The House That Dragons Built (2022) s01e07 Episode Script

Breathtaking, slightly terrifying,
exhilarating. All the emotions at once.
It felt good to finally step forward
and to get the show going.
Once we rolled on that first shot,
I knew we were off and running
on a great adventure.
Episode seven
was the one that we shot first.
It was necessary for Miguel
to set the tone right out of the gate
with the cast and the crew
and everything.
It was a good one to pluck out, because
by the time you come around to it,
everybody's here in this alien place
at a funeral.
And nobody
really knows how to feel or act.
High Tide is a different feel
to the rest of the show.
It's a standalone castle
belonging to Lord Corlys.
We decided very early on
that St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall
would be the main location for that.
St. Michael's Mount
was absolutely glorious.
Seeing it in the show,
you see that location and you think,
"Well, this has to be a green screen
or a set or something."
I tell you, it is not.
That is a real place.
It's a tidal island,
which means that depending on the tide,
if the tide's up, you're gonna catch
a ferry to work. Heaven.
Or if the tide's down,
there's a road that emerges.
You travel there by boat
at a certain time of day.
And other times of day,
this path appears out of the sea.
You can just walk back.
No acting required.
I mean, it does feel like
you're in another world.
It makes perfect sense for the House
of Velaryon to have that as their seat,
because they are sea people.
Any island is
a nightmare for a film crew.
And most producers will say,
"If it's an island, walk away from it."
But on this occasion,
it was such a powerful location
we decided to go with it.
Logistically, it's difficult
because at high tide, twice a day,
it is inaccessible.
So we had narrow windows
to get trucks across the causeway.
You've gotta time everything
perfectly within that window,
to make sure you're not left
stranded on either side,
wanting to get home
or go to work.
We had to preload all the costumes
in and we had an awful lot of armor.
So we went down about a week before
and started setting up the locations
and the tents and getting ready.
We spent the first two weeks just
getting the equipment onto the island.
And we got everything over there,
and then we started to build.
When I went and saw the sheer drop
of where we had to put the set,
I was thinking, "How on earth
are we gonna do this?"
We were having to build platforms
right down on the water's edge,
right on the rock.
We were all very nervous about that,
I think just because
of the sheer uncertainty
of what weather we were gonna
face, and tides.
It was a logistical problem
for the art department.
They can't drill into
the rocks of St. Michael's Mount,
so they have to strap it down.
It was slightly nerve-racking, that
whole experience of making that work.
Worries about, "Is the tide gonna
come in and wash it all away?"
The number of conversations about
how we couldn't possibly build
an extension to the rock pool,
because of the tides and this
that and the other.
There were just so many
reasons why we shouldn't do it.
Which was, to me,
so many reasons why we did.
When you choose a location like that,
which is a difficult location,
you want to take advantage
of what's there.
You don't want to be hiding everything.
We built a courtyard in the grounds,
so we used a lot of the original
architecture and the stone walls.
You have to then
make those walls believable.
You couldn't take plants
onto St. Michael's Mount.
Their gardeners are very helpful,
and we used their stuff
rather than our normal way.
You couldn't tell what they had created
and what was already there.
And so, we're up on a platform,
three or four days into shooting,
I had stubbed my foot and it was like,
"Oh, that's not stone at all. My God!"
The more that's done around you,
the less you have to use your
imagination because it's there.
I can't even believe
that actually exists.
To be able to shoot there,
I couldn't believe we were so lucky.
So seamless.
It seemed like the gods had built
those cliffs exactly for that funeral.
We did two scenes up there
that were quite hard to pull off.
The first day,
and then the next four days.
The first day
was the funeral.
We didn't really have a sense
of what a Velaryon funeral was,
but we decided to take what we knew,
which is they're a house
that's all about the salt and the sea,
and build a ritual around it.
It's called "The Seat of the Sea."
And the idea is that all those stone
sarcophaguses build up at the bottom.
And over the centuries, have built the
foundation for the island of High Tide.
That was my first scene.
For me, it was nearly
three months prep
because I had to learn
all the High Valyrian.
I drilled those lines every single day
until I got to the point where I thought,
"Okay, I know this backwards."
We had around 50 extras
for the Seat of the Sea,
it was the first thing
that we shot.
So it was really the first time that we
saw our nobles
and our citizens of King's Landing
and High Tide for the first time,
it was exciting to create those looks.
Cut.
First week of shooting out of the
studio, all our cast standing around
in the intermittent pissing rain
with this sarcophagus
that needed to be hoisted up
and over and fall into the ocean,
and be picked up, and pulled out,
and put back in.
And et cetera, et cetera,
with the resets taking 20 minutes.
It was a really difficult location.
It was a hard one.
We made a rig, a conveyer belt,
that was drawn
by the guards using rope.
And we had to build that out
over the edge of a cliff.
We had to build a stone coffin
and we had to weight it.
Basically, whatever we put into
the water, we had to get it out again.
When it hit the water, it looked like it
was gonna sink, but it didn't.
It would bob up really quick. And then
we could take it, and do it again,
and again, and again.
We've got to make this fiberglass
really strong,
because it's gonna have a lot
of battle damage on it.
Yeah, we're thinking about how to do it,
so it survives lots and lots of takes.
Normally, you would do that kind
of thing on a tank and in a studio.
We actually did it
in the sea.
It was tidal, so you had to wait until
it was the right time to shoot it.
And if it's drifting out to sea,
then you lost it forever, haven't you?
I know this is an emotional
and sad scene,
but it was really funny when I saw
the little coffin go into the water,
they had to drag it out again and go
and re-start again.
When the actual sarcophagus falls off,
and we go under water,
that will be a fully-CG
shot there.
The outcropping that the sarcophagus
comes off
of was brought in by our art
department.
The scaffolding that's underneath it,
and all of the safety fellows who were
underneath it,
we all had to paint those out.
For all intents and purposes,
we should not have made that day.
But then once we did, we then moved
into a four-day sequence of the wake.
In episode seven, which is in part why
we chose it to be the first episode,
they are all out of sorts.
We thought, "Well, what better
way to start the process,
because our actors
need to find their characters."
The Lord of the Tides
rules the sea.
Even Harvey, little Harvey,
was not able to play himself.
We wrote a lot of these,
like, 10-12-15-17 page scenes
that all take place in one place
with all of our cast and crew.
Which are, of course,
incredibly difficult to shoot
but they're really compelling pieces
of drama because you have all these
little mini scenes happening within
the larger overall scene.
And that wake sequence
is a great example of that.
We have nothing in common.
She's our sister.
You marry her, then.
I would perform my duty,
if mom had only betrothed us.
It was an experience for me in terms
of learning how to direct theater,
because it quickly became apparent that
the best way to shoot it was to have
the entire sequence play as one,
and then go around
picking pieces of it off much
to the chagrin of the actors.
No matter how fat the leech grows,
it always wants for another meal.
Cut! I need it right there.
We're shooting with four cameras
on a very small little bit of set
that had been built on this sort of
sea-facing side of Michael's Mount.
I think everybody was a bit like,
"What are we doing?"
It was so many people
on that tiny bit of set.
We couldn't get dollies or cranes down
there, so moving the camera,
adjusting height during shot
was really difficult.
It was very much a scene that he'll use
all four cameras, longer lenses,
focus pulls between foreground
and background.
It was shot over five days, and we had
everything but the weather confer us.
Fabian pulling his hair out,
trying to match, one day,
beautiful sunshine, next day,
howling gale.
That's definitely those scenes.
Those are the scenes that are shot over
five days and you just shoot everywhere
and you have to try
and match it somehow.
But you're shooting this side one day,
and you're shooting this
side the other day.
This scene was supposed
to take place over the course of a day.
So, we had to have a daytime scene,
dusk, and a nighttime scene.
There were days that were
very sunny and strong
and there were days
that were windy and grey.
And some of the shots that were supposed
to be in the middle of the daytime,
are now night shots.
And so, you can't really have very, very
strong shadows in night shots.
So, we're having to roto-out all
the people, get rid of all the shadows,
and then relight a lot of those scenes.
A lot of the boats that were out to sea,
we're painting all of those out,
the farms and the towns that are along
the coastline in the background.
Where we shot, down in Cornwall, was
such a beautiful location to start with,
so it's just augmenting that real
location and making it feel lived-in
and the right period.
It was a very interesting experience
and a really good learning curve.
And surprisingly,
I mean, it came out quite well.
Looking back now,
in hindsight,
at some of the stuff that
we shot there, I thought was great.
Like the funeral, even though it was
tricky and dangerous, it really worked.
We were all on this island together,
and it was just a really nice experience
to kick things off.
We hold back the reveal on this a bit
because it is the most exciting dragon.
Vhagar, the oldest,
largest dragon in the world,
certainly the largest dragon
you've ever seen on Game of Thrones,
many times bigger than Drogon was,
and Drogon was a huge dragon.
Vhagar was
a hundred and thirty years old.
One of the concepts of this series is
that dragons keep growing and growing.
As they get older and older, we see they
get more battered, more weather-worn,
and they start to struggle to support
their own weight.
Dragons just, essentially,
grow until they die.
And part of their death-cycle is getting
too large, too big for the world.
And Vhagar's so large that she doesn't
really fit anywhere anymore.
In our story, she doesn't even fit
in the dragon pit anymore,
and that's created a bit of a loner
personality to her.
She's very grumpy, she sleeps a lot,
you know, she's like an old cat.
Aemond finds Vhagar hiding in the dunes
and Vhagar becomes his ride.
It's such an important
growth moment for him.
He claims the biggest dragon who's ever
existed, which, in the beginning,
is terrifying because she's, you know,
a hundred and fifty meters long.
It's one of the sequences
that we first started pre-vising.
We shot day one on day two, him
approaching Vhagar on Holywell Beach.
Because it was so complex, we had
to stick pretty-much to the pre-vis.
I had him running around
these sand dunes for two days.
The wind's going and, and like,
literally, he looks at me, and he's got,
kind of, he's encrusted with sand
in his eyes.
And I'm like,
"Just one more take."
We shot dragon-riding
in The Volume nearly six months later.
Filming on a dragon. Obviously,
you don't get much better than that.
Hello, guys.
We are going on to set.
Dragon riding again.
You do the drop, boom. And as you drop,
the camera comes up, and then you
Gonna be very fun.
Special Effects, Mike Dawson and his
team, they developed a new motion base,
which has much-more extreme angles
than I've used before,
so it can be more dynamic.
We used it on what's known
as The Volume, which is new technology.
Basically, the environment
is surrounded by,
I think it's, two and a
half thousand LED TV screens.
Three, two, one. Line!
This is a three-axis
motion base that we built.
Visual Effects can give us previs.
We can feed that in.
It will move exactly as the previs,
so all the movements can be repeated.
It's all got to be quite precise.
We had a special-rigged seat,
which was rigged vertically,
so we could hang out of the saddle.
The first day was quite hard.
And the next day I came in,
I felt so much power.
And I was like,
"I need to get this as well as I can."
Three, two, one. Action!
I think it, kind of, overwhelmed me
at some point, you know?
Trying to focus on so many different
things, hanging off ten feet in the air.
It's a stunt.
That's why they call it "Stunts."
Leo is a natural, an absolute natural.
We shot additional, final approach
moments on blue screen
almost seven months later, so
Actually, one of our concerns was making
sure he doesn't look like he's growing up
during the course of the scene.
We started shooting one year,
and we finished a year later.
I'm surprised we made it.
I loved every second of it.
And I think it came out pretty well.
Prior to starting, the most concerning
sequence for everybody is this fight
when Aemond comes back after having
ridden the dragon.
Vhagar is my mother's dragon.
Your mother's dead.
Vhagar has a new rider now.
The goal of it was always to make it feel
like a fight amongst young adults.
The actors are aged from nine to twelve.
How do I manage these five kids and
get them ready to shoot this sequence?
I've never done a fight
fighting before.
The questions are, "Can we do it?"
And the answer always has to be, "Yes."
We had, like, a week of just stunts.
You'd have, like, a couple of hours
of just rehearsing, over and over again.
Punching and, like, kicking,
and, like, practice fighting.
It gave us the ability to teach them
how to fight, how to maintain distance,
how to maintain control.
It's more about making them
go up and out.
It also taught them,
when the camera's over here,
you might have to change
a punch to go across the face.
It taught them how to film fight.
I shouldn't do it like that.
I should do it like that, at the bottom.
When it's an angle at the camera.
And cut.
I would always be kinda surprised that
he had managed to get them
as effective at doing
these sequences as he had.
Rowley very smartly wanted them to show
up on set with all that muscle memory
built into them so that they could just
worry about their performance stuff.
We're all really good friends,
all of us kids who are fighting,
but we just have to hate each other.
You're in this cramped space,
and it's really hot.
And you're just going at it every time.
And you need to give it a hundred
percent energy every single time.
Jumping jacks, please.
Way out of breath.
And three, two, one,
and action.
You'll die screaming in vain
just as your father did.
Because it's children, you can't really
get them to throw dirt
in each other's eyes or cut their
eyeballs out,
so there's a lot of blade
replacements and blood added.
But most of it is, is the Prosthetics
Team's work, which is brilliant.
They had to put blood in my mouth.
It's a disgusting taste. I'm sorry.
But I had to, like, spit it out.
I had to have some Listerine
just to wipe that all out.
And then, again!
I had to do it again!
We had a laugh, that's for sure.
There was a couple hilarious moments.
They had fun with it. They made it like
camp. They really did a great job of it.
The thing about kids fighting
is you need every hit to land.
Because otherwise, it looks like staged.
I've seen the cut and it does look pretty
feral what they're doing to each other.
It was hard. And I'm so proud
of everyone who was involved.
Well done, guys. Well done.
Very good.
Working with other actors, choreographing
a long scene, and just getting it done,
and having the feeling that you've
just completed something incredible,
it just makes you feel so good inside.
Gods be good.
The episode is really bookended
by these two very long scenes,
"The Wake" being one that doesn't
really end in much resolution.
And this one is
"The Great Coming Together"
that ends with a very final
punch to it.
We got it up and running
as 15 or so actors,
and then we added
40 extras into the mix.
It felt like we started to really,
sort of, be the characters.
Miguel and people around
could see the thing come to life
just a little bit more.
Losing an eye is quite something.
There was so much work
going into that makeup.
We created an appliance which went over
the one side of his face.
We had this slash which went basically
down his forehead through his eyeball
and onto his cheek and the maester's
sowing the cheek up.
Prosthetics team did a great job.
We don't shy away from those details,
so you do see the skin being sewn up.
Jace? Luke!
The nature of prosthetics are
they always take a long time
in the chair in the morning.
But with a young child when you've got
reduced day, obviously,
the pressure's on to get it applied onto
somebody's face as quick as possible.
I was just coated. It was all
down the side of my face and hair.
There were a lot of jokes about
"Oh, you've been a fight."
-Enough.
-It should be my son telling the tale!
-He called us
-Silence!
Cut.
I've never shot scenes for as long as we
have on this, ever. But I enjoyed that.
Yeah, it was a huge scene
that we did over days and days and days.
I realized very quickly that
the ringmaster in the scene was Paddy.
He was tired, but he was kind of elated
at this performance he was having to do.
And he really
just kept everybody's energy up.
I loved shooting that.
I thought it was a fantastic scene.
There was a lot going on in it.
It was so, like,
meticulously choreographed.
It's a family saga.
It's all about the relationships
between the individual characters.
So, everybody in that scene
has a different motive,
and is therefore looking at certain
people at certain times.
We shot, again, with four cameras.
A lot of it was about,
"How can we get one camera here
and not see another camera there?"
But if you take the time
to make that work,
then you can be really efficient with it.
I shall have one
of her son's eyes in return.
It's a long shoot, but in between takes,
everyone was having a laugh.
Paddy, like, fell over at one point,
which was hilarious.
There were so many funny moments.
But at the same time,
there were so many incredible moments,
to witness from my position,
of excellence in acting.
And it's so mesmerizing to watch,
even from an actor's kind of vision.
Where is duty?
Where is sacrifice?
That's actually one of my favorite scenes
that we shot in the season.
It's finally boiling over,
all these years, and it's a joy to watch.
Now they see you as you are.
Rhaenyra and Daemon
are old-school Targaryens.
They really are all about fire and blood.
The writers took what material we had,
knowing what we knew about Old Valyria,
knowing that any kind of marriage
ceremony would probably be a bit primal.
And so, one of our writers wrote vows,
which we gave off to David J. Peterson,
our Valyrian translator,
to translate into High Valyrian.
And we turned it all into
a ceremonial Valyrian wedding.
All right, quiet please, everyone.
Here we go. Shooting!
Whether it's a wedding or a funeral,
it's a ceremony.
And they will present themselves
for a ceremony.
And we have to back that up
with hair, jewelry, and looks.
All of that has to be thought out.
We gave them quite a stark makeup.
They meant business.
That love in that wedding is a real love.
It's not for show. She's not marrying
someone she's been told to marry.
Emma's got quite a big hair ornament.
There's almost a little mirror.
If you look at them, there's a slight
twist that echoes each other.
It's a nice look.
Those last two lines that you said,
like, you say those lines,
and then, "You may kiss the bride."
That was actually
one of the most difficult costumes.
I couldn't do more than what I had done
before for the different wedding.
So I thought it would be a good approach
to do something completely different.
We thought, "What about going in
the direction of the dragonkeeper?"
Something very simple, very kimono-like,
which seemed to have been created
before the Targaryens.
I wanted
the red blood-elements in it.
We had to create the tie-dye,
going from red into the purity of white,
and that was a lot of work.
The costumes were
beautifully hand-printed by our team,
and required a huge amount of work
to finish, get ready, and then age.
Because they had to look like
they were thousands of years old
and to be ready for Matt and Emma
to wear them on the day,
was quite a challenge.
Rhaenyra and Daemon,
they're normally a potent chemical mix.
But briefly, during this ceremony,
I don't know,
there's something quite
peaceful about it.
It's just magical.