Writing "Beyond the Wall" was written by
Game of Thrones creators
David Benioff and
D. B. Weiss. In the "Inside the Episode" featurette published by
HBO following the airing of the episode, David Benioff indicated that the death of the dragon Viserion was something that he and the writers had been working towards for a long time, and added "The whole path of the show in some way has been trying to map out all of the episode end points, and with this one, it was the dragon opening its blue eye, and realizing that the Night King has finally gotten his own weapon of mass destruction." Weiss also stated that the most enjoyable part in writing the sequence was to make it seem as though all of the "good guys" were going to "get out the other side more or less scot-free", and knew that subsequently killing the dragon would have "a tremendous emotional impact", due to its importance to Daenerys. Weiss also spoke about the concluding Winterfell sequence, saying that once Sansa finds Arya's collection of faces and is confronted, Sansa intended to start to see Arya as "a real, physical danger to her", and that they wanted to translate that fear to the subsequent episode, in "
The Dragon and the Wolf".
Filming "Beyond the Wall" was directed by
Alan Taylor. This was Taylor's seventh episode as a director for the series, but it was his first episode since the
second season, where he directed that season's finale episode, "
Valar Morghulis". He was also a director for two episodes in the
first season, "
Baelor" and "
Fire and Blood", as well as four other episodes in the second season. Since his hiatus from the series, Taylor was a director for several big budget Hollywood films, including
Thor: The Dark World and
Terminator Genisys. In an interview with
Entertainment Weekly, Taylor spoke about the differences between his earlier stint with the series, and his return for the show's seventh season, saying he was previously told to avoid using green screen, and thus special effects, due to the budgetary constraints that the series had in its earlier seasons. Dormer also noted the difficulty of filming a flaming sword, revealing that the sword could only burn for two minutes at a time, and could not be swung too quickly, requiring Dormer to slow down his movement. He also said that the sword he was using weighed approximately three times more than a normal sword. Four to five different shots were needed in order to accomplish this portion of the battle. Taylor described working with
Vladimir Furdik, who portrays the Night King, noting that Furdik is completely covered in prosthetics, and saying "He's just delightful. There's nothing he can't do. He's a full-on actor in that role, aside from being able to do all of the action and all of the horse work. He has a beautiful face — although you lose some of that behind the Night King prosthetics." Taylor revealed that he had worked with Furdik previously, as Furdik was also a stunt performer on
Thor: The Dark World. To film the death of the dragon, Viserion, Taylor said that he "provided the shots where we knew the dragon was going to be impaled and crash", for special effects supervisor Joe Bauer to use later. But Taylor also filmed reaction shots "all along the way" while the dragon fell to its death, utilizing a tennis ball on a stick in order for the actors to understand where the dragon was in the scene, as well as a "pre-viz" and storyboards for them to understand what the final product would look like. Taylor praised Emilia Clarke's performance as Daenerys Targaryen in the scene, and he was also grateful that he was chosen to direct the dragon's death, due to his self-proclaimed past of directing pivotal death scenes in several series, including the death of
Ned Stark in season one, as well as major deaths in
Rome,
Deadwood and
The Sopranos. Taylor also spoke about the amount of time that was intended to pass between the approach of the White Walker army, and Daenerys's arrival, saying that they were being intentionally vague, "We did a few things, like getting deliberately hazy about how much time is passing, because it's so dark in the frozen lake and you don't know how many days or nights you may have witnessed. We tried to make it a little ambiguous and give it some wiggle room on that end. We were aware that we were asking for people's suspended disbelief — plausible impossibilities is what you're aiming for." ==Reception==