The House That Dragons Built (2022) s01e03 Episode Script

I remember thinking,
"This is gonna be a nightmare."
Are we actually gonna do this,
and do this here?
It's literally like playing Cowboys
and Indians when you were a kid.
There's been a lot of tough challenges.
That was up there.
It was epic.
This is exactly what you signed up
for in the first place.
This is why you do it.
Essentially, the concept of the episode
is: while Daemon goes off to real war,
Viserys, again, as he did with
the tournament in the pilot,
plays a blood sport.
In this case, the blood sport is a hunt.
We treated that
as another show of power.
That when the King goes out on a hunt,
thousands of people go with him.
Here's to his Grace
on his second name day.
We spent a lot of time researching
medieval hunts
and the kinds of things
that would go on,
so we could get the details
of that correct.
We looked at medieval tapestries,
of which a lot of that world is sewn
into history anyway.
So you can glean ideas
of who arrived at such events.
The important thing was to really
expand on the idea of decadence.
It was a really impressive undertaking
from the art department
to create what was effectively
a kind of a festival.
It wasn't like, "Oh, we'll just
shoot in this back bit here."
I mean, it was like the whole
It was like a whole town that they built.
And background action,
and horses, and dogs.
Look at all the dogs!
They'll eat you for lunch.
The hunt was a massive sequence
for us to shoot
because we had all walks
of life there.
We have nobles, we have knights on
horseback, we have chicken pluckers,
we have latrine diggers.
We have dressed over 118 principal
actors and 12,000 extras
over the course of this shoot.
And the fires, the cooking,
the preparing, the weapons.
All of these different sort of stations
within the camp have to be established.
An awful lot of that was props.
We put up so many tents.
And every tent needed to be dressed.
Inside some of them, outside all of them.
It was absolutely
full of detail wherever you looked.
It just brought that world to life.
Love acting. Again?
The process of that is getting it right,
sooner rather than later.
I think that's what's helped us along
the way
is a lot of really great
communication.
-Is it sharp?
-No.
Miguel and Ryan, at the beginning,
they'd come up
to the art department set dec,
and we'd show them the model makers
and what they were doing.
All the different
ideas for the props, the sets.
God, the work is unbelievable.
That's one of the things about this
as well, is all the work that goes on.
And you just turn up
in the morning with your coffee.
And people have been here with hammers
and nails and God knows what,
at all hours,
making this world real for you.
The Aldershot location
was just incredible.
But Charlie had an expression
that carried through all production,
which was, "There will be weather."
We were lucky in that
the dressing time we had there,
the weather was pretty good.
You know, it stayed dry,
we didn't have a lot of wind or anything.
But the morning of the shoot
We arrived at silly o'clock in the
morning, and a security guard said,
"It's nice now, but at nine o'clock,
it's going to be biblical."
And I just remember
that word "biblical."
It poured!
I mean, we got slammed.
There was sideways winds and there was
tents flapping and trim coming off.
It feels like almost an English
version of monsoon weather.
There was a point where it looked like
there was gonna be a repeat
of the Terry Gilliam Lost in La Mancha,
where you see his entire set
drifting away, down a mudslide.
All the makeup and costume tents had
to be evacuated because of the river
that was running through
the middle of the set.
It was mental!
It was mental.
I think we just thought,
"Our game is up."
I am constantly surprised
at the English weather.
But it really makes for an incredible
beauty that we've been able to capture.
The nature of filming is:
the show must go on.
There's a lot of characters in the story.
And we have to introduce
them kind of quickly and efficiently,
in a way that feels organic
to the storytelling.
It's just this fucking asshole.
No Hey, guys!
Those royal hunts were the
that was the event
that was looked forward
to all year long in those times.
And only the you know, the most-elite
had been invited to this thing.
Helmet. Pommel.
Anthony, we'll put you onto the bus.
Fierce, loyal expression.
I love when the Lannisters,
and the Starks, and the Baratheons,
and you hear these names
that you know.
And, you know, these are the ancestors
of the people
that you came to know
on the show.
And action!
I mean, those days are fun, just
'cause you get to finally see everyone.
It was just really nice to just all be
together and just, like, have a laugh.
It was amazing
just to see everything in motion.
Luckily, for my first few weeks,
I did nothing but, sort of,
skulk in the background,
which is quite handy.
You have Jason and Tyland
who are twin brothers on the show.
It's really great to watch Jefferson
play both characters
because he plays Jason Lannister
with that Gaston, you know,
"Of course, you'll wanna be with me!"
And it's really great to watch.
-I'd do anything for my queen.
-Thank you for the wine.
The secret agenda of the nameday
is to also marry Rhaenyra.
Once she figures it out, she ends up
retreating, and blowing off the party,
and going off into the woods
for the bulk of it.
You have everybody in medieval
and beautiful bespoke costumes.
And then you have guys running
around in blue leotards.
And it's just like, "What is that show?"
Ah, the Blue Man Group?
Yeah, it's really cool to
see all that stuff come together.
It's amazing how much goes into it.
On the day, we had one of my guys
playing the boar.
So, he would run around
and knock over the actors.
It was just this man in a blue morph
suit with, like, a face mask on.
Kind of like Spider-Man,
but just blue.
Just pelting at me.
It was actually quite terrifying.
She had to have something,
or someone, to fight against.
It's much easier for us
if there's a person
who is happy to put on a Lycra suit
and interact with our actors.
It means that the cameraman's
got something to follow.
You can see the action.
You can see the flow.
You can cut the scene to that action.
And it just makes it
feel more realistic as a result.
Milly doesn't like boars, and she stabs
them whenever she gets the opportunity.
That poor boar. Yeah.
The white stag is not really something
from George's mythology per se.
I mean, that's something that
we borrowed from Arthurian tales.
It is a combination effort between
stunts, special effects,
and visual effects really,
to get the thing right.
Quite a lot of animals
are in this episode, too.
And all of them are completely CG.
Who's gonna be the front and the back?
I think they just tossed a coin.
'Cause I always wonder if
that guy, for all future time, says,
"deer's ass" or "stag's end."
Go, Chrissy! Go, Chrissy!
-Chrissy, man. Yeah!
-Freedom!
Kill that Smurf! Yeah!
Miguel wanted me to come in and do
episode three. It was a huge episode.
It had, really,
one of the big battles for the season.
You open with Daemon on a full assault.
Also, to give us the geography
of the battle
that's to come later
in the episode.
You're trying to quickly set the stage
for what this conflict in the Stepstones
has been like for three years.
The Crabfeeder and his men
are coming out, doing a bit of fighting,
and then running back inside
when the dragons come.
It's tiring, and it's exhausting, and
we're not seem to be getting anywhere.
We wanted a gritty, kind of,
Vietnam battle against a guerrilla army.
And how do we use the landscape
and the technology to tell that story?
That whole storyline is sort
of explained in one big, long shot.
There's a lot of exposition that takes
place in there and our work,
in particular,
carries quite a lot of that.
To have a volume available, we were
learning a lot as we were going along.
We learned how much more we could do
than we thought we could do.
What was brilliant about the volume was
that that interactive light
on the gentlemen riding dragons, that
just ties you perfectly into the scene.
This is a case where we weren't using
the volume as a real-time set extension.
We're just using it as
the ultimate lighting space.
Daemon has been failing upwards.
And now he's faced with an opportunity
to be taken seriously,
and he's finding it
very hard to fulfill.
I bring word from His Grace,
Viserys Targaryen.
Rather than have his brother come
to again get him out of trouble,
he would just rather go and,
like, die on the battlefield.
As Daemon was
coming up the beach in Cornwall,
we now see that beach from episode two,
now fully covered in bodies.
The whole battle itself was originally
set to take place on that beach.
And I scouted it,
and was like, there's no way.
We literally would have been able
to shoot for about three or four hours,
and there just wasn't the time to get
through the workload.
Even if the weather was kind.
Because of all our title issues in
Cornwall, and on the beaches in general,
the idea was to recreate a beach
in a controllable environment.
So we could shoot continuously, and get
the same environments every day.
The joke on set became
that it was the Battle of the Backlot.
The challenge is,
with moving it to the studio,
is suddenly,
everything feels fake.
You know that it's gonna be a real team
effort to make all that work together.
So to create the soldiers and sailors,
we would all get together.
Prosthetics, hair,
costume, makeup.
Once we'd created them, it took weeks
to age them and break them down.
It was a lot of seaweed
and we've got that going in.
We've been burning timbers left,
right, and center,
to do a kind of post-burn
dragon attack look.
That axe?
I'm gonna stick it in Theo's head.
I'm glad there's a camera here
"Pineapple juice" is my safe word.
At the beginning of production,
it's always important to find out
what your big set-up is.
And for us,
it was the Stepstones battle.
One hundred and sixty-five a side.
Valyrians and Westerosy soldiers on one.
And then we've got the
Triarchy Tyroshi pirates on the other.
Ryan's keen to have
the Valyrians come across as rich.
And it's not just those
single characters.
We have all the armies
to deal with as well.
And all the shields to paint.
We had about six bodies.
We also had extras
who were covered in prosthetics.
Huge slashes. Stakes through
the hands and through the wrists.
The head and torso section
of the craft figure
is quite an extensive build
for us.
Sculpted the cross-section of the torso
with an articulated armature.
So when Matt drags him along,
everything kind of moves correctly.
Yeah. That was really heavy, actually.
It kept getting waterlogged.
It's, like, the weight of half a human.
Bless his heart.
There was this moment for Daemon when
he thought, "The game's up. This is it."
We looked at Black Hawk Down
and the scene in the ruined helicopter,
and the soldier in there,
knowing that he was going to die.
And so we came up with the boat wreck
and the skeletal frame of a boat
washed up on the beach.
It was really incredible,
what they were able to do.
But then, also, they have these amazing,
painted 2D backings that they put onto
the containers that surrounded the set.
Scenic art in our industry is often
referred to as a "dying art."
I honestly don't think
it is at all.
People were in awe
of how believable it was.
Essentially, an old
Wile E. Coyote gag.
And it worked.
That's a silent era filmmaking
technique that he used.
And it was mind blowing.
I knew we hadn't yet earned our
ability to do the long night
of the Battle of the Bastards.
But I wanted to try to create
a memorable battle episode
that's something
that we hadn't seen before.
Very early on,
Greg and I started breaking it down.
We had, like,
goji berries and pumpkin seeds.
So we started
playing on the table with that.
This is Daemon's coming out party
as a warrior and a character.
That's all designed in little moments
that happen throughout
the course of the shoot.
Not dissimilar
to Battle of the Bastards.
It's really
a character's journey.
You're really with
Matt's character all the way through.
Size and scan
and all that is irrelevant, really.
It's what you
get right with it.
A few of those things come together,
and you think,
"Well, this could be exciting."
It's a sequence that underwent many,
many transformations.
And in the end, I think what was
most important about it
We needed to show
Daemon fail before he succeeds.
You don't want a Bruce Willis
action hero thing going on.
It's got to be about him
going and losing.
Crabfeeder
is at the cave at the very end.
Daemon is driving to the end zone.
And as he's doing it every day,
we would redress the set
to be further and further
down there.
We had some interesting camera moves
that needed to be cued.
We did quite a lot with Rowley's wire
cam. Chasing people down.
Sometimes,
we used a rig called a Maxima.
Two grips run through the sand,
and I just sit in a nice, comfy chair
and control the tilt and the pan.
All those tools are at your disposal,
and that's been really liberating,
'cause then nothing's off the table.
Unreasonable violence, please.
That's what I want.
Chaos and mayhem.
He had never done
a sequence like that before.
I come from a long,
long action background,
so it was great to have him put his trust
in me and really create a sequence
that felt emotional all the way through.
The guy takes over, and you get to swing
a sword and be covered in blood.
I mean, he was slathered in so much
blood by the end of that thing,
he said it like took two days to really
get it all off of him at the end of it.
After he's chopped off
the Crab Feeder's head, I thought,
"Yeah, now we've got Daemon,
now we've got Game of Thrones,
now we've got that look
that everyone wants."
Good job, well done, everybody.
Thank you very much, appreciate it.
So, we've seen him in episode one
where he lost to Criston Cole,
so this really is the bit to show
Daemon as being really skillful.
And we're trying and saying,
"Again and again,"
to deliver something that doesn't look
like something that we've done before,
and we just rehashed it,
and put a different costume on.
We're trying to find inventive ways
to kill, torture, maim people, basically.
If it moves, beat it up.
Three, two, one Action!
I don't think anyone
can prepare you for how hard it is.
There's real smoke, and real fire and
wind, and it all has to happen together
at the same time,
and you have to still hit your mark.
And you have to be go and do it
day in, day out. That's a challenge.
-You look great, Steve.
- Thank you.
Once a week, I go and choreograph
this fight every day.
Cutting heads, I'm smashing the armor,
cutting your limb off.
And then, the day finally comes
when you got to shoot it.
You start off being balletic,
when you start doing it.
And when they're actually
coming at you, you're going
And somehow, they create something that
makes you look like you know
what you're doing, and like some sort
of lethal killing machine.
They're extraordinary.
One of the things you haven't seen is
the real power of the dragon strife.
See smoke come in,
and blast, dragon strife.
As close as I am to you,
what does that, like, blast feel like?
We had loads of people
getting full burns.
We would need put charged on the ground
that would engulf them in flame.
And then they're gelled up
and they just go up.
When you run 160 people for a set
like this, it's just incredible.
And then set them on fire.
We had 65 stunts, and we sourced about
140 background special action extras.
Rowley's always in his element
when he's holding his bullhorn,
and yelling at the stunt d's and extras.
Yeah, he loves it.
Yeah. I want him on fire. That's
the whole point of it, it's a fire job.
We've often had like maces
about this big.
And then I thought,
"Well, let's just go bigger."
So, we made blood maces
about this big.
They're made of sort of plastic-y wax,
and we fill them
with about a liter of blood.
In the moments prior to impact,
it looks like a big metal ball.
And when it hits, it just explodes,
blood everywhere.
Action!
They actually get paid every time they
get hit for these, 'cause they aren't
I won't say they're comfortable,
you're definitely getting hit with
something quite hard around the head.
I'm really excited about these.
I think we used every one we had.
When I came out of the battle,
I felt that was
That was one of those things where
we didn't know if we had enough time
for the ambition that we wanted,
and we pulled it all off.
You know, the battles are legendary
on Game of Thrones,
so being given one was
incredibly intimidating.
And to complete it was like
glorious feeling to finally finish it.
When I looked around at everybody
shooting that battle sequence,
everybody was like smiling and laughing,
and throwing dirt and blood, and
We had a blast.
When you're watching the monitors, and
you realize you're bouncing up and down,
you realize that actually,
you're in the moment.
That's when it's just fun.
I wanted to go fight with a broadsword
and get tugged on a wire rig.
But they don't let me do that,
because they need me hunched over a
keyboard writing these scripts for them.