Game of Thrones Stunt Coordinator talks about pulling off the biggest scenes on the show

Game of Thrones is one of the best shows on the planet, and that’s for a lot of reasons, and one of the reasons is how the events written down by author George R. R. Martin are adapted for the screen, and a lot of effort goes into the same. A large chunk of these efforts are taken by the stunts department, and it’s general knowledge that it’s not an easy job. The stunt coordinator for Game of Thrones, Rowley Irlam, recently talked about bringing alive some of the best scenes in the series. Read on!

We recently reported about how Game of Thrones fans in the UK have a chance to win a spot in a Night’s Watch training camp, in a contest hosted by Sky Atlantic. Rowley Irlam and weapons master Tommy Dunne recently held a session of the same for some of the journalists from the UK, including those from Express and Radio Times, and the journalists got quite few interesting bits from Irlam.

To begin with, Irlam talked about the scene where they showed Drogon attack Daznak’s Pit in the Season 5 episode, ‘The Dance of Dragons.’ He said :

“We’ve done a lot of fire stuff, particularly in season five. We set fire to 20 guys in one day and used a 45-ft flame thrower on a motion control crane so we could control the dragon….It was the most amount of people that had been set on fire in one day.”

Irlam went on to talk about how safety was paramount. He explained :

“It’s very clear – we endeavour to shoot a sequence that is very dynamic, exciting, looks really dangerous, but it’s never our intention to hurt anyone in the process.

And we never do anything recklessly where we go ‘Awww, there’s a 50/50 chance this will go OK.

It doesn’t work like that. It’s 99%. When you’ve got horses, and you’ve got swords, and you’ve got 500 extras and 17 cast all fighting, you do have little tiny nicks and bumps, and hands get knocked by the sword. “But we don’t have any big accidents, because we really spend an awful lot of time making sure that everyone knows what’s going to happen next. The secret to safety is communication.”

Irlam also talked about their work on Battle of the Bastards, which he seemed proud of :

“What was really good about Battle of the Bastards was that unlike a film, where you mostly burn most of your time doing main unit, cast and the action can get a backseat and become a few days of second unit, we had a very very clear plan.

We had a plan each day of what we’d shoot, we’d spent five days establishing, 15 days shooting the battle then five days shooting the Winterfell segment at the end. And we stuck to that plan. 

It’s extremely rare to make a plan and really stick to it, regardless of what the weather does. But Game of Thrones does not stop when it starts raining. If it’s raining, we shoot. If it’s sunny, we shoot. Whatever happens, we shoot.”

Well, we’re certainly waiting to see what magic the crew has produced in Season 7, which is set to premiere two months from now. What about you? Tell us in the comments, down below!

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