The Cost of Cersei’s Walk
Even though it was the big special effects budgets of “Hardhome” and “The Dance of Dragons” that have caught audience’s attentions this season, last Sunday’s finale, “Mother’s Mercy,” was no slouch in the expense department. The International Business Times ran the numbers, and it turns out one of the most expensive sequences of the season was one that looked more simple than it actually was: Cersei’s Walk.
Total cost for filming a Walk of Shame for a Queen mother? “[R]oughly $200,000.”
Fans will remember back last fall, when the show first proposed filming this scene in the heart of Dubrovnik’s Old City, the Church of St. Nicholas, which has been standing in for the Sept of Baelor over these last few years, could not permit such a scene to be filmed on the property. At first, it looked like the production might have to film the scene somewhere else entirely, or back in Belfast in the studio. But the local government did not want to upset the production, so in the end, it allowed the producers to film the scene in a different part of the Old City. The Sept was green screened in after the fact.
But it wasn’t just having to switch locations within the city that cost the extra money. One of the trickier problems of filming in what was already essentially a giant tourist attraction is the open nature of filming. Over the last few years, we here at WiC have posted dozens upon dozens of fan-taken photos and video of the show in action, mostly taken from the top of the city walls looking down.
Well, if the producers wanted to keep Cersei’s Walk of Shame under wraps, this would never do. Also, marching Lena Headey and her body double naked and in public could have represented serious privacy concerns. As we reported ourselves during the filming, security locked the Old City down tight, and the very few pictures we got from filming showed only the barest glimpses of Headey or her double. Apparently, there were at least 200 security guards on set during the three days in took to shoot this scene.
According to director David Nutter, the precautions the show took were substantial:
“[W]e were shooting in the middle of Dubrovnik, which is quite a big tourist facility and the walled city in Croatia has millions of tourists travel through, around and above it along the walls throughout the year. For us to control part of the city without any cameras or onlookers that could spoil what we were doing, I was impressed.”
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