GAME OF THRONES Cinematographer On The Choice to Shoot Dark and How Viewers Don't Know How To Tune Their TVs

This week’s episode of Game of Thrones, “The Long Night”, was being being built up to be one of the greatest episodes of the series yet and while it was good, in the end, a lot of fans were disappointed. The two biggest complaints I’ve been seeing from fans was that it was so dark you couldn’t really see what was going on, and that it was just plain boring for what was supposed to be an epic battle.

Well, cinematographer Fabien Wagner has weighed in on the matter of the darkness of the series. He talks about the choice that was made to shoot the episode so dark and then goes on to blame fans for not knowing how to tune their TVs correctly. While talking to Wired, he said:

“A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly. A lot of people also unfortunately watch it on small iPads, which in no way can do justice to a show like that anyway.”

I’m going to call BS on that, though, because I do have my TV tuned correctly! I made sure of that, and it was still way too dark. I guess you could always incorrectly tune the TV and turn up the brightness of the screen to see what was going on!

In the end, though, the showrunners wanted the Battle of Winterfell to deliver something different and they thought going dark was a unique take on a battle:

“The showrunners decided that this had to be a dark episode. We’d seen so many battle scenes over the years – to make it truly impactful and to care for the characters, you have to find a unique way of portraying the story.”

Wagner went on to explain that “another look would have been wrong”, and that “everything we wanted people to see is there.” He added, “Personally I don’t have to always see what’s going on because it’s more about the emotional impact.”

But wouldn’t actually seeing the footage make that emotional impact that much more powerful? He went on to say that when watching the show, you have to watch in a cinema type experience.

“Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room. If you watch a night scene in a brightly-lit room then that won’t help you see the image properly.”

The thing is, this is a show being produced for TV, not the cinema. I don’t know. All I know is that I watched the episode on a big screen TV that was correctly tuned in the dark and I still couldn’t really see what was going on.

While I did enjoy the episode more than most, I think the choice to go dark might not have been the best decision. The creative team and actors put a lot of time, hard work, long hours, effort and money into shooting this epic battle. Didn’t they want people to actually see it?

What do you all think?