7. Neil Marshall Threw Real Wildfire At The Extras In Blackwater's Shoot
As season 2's commentary track makes abundantly clear, Neil Marshall was on a hiding to nothing when he took up the reins for the penultimate episode, Blackwater. Hired because of his work on the highly underrated Centurion, he only had a week-and-half to prepare for the biggest battle in the series, and was expected to create a titanic siege out of 100 extras, 12 horses and a small area for filming. Yet bolstered by the arrival of his director of photography Sam McCurdy as well as several stunt individuals he'd already worked with on-staff, he created a glorious battle on the bay outside the Mud Gate through a variety of shots and harkening back to his days on Dog Soldiers and Doomsday good old-fashioned gore. Combined with CGI trickery, he turned the row-boats going to shore into an army, and the miniscule amount of horses into a Lannister-Tyrell charge. Yet while this is impressive, we came for the lunacy something which Marshall brought with gay abandon. To make the whole thing look all the more fire-y and have the actors react better, he began throwing globules of home-made napalm at the fracas, and was only stopped when it became too windy to use safely. He didn't get his dream of actual green flames either, but with some colouring in post-production, we had an unforgettable scene with an amazing medieval WMD.