Damn, this is why that director is so good, he just came up with the crunch scene on his own and totally did away with what D&D wanted lol.
The crush scene, that is. Miguel Sapochnik is the director of Hardhome, this episode, and S9E10.
'Game of Thrones': Battle of the Bastards director speaks out | EW.com
One evening I got home and I kind of knew we couldn’t finish in the time we had left so I wrote a long email to David and Dan and the other producers to suggest an alternative that I thought we could achieve in the remaining time, but that would mean going “off book” for three days. That is to say, we’d be shooting without a script. I finished the email and made a cup of tea (no whisky in the house) then waited for the response, which I fully expected to be a public chastisement and general reaming for even suggesting that (Dan and David like their scripts executed the way they wrote them, and with good reason).
It was late already and if were going to do this we needed to employ this idea first thing the next day. But I couldn’t move forward without their consent and they were in L.A. at the time. I hadn’t even worked exactly out how I’d do it, I just knew we need a Plan B.
Anyway, not 15 minutes later, I get a ping on the email and David and Dan have replied. They said it sucked not to be able to finish as scripted but they also understood the crunch we were in and that they trusted me and to have at it.
I think that this section of the fight — in which Jon is almost buried alive by a stampede of panicking wildings — turned out as one of my favorite little moments in the sequence. No VFX, no fighting, just Kit giving a stellar performance and a crazy top shot as he pushes his way back out (we affectionately called it the “rebirthing” shot). The other reason I liked it is because of what it meant to be allowed to follow my gut and go for it. That kind of trust you can’t buy and it felt like a privilege to have been given that kind of support to go into unchartered territory by the producers in such a high stakes game.