort” of the studio.

One of the studio rooms was the motion-capture suite (or “mo-co”). There, Harington and Clarke took turns on the dragon rig, which looked like a large green mechanical bull that tilted and swiveled against a green screen. There Sapochnik tried to find ways to add more storytelling into what actors called the show’s most monotonous on-camera task, and what one director dubbed “Emilia’s own mini theme park roller coaster.”

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: You put an actor on a rotating buck and you blast them with wind and they’re on a green-screen set, so the last thing they’re thinking is they have to do a performance. My focus was on getting a performance from the actors so their story continues even though they’re on a dragon.

KIT HARINGTON: I was slightly pissed off I was on a dragon. It stopped me from fighting in a crowd. In some ways, as Jon does, I wanted to get back down on the ground. The fact he can fly a dragon means he has to, but his place is down there amongst the sword swingers.

MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK: I pitched the idea of designing shots that felt like they could have actually been shot in real life, and [I looked at] footage of World War II Supermarine Spitfires in action. I also pushed for the idea of allowing the dragons to constantly break frame. That is to say, frame shots slightly smaller than the actual dragon is so that it felt more like wildlife “on the fly” photography. The dragons should be so big and fast that it’s hard to keep up with them.

As Williams pointed out, the cast and crew didn’t have the luxury of getting sick. But, of course, some got sick anyway.

EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): Mo-co was called “the infirmary” because everybody got sick with a most intense flu. Everybody in the room was fucked. I was incredibly ill on the back of the dragon. So I’m being thrown around on the back of this dragon going “Aaaaahhhh-chew!” Then the dragon started to malfunction a bit and you’d just try to hold on. I like to say that Kit broke it.

“The Long Night” almost certainly ranks as the most filming hours ever dedicated to a single episode of television. After shooting was complete, there was a massive feeling of accomplishment among the Thrones team, though some said it took them six months to fully recover from filming. Crew members proudly donned “I Survived the Long Night” jackets.

MAISIE WILLIAMS: The sense of achievement after a day on set is unlike anything else. [Even on] one of those really tough days, you know it’s going to be part of something so iconic and it will look amazing. The hard work pays off on this show.

IAIN GLEN: You had an absolute fucked bunch of actors, but on-screen it looks horrible and dirty and dark and cold. Without getting too Method about it, it bleeds onto the screen.

DAVID BENIOFF: Maybe my proudest moment from this show was when screening “The Long Night” at the Mann’s Chinese Theatre. When Arya gets the Night King, the whole theater erupted. I was sitting next to my wife and her best friend, Sarah Paulson. My wife was grabbing my arm, and Sarah was screaming. I’ll never forget that feeling.

The critical reaction to the episode was quite positive, if less effusive than the team had hoped. “‘The Long Night’ certainly lived up to being the show’s biggest rumble yet, and it was extremely effective,” wrote Empire’s James White. “We felt the emotional impact of those who died, cheered at various near-misses, and watched as the conflict evolved between skirmishes, grand conflicts, and some true horror stalking the halls.”

Many viewers at home, however, struggled with the episode’s intentional dimness, which was used to literally dramatize a long night. The issue was likely made more noticeable when the episode first aired due to video compression (some cable providers significantly reduce content resolution, particularly during peak usage). Subsequent viewing of the episode, especially on Blu-ray and on properly calibrated TVs, show the episode’s action clearly. But it’s also fair to say that fans shouldn’t need the highest-quality video stream, or to change their TV settings, in order to watch their favorite show.

Game of Thrones insiders point out the production has always used “source lighting,” meaning lighting that’s justified with a visible illumination source in the scene (such as sunlight, moonlight, candles, or torches). Many previous dark scenes in the show were lit the exact same way as the shots in “The Long Night,” but there were never so many in one episode before.

BRYAN COGMAN: There’s a famous story about the director of photography for The Lord of the Rings. Sean Astin asked him about a scene [in Shelob’s lair], “Where’s the light coming from?” And he said: “The same place as the music.” Perfectly valid answer. And if you watch The Two Towers, there’s light coming from everywhere; the battle is lit up like a Christmas tree. And that’s fine; I’m not dissing it. But that was never Game of Thrones. You write a battle at night, then this is how you light it.

Another complaint was about the length of the final season; some wished Thrones had filmed more episodes to further flesh out the story’s final arcs. Those who work on the show insisted they could not have shot additional hours for season eight, especially after making “The Long Night.” Each year, the Thrones team pushed their limits. In the final season, they reached them.

CAROLYN STRAUSS (former programming president at HBO; executive producer): People are like, “Well, they should’ve done more.” The truth of the matter is it took so long to make the episodes that we made, I don’t know how it would have been physically possible. There are a lot of factors that go into making this, practical ones and storytelling ones. These guys did a masterful job of considering all those questions.

Could the show have made a ninth season instead of more episodes for season eight? In addition to the showrunners’ belief that there wasn’t enough story for another round, some claimed delivering the spectacle of season eight was only possible because the cast and crew knew it was the finale.

BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: Several of our hero team players were like, “I almost quit.” People were willing to go that extra mile for season eight only because they knew it was the final season and they knew it had to be spectacular.

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: If that hadn’t been the last season, there would have been a mutiny halfway through the night shoots.

BERNADETTE CAULFIELD: David and Dan did not hold back. They wrote the biggest that they could. We tried to reduce some things, and David and Dan and Miguel were like, “Nope, we need it.” Every department was stretched beyond where we should have stretched them. Like, we had two visual effects teams—which we never had before—working seven days a week for a year trying to keep up with the shot list. Everybody said: “I never want to do that again.” It was the hardest thing all of us have ever done. It was definitely the maximum we could do.

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: George R. R. Martin, back in the day, said that this would be impossible. And there we were, shooting it.