How much time will Game of Thrones devote to the Battle of Winterfell?

Entertainment Weekly

Sunday's episode is scheduled to be the longest of the season at 1 hour and 22 minutes. Director Miguel Sapochnik, who helmed the "Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards" and “The Winds of Winter" episodes, spent 11 weeks of grueling night shoots filming Sunday's episode. "The process of whittling it down took longer this time," admits Sapochnik. "Because creators David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) wanted everything. We all want everything but we were up against the reality of what we could achieve in the time we had. The thing I’ve put the most hours into was is how, in episode 3, how to not have an audience feel battle fatigue. After 20 minutes of watching a battle, you’re over it. So how do you stop it from being a battle in that sense?" He adds: "It feels for me at some point you exhaust an audience. For my reference point I watched (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) because the siege is a 40-minute sequence, but it’s actually three different battles in three different places intercut. That was the biggest thing I could think of that was contemporary. I was trying to get a sense of when do you tire out. I think we’re going to blow past that. It feels like the only way to really approach it properly is take every sequence and ask yourself: 'Why would I care to keep watching?' One thing I found is the less action — the less fighting — you can have in a sequence, the better. We also switch genres. There’s suspense and horror and action and drama and we’re not stuck in killing upon killing because then everybody gets desensitized and it doesn’t mean anything." ALSO: Emilia Clarke goes undercover as Jon Snow in New York City to promote her brain injuries charity.