Pilot episode



The Game of Thrones pilot episode was the first episode of the series filmed, but has never been aired.

The pilot was directed by Thomas McCarthy. A heavily re-shot version of the pilot, with new material directed by Tim Van Patten, serves as the actual first episode of Season 1, "Winter is Coming". It is not known if the original pilot will ever be publicly screened or released.

Because several scenes shot by McCarthy remain in the finished episode, and because McCarthy helped cast several of the regular cast, he was given a "Consulting Producer" credit on the first episode.

Production
The pilot was shot between October 24th and November 19th, 2009, on location in Northern Ireland and Morocco.

The pilot episode was the culmination of about four years of work by scriptwriters David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to make an adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels as a TV series for HBO - including all of the time spent negotiating, pre-planning, designing and constructing sets, props, and costumes, casting, and writing.

Benioff and Weiss never anticipated having to refilm the pilot episode. After they finished, however, they showed a rough cut to their friend and fellow scriptwriter Craig Mazin (known for writing the scripts to The Hangover series's sequels and Identify Thief). They expected Mazin to give them a few written notes on points to refine, but instead the only thing he wrote on the notepad he handed back to them was "MASSIVE PROBLEM" spelled out in capital letters.

Both Mazin and HBO felt that there were major problems with the pilot episode, which devastated Benioff and Weiss - even years later, after Season 5, they explained that this had a huge emotional impact on them, and they considered it the low point of their careers, only regaining their mood when they decided to take the unorthodox step of outright re-filming almost the entire first episode (about 90% of it by their guess) and learn from their mistakes.

One of the major criticisms was that basic exposition throughout the pilot was deeply flawed. The visual medium of television is different from writing a novel, but Benioff and Weiss had no prior experience in television (only limited experience writing movie scripts). A novel can stop to give a paragraph of exposition, which a TV episode cannot. Particularly, Benioff and Weiss have frequently noted was that many people at private screenings of the pilot such as Mazin didn't even understand the familial relationships of the major characters. Specifically, they didn't even realize that Cersei and Jaime Lannister are brother and sister, or that Tyrion is their brother. In reworked scenes for the new first episode, "Winter is Coming", Benioff and Weiss therefore made it a point to emphasize this: in Jaime and Cersei's first scene he goes out of his way to say "as your brother I need to tell you..." etc., and also dubbed in off-screen voiceovers have characters shout "It's Tyrion the imp! The Queen's brother!" etc. Benioff and Weiss remark on this in the "Winter is Coming" 1 Blu-ray commentary.

Differences between pilot and series: casting and filming
The pilot episode has a notably different cast than the rest of the series. For a number of reasons, HBO replaced several actors, major and minor, between the filming of the pilot and the series itself:


 * Tamzin Merchant originally played Daenerys Targaryen, but she was replaced by Emilia Clarke.
 * Jennifer Ehle originally played Catelyn Stark, but was replaced by Michelle Fairley.
 * Ian McNeice originally played Illyrio Mopatis, but was replaced by Roger Allam.
 * Richard Ridings originally played Gared, but was replaced by Dermot Keaney.
 * Jamie Campbell Bower originally played Ser Waymar Royce, but was replaced by Rob Ostlere.

In the pilot, author George R.R. Martin himself made a cameo appearance. He played a Pentoshi nobleman in the background who wore a gigantic hat. However, his appearance was ultimately cut out of the finished episode.

In addition, the role of Grand Maester Pycelle was originally planned to be in the pilot episode in a new scene and the role was cast with Roy Dotrice. The scene was cut but Dotrice was retained for the series itself. Shortly before filming began Dotrice fell ill and was replaced at short notice by Julian Glover (Dotrice later joined the TV series in Season 2, cast as chief pyromancer Hallyne). It was also announced that Bronson Webb would also be recast in the role of Will due to a scheduling conflict, but the producers were able to work around the issue in order to retain Webb.

Also, the German folk band Corvus Corax appeared as minstrels at the Winterfell feast. However, their scenes were completely removed in the finished episode.

Another change was that the pilot featured scenes shot in Scotland, using Doune Castle to stand in for Winterfell. Other footage was also shot in Morocco for the scenes featuring Daenerys. In the series itself Winterfell was created through several locations in Northern Ireland and filming on soundstages, while Malta and Croatia were used for the majority of the scenes involving Daenerys in Essos in the first two seasons. However, the producer later returned to Morocco to film the Slaver's Bay scenes for Season 3.

Overview
No comprehensive summary has been made public of the finished pilot episode that Benioff and Weiss screened to HBO. Three different sources of information exist giving some description of it:


 * 1 - Various cast and crew interviews mentioning scenes from the pilot, some of which were filmed, and others were scripted in early planning stages but ultimately not filmed. None of these gave a comprehensive listing.  These are supplemented by a few actual set photos of scenes which didn't survive into the final version.  Unlike the script drafts later discovered, however, these are the only sources that confirm scenes which were actually filmed (and not just script ideas abandoned in later drafts).
 * 2 - A version of the script has been circulating online for several years: it is apparently not a fake, because multiple scenes in it later matched up with descriptions of the pilot the cast and crew gave. It might not, however, be the final shooting script or reflect the final cut of the pilot:  scripts usually go through multiple versions across extensive rewrites.  Thus the digital file is only confirmed to be a snapshot of what the pilot script looked like at one point in time.
 * 3 - George R.R. Martin himself has actually, for many years, been mailing various manuscripts of his works to the A&M Cushing Memorial Library in Texas. A report about this pilot script was made in the Huffington Post in February 2019. There are several notable differences between Martin's archived copy of the pilot script, and the earlier version circulating online.  It is unclear, however, whether Martin's version or the other one came first - and thus which one of them more closely resembles the final, filmed pilot.

Significantly different scenes in the unaired pilot included:


 * The title sequence was different
 * An extensive opening scene showing a poisoned Jon Arryn, desperately trying with his last ounce of strength to write a warning letter, but then collapsing and dying
 * The early design of the White Walkers was slightly different, particularly their language
 * Cersei burning the feather Robert left at Lyanna's tomb
 * Jon gets drunk at the Winterfell feast, as in the novels
 * More exposition between Jaime and Ned about the Mad King
 * An actual flashback to the Mad King killing Ned's father and older brother
 * A scene in the training yard with Bran and Tommen sparring, then Robb and Joffrey (from the books).
 * Catelyn wanting Sansa to go south, and Luwin being the one to urge Ned to go south
 * The Jaime/Cersei and Daenerys/Drogo sex scenes were changed

As the final version of the unaired pilot has never been released in any form, this listing is not totally comprehensive, only covering what scenes are known to have existed. Moreover, not all of them are confirmed to have been filmed, as some may have been early ideas that were abandoned by the finished cut of the pilot.

Opening and Jon Arryn
As described in the DVD commentary, the Title sequence was very different. In the full TV series, it consists of the camera panning over what is supposed to be a maester's astrolabe, with mechanical map pieces unfolding. In the pilot version, it began as a maester writing a not and attaching it to a raven, then the camera follows the raven as it flies over the landscape, the background morphing into a map that the raven flies over.

The opening scene would have been Jon Arryn himself, still alive but poisoned, staggering into his chambers and desperately trying to write a letter warn others of the conspiracy he discovered, but ultimately collapsing and dying, with his ink jar spilling everywhere. Most or all of this was apparently filmed, as veteran actor John Standing was in fact cast to play Jon Arryn. He actually does "play" him in the finished version, but only briefly appearing as Jon Arryn's corpse while it lies in state in the Red Keep.

Prologue: White Walkers
Much of the Prologue sequence with White Walkers attacking the Night's Watch scouting party had to be re-filmed due to Waymar Royce being recast. The early design of the White Walkers was slightly different in this version, with more crude and brutal features. It is unclear if they were even meant to be seen prominently on-screen at the time, as they were intentionally obscured in shadow. Whatever the case, their design was updated by Season 1. Ironically, this is still one of the few sequences from the pilot that had footage survive into Season 1's "Winter is Coming" - none of the shots of the humans (due to the recasting), but a few blurry shots of the White Walkers running through the woods (artificially brightening the scene makes the early design a little more visible).

The actual story beats are more or less the same, as they both closely follow the books, but the pilot version had a few more beats from the book version. The notable difference is that it actually features the White Walkers' language, "Skroth".

In the pilot version, just as in the books, Will climbs up a tree to spy around, when the White Walkers surprise Waymar on the ground below. Will then hides up the tree for some time and can hear the White Walkers talking to each other in their own language, which the books describe as sounding like the cracking of ice. Linguist David J. Peterson actually designed a language for the White Walkers and it was used in the filmed pilot - but ultimately, it was abandoned by the finished version of Season 1, in favor of the White Walkers literally making sounds of cracking ice when they speak, dubbed in and mixed around using special effects. A human actor could plausibly speak the pilot version of Skroth, but it is physically impossible to speak the final Season 1 version.

Peterson has since warned that the "Skroth" he came up with for the pilot was abandoned and is thus not "canon" to anything, nor did he want to give samples of it in case he re-used it for some unrelated project later. Eventually, however, Peterson did release a short clip of it in the February 2019 report on the unaired pilot made by the Huffington Post. It sounds

Training yard scene
In the novels, at one point during the royal visit to Winterfell, the young boys from both groups have a sparring match in the yard, using blunted tourney swords. Even Bran Stark and Tommen Baratheon spar with each other - though because they are both only seven years old, they use only wooden swords and heavy protective gear. Tommen gets repeatedly knocked down by Bran, though Tommen shows great sportsmanship, keeps getting up, and is appreciative that Bran gave him the opportunity to spar with another boy his age (Cersei apparently coddled her sons and prevented them from engaging in martial training, like most other boys their ages). A brief shot seen in one of the behind-the-scenes production featurettes actually does show one of the small boys in protective training gear and armed with a wooden sword, so apparently such a scene was originally filmed, but in later drafts was cut for time.

Sex scenes
In an interview at the Season 7 premiere in July 2017, George R.R. Martin said that in the original pilot, the Daenerys/Drogo wedding night scene (with Daenerys played by Tamzin Merchant) was filmed exactly as it was written in the book, with Daenerys ultimately saying "Yes!", etc. - the aired final version, with Daenerys played by Emilia Clarke, changed this so she never says "Yes" but freezes in terror and cries, which Benioff and Weiss explicitly describe as "rape" in their Blu-ray commentary. Speculation at the time is that this change was made to bring it closer to modern sensibilities - in the books Daenerys is basically an unwilling teenaged bride and her wedding night could in a sense be seen as statutory rape, so it is possible the showrunners simply thought it was less controversial to honestly present it as "rape" instead of showing her ultimately enjoying it. The TV show invented several rape scenes for characters who don't have rape scenes in later seasons, however, so it is now uncertain exactly why they changed the Daenerys/Drogo wedding night between the pilot and final versions. When Martin himself was asked in this interview why the change was made, he only said, "You'd have to talk to David and Dan about that".

Material retained in the first episode
Several scenes shot by McCarthy were retained in the finished episode, "Winter is Coming". These scenes are shot on film rather than the digital recordings made for the rest of the series, making them appear slightly different (most notable in the scene in Winterfell's crypts). These are known to be:


 * A few brief shots during the Prologue scene, when the Night's Watch rangers are fleeing from the White Walkers through the forest, were retained for the pilot.
 * Inside Winterfell's crypts where Robert Baratheon asks Eddard Stark to become the Hand of the King.
 * The scene at the Winterfell feast where Ned and his brother Benjen Stark discuss the Night's Watch ranger that Ned executed.
 * Sansa's scene during the feast at Winterfell when Catelyn introduces her to Queen Cersei. Because Catelyn was recast between the pilot and the finished episode, Catelyn's appearance had to be re-filmed with new actress Michelle Fairley. However, because one camera angle is pointed at Catelyn and Cersei, and the opposite camera angle is pointed at Sansa, the original footage of Sophie Turner in this scene from the pilot was simply intercut with the new footage of Michelle Fairley as Catelyn. Notice that in the finished episode, in this scene Sansa is never in the camera frame with Catelyn and Cersei at the same time (only a stand-in wearing her dress, of which the sleeve is visible).
 * This is the only retained scene featuring one of the child actors, and because they aged a full year by the time of the reshoot, Sophie Turner noticeably looks younger in this scene than she does in other scenes filmed a year later with Fairley (combing her hair, etc.).
 * Tyrion Lannister's first scene, at the brothel with Ros. Tyrion has much more light blond hair in this scene - in the regular series this was changed to a more dirty blond (in real life, Peter Dinklage has dark brown hair, thus the pure golden blond in his original look didn't match the actor very well).
 * The scene in Winterfell's courtyard where Tyrion Lannister and Sandor Clegane exchange a few words before Robert and Eddard ride out to hunt. Tyrion again has much lighter blonde hair than in the scenes filmed later.  Moreover, Theon Greyjoy is also shown in this scene with blond hair rather than the brown hair he sports for the series proper. Also, the makeup design for Sandor Clegane's facial burns is somewhat different in this scene than what we see in subsequent episodes.