Besides lensing Baker Street and Victorian London, which resulted in an Emmy nomination for Sherlock, DP Fabian Wagner, BSC has captured the fantasy kingdoms of Game of Thrones for the past two seasons. He received an Emmy nod for the episode “Hardhome,” sharing the “Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series” category with three other GoT DPs, each nominated for different episodes. “Because we shoot everything simultaneously, we’re able to spend time with each other to talk about certain sets or lighting setups or things we want to do,” Wagner explains. “It’s a great benefit to be able to do that.”
The title of the episode comes from the site where a devastating White Walker massacre takes place. “[Show creators] David Benioff and Dan Weiss said, ‘We want this to be the biggest battle that we’ve ever filmed on Game of Thrones.’ We set out to do exactly that,” Wagner told us. “When I first read the script I said, ‘Wow. This is huge.’ The fighting is great, but most of the preparation that [director]Miguel Sapochnik and I did was making sure that we didn’t lose our characters and their stories in all of the fighting, because that’s the one thing that people always care about.”
Among the fast-paced action sequences in the episode is a tracking shot that features a rampaging giant. “It was 40 seconds of Jon Snow [Kit Harington] running and fighting a bunch of White Walkers. There were a lot of elements that we had to do,” Wagner explains. Special effects and stunts needed to be coordinated with the visual effects that would be added later. “That shot was tricky because everything had to work. We didn’t have anything to cut away to if something went wrong in between.”
“The location is always the trickiest and most important thing,” notes Wagner. “We’ve used the location for ‘Hardhome’ a lot on Game of Thrones. Castle Black is located just up the hill in a quarry that is roughly an hour outside of Belfast. They also shot the attack on the city at the end of Season 2 there. It has an interesting landscape.”
The Arri ALEXA was the camera of choice for the episode, paired with Cooke lenses and Angénieux zooms. “Personally I don’t like to use lights on exteriors, so I normally use natural light and bounce,” Wagner tells us. “The side of the quarry was so high that by the end of November, the sun was literally just skipping below the quarry line. So apart from the first day or two, I never had hard sunlight hitting. Otherwise, it would have been tricky with continuity and consistency of lighting,” Wagner explains. “We were shooting for about three weeks, and were lucky with the weather. We had just two days of heavy rain. I used ARRIMAX lights for the interior shots in the hut. I tend to light everything from the outside, so I had ARRIMAXs on a couple of cranes.”
During the episode’s epic battle sequence, scores of White Walkers run off a cliff and quickly pick themselves up to join in the fighting. “It was straightforward,” remarks Wagner. “We sat down and said, ‘This is what we want to do. How can we do it?’ We all had to come up with a way to shoot it as fast as possible. We didn’t have that much time to shoot it all, and we had to do lots of replication shots,” he explains. “There were so many different elements that we needed to shoot. We shot the main scenes with the actors on the set. We had about 250 extras, 50 stuntmen, and a combination of various White Walkers with different makeup stages. Some were mainly green, and others were mostly makeup.”
“The second unit, directed by Chris Newman [Your Highness], shot the White Walkers jumping off the cliff, and we also shot some plates. A couple of months after we shot the sequence, I went to the green screen studio to shoot all of the miniature scale sequences with the giant, which were later composited in. It was great that I was able to do that. I could replicate in the studio exactly what I had done outside,” Wagner tells us. “There were various elements that needed to come together, and it all worked smoothly in the end.”
Elsewhere in the episode, “There were a couple of sets that I really liked, such as Cersei’s [Lena Headey] cell, which was a tiny set,” says Wagner. “I was quite proud of that because it was such a difficult location to fit two cameras into to shoot those long scenes. We came back two or three times in the episode, so I tried to make it slightly different each time by finding new angles.”
Space was not an issue when capturing a pivotal conversation between Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Theon (Alfie Allen). “There was room to maneuver, but that was a tricky set. I had to light it from the top, which is not something that usually I like to do, but it turned out to be a nice scene. It had dark, silhouetted shots, which I enjoyed.”
In another key scene in “Hardhome,” Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) and Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) converse with each other in the throne room. This scene led Wagner to break the set’s typical shot direction traditions. “I started to key light from the other direction. I was happy with it in the end. It showed a new angle of the set, which I liked.” Another scene features Tyrion speaking with Daenerys in her private quarters. “We found fewer angles to shoot, but chose angles that would build up the tension throughout the scene.”
Wagner told us about his upcoming projects, including his big-screen cinematography debut. “I have my first big movie coming out this year, Victor Frankenstein, which was directed by Paul McGuigan [Lucky Number Slevin] for 20th Century Fox. It went great, and I can’t wait to see it now,” he told us. “I also shot Churchill’s Secret, a small TV movie about Winston Churchill with a fantastic script and great actors. There was no green screen or special effects. It was real joy to work on that. Now I’m back to Game of Thrones. Belfast is going to be cold and rainy!”
Game of Thrones Season 5: Episode #8 – The Massacre at Hardhome
Game of Thrones Season 5: Inside the Episode #8
Fabian Wagner’s next Project: Victor Frankenstein