Although Miguel Sapochnik is grateful to have worked on Game of Thrones for as long as he did—a run that included directing two episodes in the show’s final season—the director has also admitted that some of the choices made in the HBO drama’s final season were not ones he would have made himself. Specifically, speaking with IndieWire, Sapochnik said he wanted the Battle of Winterfell to be more shocking than it wound up being.

“I wanted to kill everyone,” Sapochnik said. “I wanted to kill Jorah in the horse charge at the beginning. I was up for killing absolutely everyone. I wanted it to be ruthless, so that in the first 10 minutes you say, ‘All bets are off; anyone could die.’ And David and Dan didn’t want to. There was a lot of back-and-forth on that.”

Sapochnik also noted that the showrunners wanted to save some of the material he wanted to use in “The Long Night” for “The Bells,” the show’s penultimate episode.

“With credit to them, they let me engage early,” Sapochnik said of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. “It was a sustained engagement. I got to really question and argue with them, and I’ve learned with them when to stop arguing because there comes a point when they dig in and you just don’t want to be there.”

By the time the three sat down to discuss the Battle of Winterfell, Sapochnik already had some experience gently sparring with Weiss and Benioff over directorial choices; in the same interview, he also recalled a disagreement over the season 5 episodes “The Gift” and “Hardhome,” specifically shots of Tommen and Maester Aemon. “I was visually policed for the first three months of my shoot, and it made the creation of ‘Hardhome’ really difficult because I pissed them off,” Sapochnik said.

So when it came to the Battle of Winterfell, the challenge became making an interesting episode without killing very many people. (Though it should be pointed out that on Game of Thrones, relatively little carnage still does mean a few heartbreaking deaths

In describing these disagreements, Sapochnik recalled events pretty matter-of-factly; the director didn’t sound bitter, perhaps because of how he’s come to understand his relationship with the show. As he told IndieWire, “I think a key thing is like it’s not my show right? I didn’t come up with the show and make it. I am a hired director to go and do that. They have let me in and let me be involved, and I’ve really loved doing that. But final cut is not mine. Final cut is theirs; it’s their choice.”

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