Game of Thrones producers begged HBO bosses to film iconic battle scene: ‘We went down on bended knee’
The Game of Thrones producers have revealed they had to plead with the bosses at HBO to let them film the Battle of Blackwater.
The legendary season two battle, which sees Stannis Baratheon attempt to take King’s Landing and seize the Iron Throne from Joffrey, almost didn’t get made.
In an extract of James Hibberd’s forthcoming book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, released by Vanity Fair, the series’ showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss admitted to the difficulties they faced when trying to get the iconic scene filmed.
“There was talk of turning Blackwater into a land battle, which would have been terrible. We begged and pleaded with Mike Lombardo [former HBO boss],” said Weiss. “We had a big conversation about how many boats we could do.”
Benioff added: “We went down on bended knee: ‘Just this once, please.’”
The pair were granted an extra $2m (£1.5m) to bring the Battle of Blackwater to life, as well as an extra week of filming. However, the original scene written in the books was still too ambitious to stage so its author George RR Martin was tasked with downsizing his vision.
Martin told Hibberd: “We had to scale down Blackwater considerably from the book. They told me right from the start that the bridge of boats would be impossible.”
Despite having to curtail his written version of the battle, the acclaimed author recently revealed that his least favourite scene in the HBO adaptation of his books is, in fact, an early sequence of King Robert going hunting.
