Maisie Williams on the end of Game of Thrones; Miguel Sapochnik talks directing Bastards and the season finale

Gotta love the run-up to the Emmys, with interviews galore popping up regularly now, as the Game of Thrones contenders put themselves out there. Today, we have two great new interviews to share with you- Maisie Williams speaks with Variety, and GoT director Miguel Sapochnik sits down with the New York Times. 

Looking ahead at the impending end of Game of Thrones, Williams is accepting, telling Variety, “Good things must come to an end or they’re not good anymore. It doesn’t last forever and we’ve done what we came to do, it’s time to wrap this up, and it will have the ending it was always supposed to have, and that’s very special. David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] started writing this show knowing the end, not knowing that it might actually come around and we might be allowed to make that many [seasons] — at the beginning we were just willing to make one [season]. They started this with an end in sight, and so it’s exciting to be closing it.”

When it comes to Arya’s bloody execution of Walder Frey in the season 6 finale, Maisie is “so thrilled” about being the one to finish him off. She tells Variety that she checks in with the GoT crew for their reactions on show matters, and that “Everyone, from all departments, said, ‘you have got the best kill of any kill ever. I don’t think there’s a single person in the world that won’t be thrilled that Walder Frey is gone,’ so it felt very, very good. It was such a fun day – so many things just went so well with that scene.”

As for who she’d like to see Arya meeting up with in season 7, the actress says that “It would be wonderful to work with one of the Starks again, but I just want her to see Melisandre or Cersei and not be dead at the end of it.” She explains, “To cross another big name off the list – but then I feel like people might come for me, because although everyone doesn’t like Cersei, we kind of love to hate her and I love to hate her. For the story it would be cool to meet either one of those and put a sword into them.”

Alright you heard her- don’t come for Maisie if Arya takes out your fave!

Visit Variety to read about the best part about Williams’ Emmy nomination, how she thinks Jon would handle the news that he and Arya are cousins, and more.

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Miguel Sapochnik talks to the New York Times about his Emmy-nominated work on Game of Thrones with “Battle of the Bastards” and his direction of the season finale “The Winds of Winter.”

He’s not directing any episodes in season 7, unfortunately. “I’m getting a little breather, but hopefully I’ll be back,” he says. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for season 8!

When asked, Sapochnik explains that the toughest thing to depict was “Having 3,000 horses running at each other, especially after we discovered that horses cannot touch each other. It’s illegal — it’s a very valid rule about protecting the horses. So the very thing we were trying to do was not allowed. And we only had 70 horses.”

They solved the issue by having “one guy run into the frame, and then the horse rider would pull the horse, which means make the horse fall and lie down on its side. Later we would digitally superimpose another C.G.I. horse and make it seem like it had impacted the live one. Pulling horses down, you can do. It’s about turning their necks in a certain direction, and then having two guys with a rope wrapped around the front two legs — they pull the rope, and then it allows them to fall very painlessly onto a bedded mulch base, so they’re falling into a soft surface.”

Sapochnik discusses the choices involved in a shocking scene from the season finale- young King Tommen’s suicide, jumping from the Red Keep after the wildfire explosion.

The director says, “It was scripted as shot — they wanted a single shot of him walking away out of frame, waiting an unusually long moment, and then returning and, without pause, throwing himself off the building. One of the most interesting things was trying to work out how long to have him offscreen before he came back. It’s something I’d never done — how long do I stay on an empty frame?

“I saw this great YouTube clip: It was in a bar, and a bunch of people were watching that scene, and it was amazing. There were these girls at the front, and when Tommen jumped out, they just went bananas. And I couldn’t work it out: Were they bananas because they felt terrible? Or because they loved it?”

The aforementioned video- Tommen reactions are at the 5:00 minute mark:

Miguel Sapochnik has more to say about Battle of the Bastards and The Winds of Winter over at the New York Times.

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