“In the Name of the Mother,” episode 5 of the Game of Thrones prequel miniseries A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, centers on one long, brutal fight. After defending a commoner from the cruel Prince Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett), series protagonist Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) is forced to defend his life in the Trial of Seven, a vicious, bloody affair that pits two teams of seven knights against each other in a muddy, foggy arena. Many battle sequences in the Game of Thrones franchise have been more epic, but this one is intensely personal. It centers on Dunk’s fragmented, limited view of the fight, as he gets knocked around to the point where he can barely follow the larger action. Several first-person shots even come from inside Dunk’s helm, showing how frighteningly limited his view of the battlefield is when he’s in full armor.
“The through-the-helmet shot was very important for us, because we wanted as much as possible to stay, as we always have been, in Dunk’s POV,” showrunner Ira Parker told Polygon at a press day. “Things change for you very drastically when you put on a helmet, when you put on 60 pounds of metal armor, when you have to do this on a horse, when you have to do it with your peripheral vision knocked down to nothing, when all of a sudden, your breathing is close to you inside of this [armor]. Your heart is racing because you’re so nervous, so you can’t catch your breath.”
We wanted the audience to be fighting.
The first-person shots are meant to make the audience feel the weight of the threat Dunk is facing.
“Dunk is our single POV character,” Parker says. “We wanted the audience to be in that fight with him — we wanted the audience to be fighting.”
That close-quarters focus on Dunk’s perspective makes for an immersive experience, and it directly reflects how George R.R. Martin wrote the battle scene in The Hedge Knight, the novella the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is adapting. At several points in Hedge Knight, Martin mentions Dunk’s limited vision through his helm’s eye-slit. But portraying the combat through Dunk’s eyes also helped Parker stage a battle sequence on a much smaller budget than Game of Thrones or its other prequel spin-off, House of the Dragon.
“It’s funny how not having any money just forces you to find really cool, creative ways [of storytelling] that maybe you wouldn’t have come to completely if you had just had the ability to spend, spend, spend,” he says.
That creativity also included masking some of the Trial of Seven with heavy fog, which looks dramatic on-screen but also limits how far the audience can see outside of the Ashford Meadow tourney field where the battle takes place. That element was also taken directly from The Hedge Knight.
We don’t have a lot of money on this show.
“Canonically, a fog rolls into Ashford on the morning of that tourney. That was very important for us to represent, as it descends on these lists,” Parker says. “And does it make for the most bad-ass look at a fucking fight ever? You bet! But we took it from the novella. We were using things that were appropriate and that George spoke of — function over form.”
Parker admits that the Seven Kingdoms team also “embellished” the fog to disguise some of his budget limitations — particularly the size of the crowd watching the Trial of Seven, which Martin describes as hundreds of onlookers.
“We don’t have a lot of money on this show,” Parker says. “We have about a quarter for every dollar for a Westeros minute of previous shows. So we had to be careful how we hid things, and how we made it feel like we weren’t hiding things. [Putting] you in Dunk’s POV, we let you focus on what we want you to be focusing on, rather than [on us] not having 10,000 [people in the] crowd, like you probably would have at a Coachella/Glastonbury type tournament situation here.”
Episodes 1-5 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms are available on HBO Max now. The season finale airs on Sunday, Feb. 22.
