When speaking to Entertainment Weekly, director Geeta Patel was asked about the process of shooting Viserys’ emotional and exhausting walk in the scene. She explained:
“That was a very, very big sequence. We had a lot of logistical obstacles during that time. Not worth getting into, but it was already the biggest thing that we had to do as far as Paddy [Considine’s] turnaround. He had so much time in prosthetics getting ready for that, and then there was a conversation about him walking down the aisle. The real time of him walking down the aisle is just, like, you’re looking at your watch as a producer and director going, ‘Oh my God, that’s just the first take and it took, you know, 20 minutes.’ It’s one of those things where I was approached at one point, I can’t remember who came up to me, and said, ‘Maybe we should just cut around this.’ Like not really do it. ‘Let’s just do it once.'”
Ultimately, Patel decided the scene needed to be as long as it ended up being.
“I was like, ‘No, we are gonna do the walk because the story is actually that he is walking down this aisle.’ He is in an extreme amount of pain. He is walking towards something. He wants to save the realm. If we cut it short, we would lose that element forever in the edit room. We would never have that possibility. So we just put our heads down and shot Paddy walking. Even for Paddy, that was a hard thing to do because he’s got that cane and it hurts your back doing that walk more than once. But I’m very proud that we stuck to our guns because I do feel like that is what helps the emotion come out.”