Let’s visit Old Town Dubrovnik for a look at their famous Jesuit Staircase made even more famous (infamous?) as the scene of Cersei’s nude walk of shame. No clue what I am talking about here? Well, don’t feel bad because I did not know anything about all this either, mostly because I was never a Game of Thrones’ fan. This is a quick summary of what I learned on a tour of Old Town Dubrovnik where much of the filming of HBO”s Game of Thrones was done,
First up, my photo of the staircase where the queen’s nude walk was filmed. (Note that the lady I show here is fully clothed.)
Our tour guide explained that there were many problems surrounding the filming of the nude scene and of course money was one of them. (For a good article on this and other problems related to filming the scene (click here.)
Actually, according to our guide, the shops ended up being closed for 3 days. He noted that the initial agreement was to pay the shop owners for two days’ closure which they were not too happy about to begin with. The GoT folks estimated what they owed the shop keepers for lost income based on their tax returns. This did not go over well because most shop keepers tended to under report their income. Hence, they were losing money by being shut down, but couldn’t really complain too much about it.
A second financial matter popped up at the end of the first day’s filming. Extras had been hired for $30 a day to appear in the scene. After the first day’s filming took over 10 hours, the extras, mostly college kids, complained that $30 wasn’t enough and they wanted more. The GoT folks told them that a deal was a deal and that all of them needed to be back at 8 am the next morning for the second day of filming.
Angry, the extras then went on Facebook and organized such that they changed the script as to what they were to chant the next day when the queen was walking nude among them. Whereas they were supposed to have been yelling “Shame, shame, shame!” at the queen, instead they yelled “Shave, shave, shave!” Filming had to be halted as the extras were fired and replacements needed to be found.
However, because of all this lost time, filming couldn’t finish on day 2 and now a 3rd day was needed to complete the scene. Thus, the shop owners got even more pissed off. (Note however, that I think the shopowners have pretty much made up for any income they may have lost back then, because just about every other shop I saw in Old Town had something like this aimed at GoT tourists.
Here then is the famous scene along with the director’s comments:
P.S. All this talk of Jesuit steps leading up to a Jesuit college, reminded me of the Exorcist steps leading up from M Street to Georgetown University. I did a 2016 Buzzyblog post on Grandson Shawn posing on these stairs (click here.)
Not many horror songs make it into my song rotation, but this one is in there just because of all those bells. If you listen long enough, they’re not as creepy as they first sound.