02x01 - A Son for a Son

[bunniefuu]

The Dance of the Dragons
is fully kicked off.

Everything just feels
like it's times ten.

It's like we grew the town.

Well, Ryan said to me at one time

"It's much more Games of Thrones-y."

What am I allowed to say?

I've never eaten so much Manchego.

It gets messy.

It's good to be back in the saddle.

Okay, guys, we're rolling sound.
Please be quiet.

And action!

It's a bit of a dance, this.

- What the hell?
- Well...

Oh, it's gonna get hot.

It was wonderful to see everyone.

Nice to be back on set

to be aiming for something

that's bigger and better.

Feels good, you know?

I work with such amazing

and beautiful people.

This is the best cast
that I've worked with.

We're all such a unit.
I love them so much.

- This is BTS?
- Yes.

Hi. Welcome.

First day back was like that summer
when you leave school

and then you come back
and all the boys

have got, like trousers

that don't fit properly anymore

and all the girls are, like

a foot taller.

Just exactly like

being in Harry Potter.

And it is your second year at school

and you've got a better wand.

It wasn't as if

we'd been away, really.

It felt kind of like we'd had
a couple of weeks off.

It's like ya never left.

You know, it's like coming home.

'Cause you walk and you go, "Yeah.

This is my house. I know this place."

Felt like a long time coming.

It's been great
to be back with the g*ng.

This is genuinely
my favorite cast that

I've ever worked with.

The scale of season two has been

above and beyond
my expectations, at least.

Everything about it is massive.

It's like this room is massive.

There's nothing in it that's small

apart from some nuanced acting,
which is nice and small.

Your imagination
almost doesn't allow you

to think a set could be this big.

It's bigger, it's badder.

We've got more dragons.

We've just taken it
to a ten in every department.

Dragon!

Yeah. It's massive.
We had two main units.

So you're sh**ting two movies

every day, all at the same time.

Oh, it's very similar to a big film

but the fundamental difference is

there are five directors.

We've made the slightly crazy
but efficient choice

to block sh**t the entire season

which means we have two units

sh**ting continuously

five different directing teams

four different DPs.

And that's how we started.
Then, now, we've got two units

plus a splinter unit,
plus an elements unit

and sometimes, units are splitting
into two to accomplish more things.

My brain would short out and I would
just give up trying to grasp it all.

It's huge and it's just the level
and the scale of the sets

the number of crew

the catering figures.

There's no one unit that seems
to be having a easy time of it.

For me, it's script beget plan

beget schedule, beget budget.

When you work that system
and you have a collective

everybody is putting
every minute of every day

into improving that narrative.

As a director, you're not quite sure
what you're going to be handed

and you look for the things
and find things

that you know are gonna be
personally satisfying.

And I got to go back to Winterfell.

I didn't really ask why
'cause I was so happy to do it

that I just went with it.

Hearing that music
and seeing Winterfell

be revealed over the mountains
and then going to the Wall

it's hard not to get emotional,
even as a salty, old veteran like me.

Walking on the Wall,
being surrounded by Starks

that was one of the best moments.

It's such an iconic part
of this whole world.

We definitely wanted to be
faithful to the look

that had been established there,
but there are differences as well.

Like, the grade
for House of the Dragon

is quite different to the grade
for Game of Thrones

but you still want the fans to

get that little buzz
of excitement as well

that we get from sh**ting it again.

We definitely did not want

to reinvent the wheel

with the Wall and Winterfell.

That was such a, sort of,
fond memory for all the audience.

We've tried to do justice to it

and bring it back
as they remember it.

So it had to have that
Game of Thrones look

and we went back
to see how they did it

and get that feel as
closely as we could.

That was necessary to hold within
the scriptures, if you like.

Quite a part of that set,
actually, is digital

so we'd done all of those
drawings prior to sh**ting.

The whole opening

was really heavily previs'd.

You know, it's a huge wall.

You need to make sure that
we kinda get a sense of that.

And we do have some assets

that have been kept

from Game of Thrones
that we can work with

but, of course, you always

develop on them.

Visual effects moves quite quickly.

There was the backlot set,
which is up on top of the Wall.

It's so cleverly built

that most of what we're seeing

is just the sky

until you go out on
the kind of outlook pieces

and then that becomes our world.

It's a pretty contained set
once we're in it

from a dramatic point of view.

You know,
we're adding the Northern view

which, you know, we all...
we all love and fear.

What does it keep out?

Death.

To get it right was important

so we used all the references

that we could
from the original build.

We thought we'd try
and give it what it deserved

in givin' it an icy feel to it,
which we did with wax.

It's amazing how much
fake snow and stuff

can really make you
get in the mood for it.

There was a couple of times

where me and Tom

who plays Cregan,
we were trying to do our lines

and, you know, you just get
a couple of snow up the nose

'cause it's just snow everywhere.

I wanted my snow
to be a little bit whiter

because their wall is older.

So I wanted it to be newer.

You have to stipulate like,
"I want icicles.

I want bit there and a bit there."

And you go down
and tweak it durin' the day.

And then we dress it with like...

make it sparkly
and all that kinda stuff.

What we have on the van,
there is a Krendl that's an agitator.

So we put the product in there

the agitator kinda breaks it up
and stuff for us.

Got a water tank

that pumps the water down

to this nozzle here.

Paper will come through then as well.

Test the water.

Good.

So we got a 300-liter drum,
tanks there as well that we use, so.

I'll probably use one or two of them,
depending on how big the dress is.

The main changes really
have been different people

have moved into different spaces
with the change of regime.

There was a thinking in how
we distribute those apartments.

Obviously, when Helaena
became the Queen

she would inherit
the Queen's apartments.

When it was Alicent's reign,
it was quite monastic

and minimal to support her character.

And now, Helaena,
who is much more dreamlike

and of the natural world,
has actually scrawled

what we could respectfully
call "graffiti" on the walls

to illustrate her thoughts,
her thinking process.

Just as any writer or artist

might make notes in a book
or a sketchbook.

Helaena sees and perceives
the world in a different way

and cultivates different things

out of day-to-day interaction
than perhaps you and I would.

She has graffiti-ed her walls
with her dreams

and we think
it really imbued the place

with a great deal
of character for her.

Helaena was fantastic.
Her character was engaging.

You know, the fact that her anxiety

and her walls
of graffiti and graphics

sort of exposes the life

that she's going through

and her only way of escapism.

I introduced these
really beautiful cabinets

which I bought in India, actually

they were high up
in this kind of, like, room

that I wasn't allowed to go to,
covered in dust and dirt.

And the people were saying,
"You can't go up there."

And I was like, "I've spotted four
of these cabinets, and I want them."

When you tilt them open,
they're really pretty

with all the lovely
butterflies and insects.

Just so many insects.

I got to work with these crickets

in these little wooden cages.

They were making quite
a few escapes, actually

which was quite fun.

Just loads of embroidery, like,
so many spiders and owls and bats

and kind of just
creepy, cool Helaena things.

We had this dilemma,
well, where do we place Alicent?

And it seemed that there
was a kind of nice irony

that she would end up
in Rhaenyra's apartment.

Interesting scene as that's where
Rhaenyra lost her virginity.

And then that's where
she's having sex with Cole.

They both had sex with Cole
in the same room.

Sweet irony.
It's all very, very messy.

The Red Keep is
a very incestuous place.

The Princess Rhaenyra is
brazen and relentless.

A spider who stings and
sucks her prey dry.

We changed
a little bit of the furniture

but we wanted it to be apparent
there was a constant memory

of Rhaenyra being in this room

so we kept the architecture
and the position of furniture.

In Aegon's apartment

we decided that that would
pretty much stay the same.

He wasn't the man who was interested
in decoration or furniture

so he just moved in.

Gone are all the histories and books

because Aegon thinks
he doesn't need that.

Him wearing the crown is
enough for him to rule.

There is a new sheriff in town

and Aegon's reign as king
is very different than Viserys

and the way that Viserys obsessed
about history and legacy

is not something
that is on Aegon's mind.

- Your Grace.
- Good day.

Because, in the Council Chamber,
most of the camera angles

are looking towards the big window

looking out across the view

we ended up, first season

with a lot of visual effects,
which, obviously, is very costly

so we decided to go
a slightly old-fashioned route

and put a scenically painted
backing in there

by this brilliant artist
called Steve Mitchell.

And if you go right up close to it

it seems to be
just a blur of splodges.

And then when you step back
to where the camera is

it just comes into focus
as a view across King's Landing.

It's a technique that's
been used for many years

and it's persuading people
that it's still a good way

to do a in-camera view
out of a window.

A lot of times in the series,
we're looking at maps as top shots

looking down at the table

and often, because of that,
they don't get serviced, in a way.

We just thought it was
interesting to see the map

in a y-axis space
versus an x-axis space.

So it was just a more interesting
visual way to dramatize the w*r

and got people up
and moving around a bit.

Those council sessions
can be challenging to sh**t

because everybody's
sitting down, sipping wine.

I was trying to pitch that the map

that Otto Hightower brings
in the Small Council Chamber

is something that sits on the table
and is potentially being put together

as, like, pieces of ivory.

And the first time
I showed it to Ryan

his initial reaction was,
"Yes, I love it.

But, please, can you make it

like World w*r II map?"

We've had our concept artist working
on making it a standing-up map.

All of these areas of Westeros

are gonna be split
into separate sets of ivory

based on, like, the geographical
elements of Westeros.

They expect to march quickly

meeting little resistance
until they reach

the Riverlands.

We just talked a little bit,
the early days of design

had a little input, and then she did
a beautiful job of evolving that

and made it into
the stunning piece that it is.

It's an amazing bit of dressing.

It's an amazing action prop
is what it actually is

biggest one that Ellie
or I have been involved in.

Logistically, there's a lotta
times it has to move

and there's a lotta
manpower involved in doin' it.

It was a lump.

It was made for real
and it was very heavy.

The Red Keep had a 400% extension.

The general consensus was,
from legacy players

the courtyard was small.

The number of scenes

season one
didn't justify that scale of build

so this season,
we've been able to do it

and it links directly into
the King's Landing streets

which we had done
digitally last year.

And it's really given scale and depth

to that run of street.

One of the magical things

about Jim's sets

is that once you're on them,
you can forget you're on a set.

You can walk around
for a good 10 minutes

before you see a scaffolding tube.

It makes it possible to do so much

without mounting the incredible costs

that come along
with filming on location.

So far, we've done
our King's Landing scenes

in a beautiful medieval town
in Spain called Cáceres.

The problem with sh**ting
in beautiful cities

like Cáceres and Trujillo

is these are World Heritage Sites,
so you can't throw horse crap

and mud all over the street
and set things on fire.

If you wanna do that kind of thing,
you have to build your set.

So what we did this year
is we expanded

our King's Landing backlot set.

Nice.

It had been my ambition
on this season

to build part of King's Landing

so the point was to make it
seamlessly connect to the real place.

Hopefully, we've done that
with the look and the style.

I'm told you bear
a mislike for the Hightowers.

f*ck the Hightowers.

The boldest thing
that I think we did there

was decide to give the last


over to these two characters
that we had never met before.

Knowing that you're watching
Game of Thrones

and you don't know
what is going to come for you

from where, hopefully, is the fun

and the horror for the audience
that's yet to come.

I was also given to understand

that you possess a unique
knowledge of the Red Keep.

Maegor's tunnels.

Great big rat's nest, it is.

I know them better than
the shape of my own c*ck.

We have all these monumental sets.

We have Dragonstone,
we've got the Red Keep

and we've got Driftmark.

But the most intense reaction

the crew had to a set

was when we shot the sewer

for Blood and Cheese.

I'd never really thought
about Maegor's tunnels

but we had to explore them,
we had to represent them.

Jim Clay did an amazing job
of building some mini sets

and then sort of incorporating
into the larger set of the Red Keep.

It's always great to do
a sewer for an art department.

Mike Dawson put in the water

and it was absolutely flowing
like a mad river.

The sewer is probably my favorite set

my easiest set,
the prettiest set, I think.

I know it's a sewer.

We wanna delay
that first fluid dump, mate

just until they're slightly
deeper in there.

We didn't get
much of a brief on that.

They were just plowing
through the water

and I thought
"I'm gonna go to town on this."

They're all mad men.

It was incredible
and kind of horrible.

A medieval sewer.

I can imagine better places
to spend time.

We were like, "How are we gonna
build this tank effectively

quickly, portable?"

So we ended up buying these
concrete blocks that slot together

and we built up a wall around it.

We designed it so that
we had big pumps on one end

makin' a flow down through the canal.

And then I put in tip tanks

so it looks like people are
flushing water down.

And there was multiple layers,
so you get, like, cascades.

Then we opened it up for Malcolm
to come in with all these guys

and they built on top of it.
We didn't have one single leak.

Which is very unusual
for any tank anywhere.

They had some massive,
fully functioning pumps in there

turnin' the water around.
It actually recycled water.

They brought the tank in,
then we built the set inside

using the tunnel from season one
with the water.

The way the special effects
done their side of it

it looked fantastic.

I remember turning it on
for the first time

and everything was working
really, really good.

And I thought,
"I'm gonna get a gold star here."

I called Alan up and said,
"Would you like to come and see it?"

And he just walked in.
He went, "Ooh..."

And that was good.

And then, the production office
rang me up and they said

"Oh, can we come
and see the sewer set?"

So we was turning it on
for, like, a guided tour.

I think we were taking
more people in it

than the Harry Potter tour
at one point.

I was really thrilled.

We're sh**ting right here
for the sewer entrance.

I mean, when they said,
"You're in a sewer."

I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna
be up to here in a swimming pool

and there'll be green screens
all around me

and they'll get it done."

And then I get there

and they've built a sewer.

The water's waist-high,
carrying a dog and a torch.

It's like, we're in a hangar



And here I am at the Red Keep.

Yeah. It's... bonkers.

Okay, send the water, please, Tommy.

I think PJ was excited
about doing these big spaces

lit only by a torch.

You know, we all watched
The Third Man again

'cause anybody who shoots in a tunnel

has to go back and watch
The Third Man.

It was great imagery, I think.

That was a lot of fun.

We got to chase these two guys,
follow these two guys

lead these two guys
through all these spaces

tramping through a sewer
with running sewer water

and see parts of the Red Keep
we'd never seen before.

It's just a DP's dream.

The design team on this
have just surpassed themselves.

We rarely double up on angles

because of the opportunities

this set gives us.

Because their mission
is about subterfuge.

They're trying to be secret
but, obviously, the castle is dark

and the space
they're going through is dark

so they're carrying the torch.

The interplay of the firelight
bouncing off walls

makes it really magical.

I really wanted to lean into that

so we kept the lighting
of the set itself

to a bare minimum,
so that as they move through spaces

you had a sense that you
were moving through the space.

You never had a sense that you knew
where they were heading.

You were discovering where they
were going as they discovered it.

In terms of getting into character

you don't really
have to do very much.

I don't have to say to myself, "Okay,
you're in a castle. Deliver..."

Like, all that's done.

We need to get our head and get out.

We had to just
not think of it as like

we're going into film the most,
like, horrifying thing.

Another heartwarming moment
from George R. R. Martin, everybody.

This shot involved

a lot of different methods

of moving the camera

going backwards at speed

up and down stairs, spinning around

trying to capture the performance
from fear at the same time.

Yeah, this certainly
had its challenges.

And by the time we come around,
we want him to be that...

that far away from us.

So she's going faster and faster.

So when we come around

she's, you know,
we're seeing her head to toe there.

She's getting...
she's going faster than us.

- Yes.
- And we want it to be believable.

Then when we come around here
and she's that far away from us.

Yeah.

SFX did an amazing job
making it look very atmospheric

with all the rain
and the wind inside the stage.

We got 10,000 liters

of water sittin' outside

ready to pump into the stage.

We have to make sure
that the landing area

for the water is sealed.

We've got a membrane down,
we've got some sort of management

so we can get some pumps in.

And then, ultimately, it just
comes down to a lotta squeegees

a lotta labor, and some pumps
just pumpin' it out the door.

It's a small piece of a large puzzle.
I think it's gonna look epic.

That journey at the end
of episode one

it's my hope that
that kind of lives in infamy

through House of the Dragon
and its legacy.