Miguel Sapochnik Says He “Pissed Off” The ‘Game Of Thrones’ Creators Who “Visually Policed” Him

Much has been made about the lengths that the recently-concluded “Game of Thrones” went to keep its ending secret ahead of its final air date, even shooting multiple finales to throw fans off in the event of potential leaks.

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But that level of on-set scrutiny extended to some of the mega series’ most acclaimed behind-the-scenes names as well, and long before the final season. Speaking to Indiewire, Miguel Sapochnik – the man behind some of “Game of Thrones’” most acclaimed episodes, including season eight’s “The Long Night” and “The Bells” – discussed how short of a leash showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss seemed to have him on.

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“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 candidly, referring to the second episode he ever shot for “Game of Thrones,” and one of the series’s standout hours of television that transcended the medium.

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Perhaps it was because he initially brought on as a replacement director, but Sapochnik said he had to sacrifice some of the vision he brought to certain scenes in the series, including the death of Aemon Targaryen in season five. That scene, according to Indiewire, was initially imagined as a cut “magically transitioning Aemon to his funeral pyre with his bed pillow under his head.”

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But Benioff and Weiss, who helmed “Game of Thrones” from start to end, “said (it was) ‘so self-conscious and we hate it basically,’” Sapochnik said.

While they made clear to Sapochnik early in his involvement about the liberties he could take as an artist, Benioff and Weiss were obviously still enamored enough with the unique visual style he brought to some of the standout sequences in “Game of Thrones” – including the Battle of the Bastards – that they decided to bring him back for some of the HBO’s series’s most climactic episodes, including Daenerys’s visually stunning pulverization of King’s Landing in the penultimate episode. Listen to the full interview below.