Across eight seasons playing Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, Kit Harington grew close to many of his colleagues. But one of his closest friends and collaborators was a relative late-comer: Miguel Sapochnik, a veteran television director (House, True Detective) who came on in Season Five and handled some of the show’s biggest most elaborate action episodes, including Season Five’s “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards” in Season Six.

I recently sat down in New York with Harington for joint conversation between him and Sapochnik, who called in from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has been directing Bios, a post-apocalyptic feature film starring Tom Hanks. After pleasantries and some spoiler-free gossip about Season Eight, they got to talking about their first meeting.

Sapochnik: Kit, I was going to ask you something. The first time that you and me met, you were getting off a bus, and I came over and I introduced myself. I said, “Hi,” and that we were going to be doing “Hardhome.” We then going into a conversation of what we wanted to foreshadow [in that episode] about what was about to happen later in the story. And halfway through the conversation, I realized I didn't know if you knew you were going to die yet. I could see something in your face, and I wasn't sure whether you'd clocked it or not. So I just suddenly thought, “Miguel, shut up right fucking now. You should not continue with this conversation.” I remember that being, for me, quite like, “Oh, great, I've just put my foot in it.”

Harrington: I don't think you had. At that stage, if I remember, I’d read the episode where I died, but I hadn't been told yet that I come back. So I was in a place of going, “Does this man I've just met know more than me?” So that's probably the searching look that I had in my eye. [Laughs.]



I felt that you came along at a time in Thrones when Thrones really needed you, in that we were getting to a point where it had been really successful, and the temptation—I could feel it in myself—was to sit back on your laurels a little bit. “I know the character. I know what I'm doing. This template works. I know how Jon would react to anyone at this point.” And what Miguel did is, he came in and with every actor he'd test that [complacency] and say, “Well, why?” He pushed us to re-investigate our characters—at a point when Thrones could have, and I think many shows do, lapsed into stagnation. So Miguel came in with new blood but also a way of directing, which I think reinvigorated the whole thing.

Kit Harington says director Miguel Sapochnik came onboard at the right time: "He pushed us to re-investigate our characters—at a point when Thrones could have, and I think many shows do, lapsed into stagnation." HBO

Sapochnik: That’s kind of you to say, sir. For a long time, I think, television has had lots of directors who just go job to job to job to job, and they churn them out. To a certain extent, you don't get an opportunity to get to know the actors. For me, what was very important when I was doing my first season on Thrones—for every season, actually—was getting to know the actors, making them feel comfortable, trying to track their journeys with them so that the episodes I did felt like continuations, rather than just stand-alones.

Harington: “Hardhome” was the first time I’d worked with Miguel [aside from one scene in an earlier episode, “The Gift”], but I remember thinking you were my type of guy when I saw you play Wun Wun, the giant [a CGI character], and run down the hill. They had the cameras rolling and you literally had this big stick, running down, shouting at the background artists [extras], saying, “Follow this. Look that way.” And you were really into it. Rather than having one of the VFX guys doing it, you were in there, which I felt like that was a level of investment I could get onboard.

Sapochnik: Season Five was the hardest for me, mentally, because it was the first year that I'd worked on it. David and Dan [David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the show runners] didn't trust me. Nobody knew me. I was just coming in, and I got dumped in the deep end with “Hardhome.” It was a case of having to prove to them that I could do it, but also I'd never done something at that scale and size before. I knew that I had to take a point of view on the story, and it naturally fell to be Jon Snow's perspective. But not having either worked with or had the opportunity to choose the actor that I was going to work with, I had a lot of trepidation. Because what I was asking for is, you have to act and fight at the same time, which I don't think is an easy feat. But working with Kit, it was the first time I got to work with somebody who could act and who could also fight, who could do the choreography but could still look for the moments in between the words and the action to have an emotional response—and who was interested in that. And that was a joy.

ESQUIRE: Could you tell me about a specific shot or sequence that speaks to that?

Harington: The sequence that always sticks out for me in “Hardhome” was a tracking shot where Jon has to go and get the dragonglass and he has to run across the grounds, as it were, to the hut where he finds a White Walker. And it was just this one long take. It's one of my favorite shots in Thrones that I've been a part of, actually. It’s that thing of, “Right, we need you to run, but not move too fast”—which is actually really hard. Because Sean [Savage, a camera operator] needs to keep me in camera, so it's this weird sort of simulated thing. You have to find moments of tripping, or stuff to slow you down, or things to look at, to make sure you're not moving getting too far ahead. And it's hard, because in reality you'd fucking sprint! You’d run as fast as you can! But what you do is you switch into a mode of like, “No, he can't sprint, because he could get killed by anything, so he has to kind of track/walk/jog.” It’s a bit of a trick, trying to move slow while looking like you're moving fast.

Sapochnik: One of the things that we talked about a lot in “Hardhome,” and we did as well about “Bastards,” is: whose story is it? What is Jon's story in this? We tried to distill it to a very simple thing, and that was not just me. It was me and Kit talking about it and trying to understand it, so that we always had something to grasp onto. And so in “Hardhome,” it was Jon goes to Hardhome to save the Wildlings, and fails. It was about the notion of failure. That was what we kept coming back to. And then when we got to “Battle of the Bastards,” I remember coming to you for the first time that season and you were in the tent doing stunt rehearsals. We sat down and we were talking, and one of the things that came up in our conversation was you felt a certain amount of weird discombobulation. You felt in limbo about what you were meant to be doing that season. Like, what was Jon’s arc? What was the story? You knew you were coming back from the dead, and we were trying to find meaning in that. We decided that one of the things to do was to lean into the idea that Jon just doesn't know why he's alive anymore, and that we would turn Battle of the Bastards into his moment of rebirth. And it felt like by just having that one simple conversation, it created an anchor not just for the episode but for the season. It felt like most of our ideas as we were shooting kind of spiraled from that one idea.

The Season Five episode "Hardhome" was, according to director Miguel Sapochnik, "about the notion of failure. That was what we kept coming back to." HBO

Harington: I remember having that conversation with you. And I remember feeling, just on a personal level, an underlying level of depression, like, “What's the point?” And that kind of went alongside, weirdly, what Jon was going though. He'd been to the other side [of death], and there was nothing there. Everything he thought he was fighting for, it was like, “Well, what's the fucking point?” In Battle of the Bastards, it's where he's on the ground and he's being trampled [after his army has been surrounded and appears to be doomed], and he could just lie down and die. He could just go.

Sapochnik: Because we realized that there was almost no dialogue throughout the entire battle, we were constantly looking for places to play this idea: Jon being dead inside, what's the point, and then where that moment of rebirth would be. And when we shot the scene where he gets trampled down, there's this really great little moment, performance-wise, where he's trampled, trampled, trampled, and he's completely under. I was saying to Kit, “At some point, just give up. Just close your eyes and just give up. Just let it happen, and then let that spark kind of kick back in.”

And it's kind of great, because he does die. You see it on camera. And then suddenly, his eyes open—and you see the spark. I think it was because there was a little bit of light that we put on you. All the stunt guys were over you and they were basically stopping any light from getting through, and then we worked it out to make a little bit of a gap so that the light hit you. In the shot, it hits your face, and your eyes open again, and suddenly you start struggling. Those, for me, are the most satisfying things, because in the midst of all of the action and all of the crazy stuff, then you actually get character.

HBO

I’ve read that that moment was something you came up with on location, that the battle as scripted climaxed differently. What was the original intent?

Saopchnik: I'm going to say I'm not 100 percent sure, but if I remember correctly, what happened in the script we went into production with was that Jon fights his way back up the body pile, gets to the top, where he has that “all is lost” moment. He surveys the damage. He's standing on the body pile, seeing everybody being crushed [by the opposing army]. What he doesn't see is one of the Karstarks [a soldier from a family aligned with the villainous Ramsay Bolton] on a horse, seeing him from the side where Ramsay is, and beating it down there on his way to run up the body pile and skewer Jon with a spear. So Jon is standing there seeing that all his men are dying. Behind him comes the Karstark. And then just at the very, very last minute, the pile explodes just beside where Jon is standing and Wun Wun comes out and punches the horse that the Karstark is riding in the face, saving Jon. That was the turning point, if I remember. All is lost, but Wun Wun saves the day. And then I think Ghost [Jon’s direwolf] comes in with lots of wolves or something like that. But that wasn't going happen in the time that we had.

Harington: Ghost always gets cut.

Sapochnik: We were standing there [on the battlefield location], and it was the end of the day, and I knew we weren't going to make it. Even the simplest thing, like shooting Wun Wun is always complicated because he's not there. It’s just me with a pole. And then a horse climbing up a body pile is almost impossible to achieve, because horses have their own personalities and they're just like, “I'm not climbing up that.” I knew we were about to go off course, and I believe in being preemptive and dealing with those things. And so I was like, it's got to be something less visual effects based, more real, which can still give us that “all is lost” moment. Because that was really the key of what we were getting to. And whether it was you, Kit, or whether it was me, it was this confluence of ideas. If I remember correctly, what we said was, “What's the worst thing that could happen right now?” And the answer that we came up with is him being trampled to death by his own men trying to escape. And that's how we got to that. And then the next day as we started shooting it, you said to me, “Just so you know, my worst fear is being trampled to death by people.”

Harington: By, specifically, Northern Irish men [i.e., the nationality of most of the stuntmen]. But we did have a chat about what was my greatest fear. And it happens that one of my greatest fears is being crushed to death like Hillsborough. Hillsborough’s a football tragedy that happened in the U.K. where everyone just got crushed. [At a 1989 match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium, in Sheffield, an overflow of Liverpool fans into a fenced off stadium “pens” caused 96 deaths and more than 700 injuries.] That’s the kind of thing, when you tap into actors’ real fears, the things that make them really uncomfortable, you can get a scene that really works on a much deeper level for the audience.

Sapochnik: Without sounding too sentimental, this is what, for me, feels testament to what I have enjoyed so much about working with Kit. We both knew something had to give. But instead of worrying about our time and the fact that it was raining, instead of turning it into an unstoppable force meets immovable object moment, we took half an hour just to sit there and figure out something that felt true to the character. That's what I feel like we've worked really hard, each season, to do, is make sure that the character isn't servicing the plot, but that the plot informs the character. If we do that successfully each time, it feels like that's the best part of our storytelling.

Harington: Dan Weiss has admitted to me that writing the battle sequences, to them, is the hardest thing. They love writing scenes between characters, but the battle sequences, they have to hand it over with a lot of trust to the director and the actors and the crew. I think that's where Miguel's been brilliant. On paper, those battle sequences can be quite difficult to read. It is in the doing of them that you figure things out, and David and Dan were great to give us license to change all those bits. I think that’s what made them great in the end.

"Dan Weiss has admitted to me that writing the battle sequences is the hardest thing," Harington says. HBO

The climax you came up with for Battle of the Bastards is powerful and satisfying, but I can imagine that the alternate version, with Wun Wun bursting through a pile of bodies and punching a horse in the face, would have been a real crowd pleaser.

Sapochnik: In all honesty, David and Dan wouldn't let punching the horse go, so we stuck it in somewhere else. We had to have the horse getting punched, right? It was like a thing. [A budget-minded producer] kept coming to me and saying, “I can't fucking afford to punch the horse. Can we just not deal with punching the horse?” And Dave and Dan were like, “We have to punch a horse! We have to punch a horse!” And it was almost like the argument was more about punching the horse than it was about anything else.

Harington: I remember in the first season, they had a line they'd put in where it said, “Wind was so strong, it blew a horse off a cliff.” It was like, what is it with them and fucking horses? That line got cut, by the way, because it was fucking ridiculous.

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