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  ====Battle of Winterfell====
  Miguel Sapochnik directed the episode, his third of the series.
  "Battle of the Bastards" was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who had directed the fifth-season episodes "The Gift" and "Hardhome". In an ''Entertainment Weekly'' interview before the episode aired, Sapochnik said he was brought on board by Benioff and Weiss after his previous-season success; "Hardhome" won several awards, including Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. About how the episode should be shot, he said: "Every battle on ''Thrones'' is unique. I think that's why Benioff and Weiss keep doing them. In the case of 'Battle of the Bastards' – or 'BOB' as we affectionately called it in production – David and Dan wanted to do a thing of spectacle, a strategic pitchfield battle they hadn't had the resources to do back in season 1 or 2. I was particularly interested in depicting both the horror of war and the role of luck in battle." Benioff called Sapochnik's work on the episode some of the best in the series' history.
  It took 25 days to film, requiring 500 extras, 600 crew members and 70 horses. Benioff described the difficulty of coordinating horses in battle scenes, which is why they are rarely used except in "big budget war films". Weiss added, "Miguel's really outdone himself. Fully fleshed out medieval battles require a tremendous amount of resources and choreography to get them right. It feels like we're doing something fresh that you don't see on TV and movies very often." Four camera crews were used for the battle scene. The 500 extras were largely the Snow and Bolton armies as Wildlings, archers, swordsmen and spearmen. Each army was trained separately to create off-screen rivalry between the two groups, and visual effects were used to expand the army to thousands. Kristofer Hivju, who plays Tormund Giantsbane, said about the intensity of filming the scenes: "It was pretty intense, actually. When you have 20 people running around getting squeezed together, and you're trying to chop at another bearded guy with a sword, you are not out of danger. You're laying down in the mud, and one wrong step, you won't have a face anymore. It was very intense, and Miguel insisted on making it that muddy and messy. War is not beautiful. Sometimes you see action sequences where battles seem organized. I know that from how the Vikings fought. It's not beautiful. It's hard. It's hard work. We had to shoot moment-to-moment, chronologically. We would shoot one sequence 80 times per day."
  The Battle of Cannae, in the Second Punic War, was an inspiration for "Battle of the Bastards".
  In an interview after the episode aired, Sapochnik detailed the process of filming the battle and called Akira Kurosawa's ''Ran'' an inspiration in shooting the scenes: "I watched every pitch field battle I could find (footage of real ones too), looking for patterns — for what works, what doesn't, what takes you out of the moment, what keeps you locked in. Interestingly one of the things I noticed is that staging of these battles through the years has changed dramatically. Back in the day you'd see these huge aerial shots of horse charges and there were two big differences. First, it was all real — no CGI or digital replication. And second, often when the horses would go down, you can kind of tell they got really hurt. Nowadays you'd never get away with that, and nor would you want to."
  Asked about the greatest challenge in filming the battle, Sapochnik said: "Every time we charge the horses it takes 25 minutes to reset all the fake snow on the field and rub out the horseshoe prints. So how many times can we afford to charge the horses each day knowing we need to give time for a reset that's 10 times longer than the actual shot? Another thing was how to make 500 extras look like 8,000 when you are shooting in a field where there's just nowhere to hide your shortfall. It becomes a bit like a bonkers math equation. And finally: How do you get these guys riled up enough to run at each other and get covered in mud and stand in the rain and then run at each other again and again for 25 days, 10 hours a day, without them just telling you to piss off?" In an interview, he said that the single most difficult thing he was asked to depict was "having 3,000 horses running at each other, especially after we discovered that horses cannot touch each other. It’s illegal — it’s a very valid rule about protecting the horses. So the very thing we were trying to do was not allowed. And we only had 70 horses ... The solution was you would have one guy run into the frame, and then the horse rider would pull the horse, which means make the horse fall and lie down on its side. Later we would digitally superimpose another C.G.I. horse and make it seem like it had impacted the live one."
  According to the director, the scene was filmed on privately owned land in Saintfield, Northern Ireland, and they had only 12 days to shoot. After reading the script Sapochnik came up with a 48-day shooting schedule, which was whittled down to 25 days. The CGI of Ghost, Jon Snow's direwolf, in the episode presented difficulties; he was "in there in spades originally, but it's also an incredibly time consuming and expensive character to bring to life. Ultimately we had to choose between Wun Wun and the direwolf, so the dog bit the dust." Sapochnik said that a crucial scene was filmed off-script. After three days of rain, unable to finish filming as scripted, he suggested a scene in which Jon Snow was trampled and nearly buried alive by bodies; the director described the character pushing his way out as "rebirthing."
  Kit Harington compared the "rebirthing" scene to the conclusion of the third-season episode, "Mhysa", with Daenerys Targaryen.
  In an interview about the "rebirthing" scene, Kit Harington said that it intended to mirror the Daenerys Targaryen scene at the end of the third-season episode "Mhysa" when Daenerys is held up by freed Yunkai slaves; in "Battle of the Bastards", Jon Snow emerges from the crushing crowd of the battle: "When the crush starts happening, he slows down, and there's that thing of peace where he thinks: 'I could just stay here and let it all end.' And then something drives him to fight up, and that moment when he comes up and grasps for breath, he is reborn again, which I found weirdly reflective of the scene where Dany is held aloft at the end of season three."
  "Battle of the Bastards" was the first episode in which Kit Harington and Iwan Rheon filmed scenes together and met on-screen. Rheon said that he had always wanted to film scenes with Jon Snow: "Anyone who has asked me, 'Who would you like Ramsay to meet?' My answer has always been, 'Jon Snow.' He's the antithesis of Ramsay. They're almost a yin and a yang. They both come from such a similar place yet they're so different. And even though they're enemies, they've both risen so far as bastards, which is almost incomprehensible, and now they're both here facing each other. They couldn't be any more different, yet more similar." In an interview, Harington talked about the fight scene with Rheon: "I actually did punch Iwan in the face twice by accident, which he took really well. He was really nice about it." According to Rheon, "The way I see it, if you don't get hit a couple of times doing that, you're not doing it properly."
  A notable goof occurred during the scene where Jon Snow mounts his horse in an attempt to rescue Rickon before Ramsay's arrows can reach him. As he's climbing into the saddle, Snow's Valyrian sword Longclaw and its scabbard can be seen bending wildly, betraying its status as a rubber stand-in.