The House That Dragons Built (2022) s01e05 Episode Script

It's all designed to count.
In all weddings of Game of Thrones,
something is gonna happen.
So much fun.
You can sort of feel the air
come out of the room.
It was absolutely amazing.
It got very hot in here.
We did start to go a little bit insane,
but it was the best time.
The Hall of Nine was
just an incredible set to walk onto.
It's got this sort of snail shape to it.
It was the first set that we built,
first set that we shot on.
It was a rather large kind of departure
from the usual Game of Thrones set.
The Sea Snake has earned enough wealth
in this time to build his own new castle,
a better castle for himself.
Our idea, our concept for it
was what does a new castle look like?
I think Jim Clay and his design
team did a wonderful job.
Hall of Nine was very much
about Sea Snake's character.
His journeys throughout the world.
The artifacts that he's brought back
from his conquests.
And so, in a way, it was going
to be a museum of his life.
It was the first thing we shot.
It was never-wracking making sure
we hit it right.
Time frames are always tight
on every job I've ever done.
And this was no exception.
We were pushing our way in there while
the paint was still wet on the walls.
It was a battle to get it done on time.
It was the start of many,
many, many months of filming.
If that was to fail, then,
I'm sure they would have brought in
a Targaryen production designer,
at that point.
Perhaps I overextended myself.
Pushed him to close to the edge.
My cousin chose to sail into
this tempest, husband.
It's undignified of the King to drag
himself here and beg for Laenor's hand.
The term we were all looking at
is that they're a fairly showy lot.
Rather than some of the more austere
interiors that we have elsewhere,
this needed to be more colorful,
a bit more flamboyant.
This is essentially his throne room.
It also serves as his study,
you know, sort of multi-function room.
But it needs to be grand and get across
the feeling that it's almost
as grand as the throne room
in the Red Keep.
The halls of Hightide
never fail to impress.
Jim gave me a good brief and a sort
of good plan
of how he thought
we should lay it out.
I wanted a grand entrance staircase
in the way I've done the staircase
in the Red Keep.
The central piece, which we decided to
use this curved, semi-spiral staircase.
And that provided the corridor
at the back of the stairs.
It's lovely the way it sort of spirals
down from the balcony
and it's quite a difficult bit of
architecture, quite difficult to produce.
When you're doing architectural,
when it sort of more circular,
rather than just square,
flat surfaces.
Which is always difficult to model,
but it's worth it, it looks beautiful.
Compared with all the huge spaces
in King's Landing,
it's actually much
more contained.
Jim wanted to sort of push us up
in the style of architecture
With this show in general,
he's gone for a lot of Byzantine stuff.
The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul
was a big reference for the set,
We tried to sort of match
a similar kind of architecture
with the big arches and windows,
and the way that is painted.
The other main aspect
was this fantastic mural,
which Steve Mitchell painted.
Which was meant to be a mural paying
homage to the Sea Snake's nine voyages.
The ship, the Sea Snake,
is depicted in that mural.
Logic, to me, says he made a map out
of the places he'd conquered.
So maybe it's better to get a map out
of that, depending on
It's time permitting basically.
Love the painting,
just sort of evoking that sort of feeling
that this is what family is,
what the House represents.
It went through a couple of changes.
I think visually, it's a difficult thing
to kind of nail
if you're thinking
of a medieval painting.
There's a certain look and style
that you sort of feel
you have to hit the right note.
The right period, so you're thinking
that all your perspectives
are skewed and wrong,
'cause they haven't figured out how to do
perspective properly in those days.
There wasn't a brief.
That was something I just
thought was a powerful thing.
I think around about that time, I'd been
to the Turner exhibition at the Tate.
And looked at all of
his seascape paintings.
They're so powerful,
they're so strong.
I think that was the spark
for me to introduce that for Corlys.
All these wonderful objects are
an incredible tribute
to the Sea Snake's life.
It is a vanity.
Because of course it's like, "Yeah, I
did that. And I did that. And I did that.
And what did you do? Oh, you were born
into royalty. Well, I made myself."
And so there are all these wonderful
objects and mementos from his voyages.
His legendary nine voyages.
We really just gave Claire and Jim what
we know about the Sea Snake.
And then we really
turn them loose.
The collaboration with the set decorator
on every movie is absolutely key.
And with Claire, it is very much
a harmonious collaboration.
We literally went back to the history
of Corlys and his story,
which then helped us with the different
artifacts that we made for that set.
He would take a treasure
from each place,
and that's what kind of became
a big part of the set.
We talked a lot about that
and what they should be.
We looked at various art exhibitions
and pieces in the British Museum.
And then she went off and designed her
own pieces to represent his life.
How are you?
I'm fine
I'm melting.
Before we started shooting in there,
I had asked Ryan for some information
about the voyages.
Or at least about the mementos, so when
the Sea Snake look at those things,
I had a memory.
It was not going to be in the script,
it was just going to be me.
We really pointed a lot at Hearst Castle
and, you know,
what William Randolph Hearst
built with his family's wealth,
and then filled it with the treasures
and artifacts he was able to acquire.
The Sea Snake did the same thing.
But these were artifacts
that he essentially won
or purchased on his own travels,
being the Sinbad of this time.
I just want the camera to go through
every single thing that is in that set.
The detail is unbelievable.
It's so beautiful.
It's amazing in the Hall of Nine.
We did some fantastic pieces for that.
I think we're very lucky. We've got very
talented people in the workshop.
The concepts come in, and you think
"How in the hell are we gonna do that?"
You know, between the guys
in there, we work out a formula.
I mean all sorts of weird and wonderful
stuff we've never done before,
so they're all very unique.
It was amazing brief.
Everything was creative.
Everything had to be made from scratch.
Stuff we've never made before.
Everything was influenced by things
already made around the world.
And we basically tried to copy
what they wanted and make it better.
The Hanging City had to be
made really lightweight.
But it had to be made
so it looked like bone ivory.
So, we had to think of a method
that we could do that was easily to be
hung up really lightly.
That took a lot of thinking
of how we're going to make it.
We ended up using loft insulation boards.
We used those different thicknesses
to carve,
and we basically layered it all together
to create the structure.
It was lightweight,
but strong as well.
You never quite know how they're going
to turn out when you start them.
And a lot of the times
You know, trial and error to get
where we are with it, but
When you see it, then you can stand back,
and that's a kind of reward.
I like the snake orrery.
It was two snakes intertwined,
and you see the globe in the middle.
By the time it was all painted, you
wouldn't know it was just polystyrene,
or insulation foam, underneath it.
I constantly get amazed at what
we can do.
And I think, "Did we make that?
Are you sure we made that?
Are we that clever
to make that?" But we did.
The driftwood throne
was really interesting
because that was the
Sea Snake's ancestral seat.
We wanted to build it and do it service,
'cause the Sea Snake is a proud guy.
Jim and Clare went out and actually
built a throne out of driftwood.
It's an incredible piece of work.
And really the only person
whose feet touched the ground
when they sat on it was Steve Toussaint,
the Sea Snake himself.
The Hall of Nine was lovely to see it as
it developed over the weeks,
as they were building it.
And then, you actually walk on there, and
it's all dressed and ready for filming.
And that's when you, sort of, realize,
"Yeah, Game of Thrones is back.
We're doing it again."
The banquet
in the wedding scene is amazing.
When I first got my episode,
"Oh, yeah! It's a wedding."
Every episode I ever done in my life,
every film I've done
seems to have a wedding in it,
but this wedding was different.
It was a typical wedding.
There was music. There was booze.
There was speeches.
There was fights. It was great!
Lord Corlys of House Velaryon!
When the doors opened, and we looked
out, and we walked down there
in this huge hall, all of these
supporting artists, it was incredible.
I think I, sort of,
pinched myself.
I realized we weren't "in Kansas
anymore" when we had every family
they'd introduce walking down the stairs
in the middle of this wedding sequence.
That was the time when I
really realized the scale of the show.
It was the banners
of the house sigils that got me.
They just blew me away.
I mean it was fun. It was funny.
We had to do the dance here.
Spoke a bit of High Valyrian with Matt.
There was a fight.
It was very eventful.
It was a good wedding.
With all of these scripts,
I sat down, read them,
decided how I would shoot them, and
then gave them away to someone else.
So, when I saw it for the first time,
it was a real,
kind of shock to suddenly see that
somebody else had gone and made this.
The attention to detail that went into
creating the wedding was extraordinary.
Every table was laden
with meats and fruits.
All of the, sort of, set dressing, on
food and banquet stuff, is brilliant.
The props boys had a tough couple weeks
and were working their ass off.
We set the tables up I can't remember
how many times for all of the scenes
and how they needed to play out.
And the home economist, obviously,
was super key to that set.
This is one of the
biggest things I've ever done.
We've got eight tables of food,
and a top table,
and some other
tables set-dressed on the side.
So, it's a massive deal,
and it's being shot every ten days.
So, we're having to really ramp
it up a bit.
We just wanted it to be
sort of black and gold and red,
and really narrow the pallet, so it
had a sort of eerie quality in a way.
They say, "This is how we visualize it,"
wanting it to be quite visceral and dark
and bloody and gory.
We've got roast lambs, tomahawk steaks,
massive chickens, red chickens,
black chickens, piles and piles
of quails, pigeons with their heads on,
sheep's heads, calves' trotters, soup
And then I go, "Well, that's gotta be
fake." And he's like, "No, it's real."
"Jesus Christ!"
We've got a really good butcher.
And we phone him up, and we say,
"Right. We're gonna need this amount on
this day, and this amount on this day."
And then we phone him and say,
"We want more."
Some of it has to be specially ordered.
It's all stuff that's out there.
It's pretty gruesome.
But I wanted to share the savagery
of these characters
and these people once they've had a few
drinks and once they let loose.
Ready And action!
Congratulations, Your Grace. You have
made a fine match for the princess.
Let's reset.
When I first read 105,
I started reading and then reading,
and then I realized it's a 25 page-long
scene. So, it's half an episode.
We wanted everything.
We wanted dancing, and speeches,
and conspiracy, and threats.
That was a really complicated shoot.
I remember first talking to Clare about
it and her being very much like,
"Yeah, no problem."
And me sitting there thinking, "Mmm"
I don't know if you know
what you're getting into.
I'm actually a bit scared.
There was a lot happening.
Nick Heckstall-Smith, the first AD,
was brilliant at really working out,
what shots, when.
The wedding
was a great sequence to read.
For myself, I started breaking
the script down into, basically, beats.
From there, started talking to Clare
and Alejandro DP about the shot list
for the whole sequence.
And then I can
break that down, day by day.
Once you start breaking it down,
you still got shot one, two,
three, four, five.
You're telling this story.
It's amazingly written.
But, of course, as a filmmaker,
you're worried about the 25-page wedding.
And how are you going to keep
the audience interested?
How are we going to pace it? What's the
tone? How are you gonna build it up?
It took us days to come up with
the right blocking, rehearsing.
And action!
Oh, dear.
And tonight is only at the beginning.
We all know the crown's oldest
and fiercest ally.
There was months of deciding
how we're gonna light it.
How we're gonna
light it for this amount of time?
How is it going to
progress during the night?
In that case,
we had fire and moon.
As a cinematographer,
you play with those elements.
So that was a lot of testing, a lot
of pre-rigging, a lot of lighting.
And then came the shooting days.
And action!
I loved doing
the wedding scene.
I think that was the first time I'd been
working with Clare and Alejandro.
So, it was quite a baptism of fire with
them because it was a two-week-long shoot
with about 200 supporting artists
every day.
Those scenes, I'm not gonna lie,
they are hard to shoot.
You've got to break them down and come
about it in a real tactical way.
It neatly divided itself into three,
and we approached each section
sort of separately.
As a visual storyteller, like, how do
we end up where the story ends up?
In case of the wedding, it was going
from a more static camera
to a more moving and then flowy
and then chaotic camera.
Be welcome.
As we join together in celebration,
with House Targaryen
In the middle of this speech,
he just looks and sees something
at the other end of the room.
And everyone follows his gaze.
And there stands Alicent,
dressed in green.
It was such a fun scene to play.
The power that I felt
in that moment was unlike any other.
It's such a stand-out point
in the series.
In a way,
it's a coming of age for Alicent.
And it's also the first time that
she moves against the patriarchy.
On the day, I didn't have
to think about it,
because we'd shot pretty much all
of my pivotal scenes in four and five.
And so I sort of had most of that
journey and most of that build up.
It was almost like a release.
Congratulations, Stepdaughter.
What a blessing this is for you.
We played a lot of different
things with her look for that.
To give that strength she's got suddenly,
from being the fresh-faced young girl.
She's got a stronger makeup on.
She means business.
I worried that,
given leave of your father's shadow,
you might wither
in King's Landing's sun.
But you stood tall.
It's a collaboration. She's gotta have
the strength from everyone.
So if everyone can play their little
role of giving her a strong costume,
strong hair,
that strong makeup look.
When she makes the entrance, you think,
"Oh! What's happened here?"
She gate-crashes that wedding. She
comes in late. She's breaking the rules.
And Tanya did that
beautiful cage and put it all up.
It looked stunning. It's been designed
that it's, "Look at me. I've entered."
And we've made it quite a statement.
She wears a lot of green,
and with her beautiful hair color,
it just compliments it very well.
In the book, Fire and Blood,
there's this very seminal moment
where Alicent wears a green dress
to a tournament.
And we decided to play
that here in this wedding.
Your Your Grace?
It was not so much the dress.
It was more, how we can make
the green look even greener.
So we had to find a fabric
where the green was very intense.
And I had to find another fabric
where the green was shining.
It's green and green and greener.
That dress probably took around
four weeks to make from start to finish.
It involved several fittings.
The main process was
the fabric choice.
And once we had the fabric right,
we knew that it would be fantastic.
We do source green fabric.
We also have an incredible
textile and dyeing department here.
They are amazing, and have created
these fabrics and textures
which are far better
than anything you can buy.
Because they've been made
bespoke for the show.
That wedding, there was so much gold
and so much glitter that she had to be
the greenest thing where she was.
It's interesting.
It is all about the dress.
But in order to make the dress stand
out, we had to be really careful
with how we dressed
the other people in the scene.
Apart from the other Hightowers,
that should be the only green thing
in the entire room.
The beacon on the Hightower.
Do you know what color it glows
when Oldtown calls its banners to war?
Green.
'Cause when you read the script, and you
think, "I'm not going to miss that one."
No pressure.
The important thing with a lengthy
sequence is that you don't lose track
of where you need to be at certain
points during the shoot.
If I haven't got targets to reach to and
an understanding of the overall schedule,
then I can't make sure
that we're on track.
I knew that by the end of day two of
the wedding, we had to start dancing.
One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven.
One and two, three, four,
five, six, seven.
That's where you'll
come to, yeah.
We prepped it so intensely.
We rehearsed it before we shot it.
I worked with a really brilliant
choreographer
who I've worked with before.
And we had to create
the House of the Dragons dance,
which we really had no references for.
I saw this as a great responsibility.
I really wanted people to believe in it.
The movement can actually
go with the dialogue.
The choreography evolved. We thought
about, "What is the best way?
"Does it look too modern?"
But pretty much in every culture
since early, early years,
people tend to dance
in a semi-choreographed way.
And so we talked
about prehistoric birds,
and we sort of drew from images
and movements
of these prehistoric birds.
When we first did it,
it felt a little bit too contemporary,
so we pulled it back.
We didn't want it
to be too fussy.
But I think we landed
on something interesting.
All of us called it
"the smelly fart."
There's a bit when we, you know,
are like this, and then we go
Like, we kind of bend down and go
so everyone would giggle.
Milly was great. I think the hardest
part was doing it in the closed space.
'Cause when we rehearsed,
there was like five people in the room.
And then you get up, and a lot
of the people there are dancers.
So you can, "Oh, they're watching."
There were a lot of dances.
It was actually really hard
to like remember where we were.
But once you got into the rhythm of it.
We pretty much shot the whole thing
front-to-back within a take. It was all
on Steadicam with just the dancers.
It was like three dances back-to-back.
And everyone kind of going in
and you have to like remember where you
were and not bump into anyone.
But it was so much fun,
a lot of fun.
And then we had to think about
how they could do these movements
in the costumes that they had.
And the costumes had
You know, didn't necessarily have
the give because they're all sort of,
like, tight here,
so the costume department very kindly
sort of loosened all the underarms
of every single costume so people could
raise their arms for the dance.
Whilst we were working
on the choreography,
I spoke to Ramin about what
sort of music we could use.
And he came up with something
that we then set the dance to.
And we could play
whilst we were shooting.
Hearing that music, oh my God,
it literally sent chills down my spine.
Those drumbeats and then watching
them do this dragon dance,
it was almost hypnotic
in a weird way.
I love working
when there's music playing.
And I feel like whenever that happens
for the actors,
I find I my operating improves
because it gives
a sense of rhythm and movement.
At that point, it was quite fun for me
because once people started
moving a bit more, I got the Steadicam
out and got to play around with
a bit more kind of creative
camera movement.
I think we had four or five camera
shooting simultaneously.
We really wanted
to get the grandeur.
The dancing is beautiful.
When you see it within the scene,
it makes a lot of sense.
And it gives
the whole thing a rhythm.
And it actually
motivates what happens next.
Six years of peace and prosperity,
there's a lot of tension built up.
And you just don't know where
the explosion is going to come from,
and then it comes from
the most unexpected place,
when Criston Cole finally just snaps.
I really wanted to lens it out, to get
some long lenses on it.
So we were seeing
our characters through people.
So, you know,
everyone had a different agenda.
We didn't know where
the drama was gonna erupt.
It's a bit like an Agatha Christie,
like, you know, set up.
All these explosive points.
The fun of that sequence is playing on
the audience's expectations
of a Game of Thrones wedding
and knowing that these things
tend not to go well.
Rowley is a brilliant stunt coordinator.
And what I soon learned was
I'd just say, "Oh, Rowley, can you just
have a little fight here?"
And before you know it there's an
explosion of something
that looks very real and very scary.
We used a Steadicam in there
and some handheld,
but the bigger, wider stuff
is the stuff that's trickier.
You know, trying to make it
all look realistic at the same time.
I think Rowley has
this kind of filmmaker side to him.
So he knows how to shoot stuff,
and this is actually the hardest part
for a stunt coordinator.
You're having to incorporate his vision
of a stunt to his storytelling.
He knows how to tone it down or tone it
up. That fight was super easy to shoot
after rehearsing it
with Rowley so many times.
A lot of it is off-screen, a lot of it
is on Fabien beating one of my mats up.
The sheer amount of punches
that he threw, when I was there,
it was like, it was like,
"Are we done?"
Go again!
From Viserys' point of view,
to see this sea of people
rolling from one side of the room
to the other side
of the room.
I didn't have that many stunt people
there, probably 20 stunt people.
I mean, and there's what?
Two, three hundred people in the room?
So it's a lot of people to control.
And we did do this kind
of wave thing as well.
Like at a concert if something
happens and you get a surge.
So we tried to do that which takes
a bit of looking after people
to make sure that we don't
trample anybody or hurt anyone.
Hours and hours went into
making each fight perfect
so that it all feels fluid
and brilliant.
And then our whole
stunt team is just great.
Clare was just not saying,
"cut," and he was screaming and
And I was like, "Okay, okay."
Eyes closed kind of scene,
when they would come in,
it was completely chaotic,
it was great fun.
There were a lot of elements about
that wedding. It was a big thing.
Day-by-day, you just chip away at it,
and then you've got the whole.
it's a great scene, one of my proudest
scenes of all of House of the Dragon.