\n<\/p>\n
It was jaw-dropping. In New Zealand, you go out the west side of Auckland, and it\u2019s like the most beautiful beach you\u2019ve ever seen. You go to Bethells Beach, and you can turn the camera here; you can shoot the entire thing. You\u2019d shoot it a little bit this way, you\u2019ve got, like, a Bergman movie. You go to the ocean, you\u2019ve got From Here to Eternity.<\/em> The freedom that you have and the beauty, I\u2019ve never experienced anything like that before.<\/p>\n The battle scenes seemed to be far more elaborate and really felt like the show was leveling up. What went into filming those?<\/strong><\/p>\n Jacob Tomuri,<\/strong> our stunt coordinator, is exceptional. He did Mad Max;<\/em> he\u2019s Tom Hardy<\/strong>\u2019s stunt double, and he\u2019s just so capable and good. And so a lot of it this season was that we have a short time frame, we move very quickly, and, again, we have a half-hour budget. We don\u2019t have a one-hour budget, and we don\u2019t have a one-hour shooting schedule. So a lot of it was just picking our shots and saying, Okay, we\u2019re going to do a battle sequence. Let\u2019s storyboard it. Let\u2019s make sure that we know what the stunts are going to be, and let\u2019s make sure that the location is spectacular. So we shoot it on that sandbar behind Bethells Beach, and it was like a dune which went on forever\u2026. A lot of it is just seeing what New Zealand has to offer geographically. And then deciding, yes, let\u2019s do that, and then building it around that, and then making sure that we\u2019ve planned enough, that we can pull it off in a way that\u2019s safe but also has enough size.<\/p>\n What was the idea behind having Stede as a merman in episode 3?<\/strong><\/p>\n The idea was to make something that was just beautiful, and to get beauty and have beauty around them seeing each other again and their need for each other. To do that and to do it in a way that it\u2019s a comedy, but to do it in a way that\u2019s earnest and genuinely doing it and singing a Kate Bush<\/strong> song. We hit on the idea of a mermaid early on in the season two room, and [we said], Oh yeah, well, we have to put that in. There can\u2019t really be mermaids on the show, but there can be in limbo, kind of purgatory, brain-damaged land as Blackbeard\u2019s dying.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n