A new interview with cinematographer Robert McLachlan reveals details about how the upsetting Red Wedding scene was filmed on Game of Thrones. The HBO fantasy/drama, which is known for surprising and devastating its fans with gruesome (and sometimes equally satisfying) deaths of its major and minor characters alike, will be returning this summer with its seventh season and is sure to be filled with plenty of death, drama and dragons.
But, no matter how many new deaths the Game of Thrones creators can conjure up to shock fans, the Red Wedding will always be the stand-out massacre that represents the brutality of the series. Even though it’s been four years since the tragic events of the Red Wedding aired during the season 3 episode “The Rains of Castamere”, fans are still not over the deaths of Robb Stark (Richard Madden), his wife Talisa Stark (Oona Chaplin), their unborn child and his mother Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley), who were slaughtered under the hand of Walder Frey (David Bradley) during Edmure Tully’s (Tobias Menzies) wedding to Roslin Frey (Alexandra Dowling).
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Now, in a new interview with Business Insider, cinematographer Robert McLachlan, who is also known for his work on Westworld and Ray Donovan, spoke about the challenges of shooting the Red Wedding and what it’s like to work on a show like Game of Thrones. Here is what McLachlan said about filming the dramatic episode (which also happened to be the first Thrones episode he shot):
I was aware that the Red Wedding was gonna be a big deal, and we wanted everyone to be incredibly shocked by it — those who hadn’t read the books. And the nice thing about the way they approach the filming on that show is that it’s not you do all your prep work in one block and then sit down and shoot like crazy for two or three weeks, like you do in most episodic television. Your schedule is sort of scattered throughout. So I had a lot of time to really chew on how I was going to approach it. The lighting, it’s kind of built into the production design so that part was easy. But I also wanted to heighten it.
![How Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding Scene Was Shot](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Robb-Stark-at-the-Red-Wedding.jpg)
I really, really didn’t want to tip our hand to the viewers that anything bad was gonna happen, and quite the reverse: I wanted to make them think absolutely for sure they were gonna get the happy ending that everybody was really dying for. So I got the art department — with the blessing of the producers and director David Nutter — to overload the banquet hall with candelabras and torches so that it was, if not by Disney standards, certainly by “Game of Thrones” standards, very bright.
It’s no surprise to hear that McLachlan tried his best to mislead fans into thinking that the Red Wedding was going to have a happy, bright ending considering the level of shock fans around the world experienced while watching the scene unfold hoping that the poor Stark family was going to, somehow, survive the ordeal. McLachlan has also returned as a cinematographer for the fourth and fifth episodes of the upcoming seventh season so fans should expect some standout (and maybe tragic) Game of Thrones episodes when the show returns.
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Game of Thrones returns for season 7 on July 16th.