The House That Dragons Built

It was on the chair.

-It was on the chair. -Right, right.

-Light a fire. -Faster. A bit more energy.

That's it, that's it.

-Ready. -Stand by. And action!

For me, directing is all about how to illustrate

what's going on in the heads, hearts, and souls

of people.

So I really wanted this

to be Rhaenyra's experience of the world,

and to be with Rhaenyra the whole time.

Ryan said to me, "I don't want this to be in the usual style."

Somebody said that art is creativity meeting limitations,

and I always loved that description of art.

And I think a great bottle episode is that.

So you just take these limitations, like,

"Let's do an episode that's all just on sets

"that we own and cover, and like, what is that?"

-So, let's push the dollies back a bit. -Yeah.

As a writer, I love these episodes because they are really challenging.

And it was Sara, Sara Hess' idea to tell the story

of the first days of Rhaenyra's reign solely from her point of view.

I knew I wanted to push myself and the team.

So, Alejandro and I watched lots of films,

and we thought about how we could develop this style

for Episode Three.

We actually talked about Conclave a lot

because it has that kind of same energy to it,

and that feeling of this political thriller

that's really on its feet and you're,

you're on edge for a while in the episode.

You don't really know why.

So, it's a very POV-style

episode, very intimate.

We wanted to give that different perspective.

And so, we created a bunch of rules

in terms of lenses, in terms of camera moves.

Whatever she experiences, we experience.

If she's not aware of it, the audience shouldn't be aware of it.

Everything's seen through Rhaenyra's eyes.

We call it the "Rhaenyra experience."

Ready. And action.

Clare did a lot of subjective shooting with this,

a lot of POV, a lot of leading and following shots

where you're in Rhaenyra's headspace

and able to, you know, spend time with her

and see what she's seeing, or see her seeing things.

And I think that brings a real life to the episode.

I banned any over-the-shoulder shots of another character to Rhaenyra

because she would never be able to see that.

The small council would look bigger

because she would never lead the small council.

Or, the hallways somehow feel more crowded.

Maybe she would see servants that she never noticed

before when she was there.

Most of Episode Three shot with one camera.

We used a special kind of lens for more POV intimate shots.

I loved this idea of being behind her,

like behind the workings of her brain in a way.

Just a simple camera move,

but it's like crawling around her head to her ear,

and then the world in front of her being out of focus.

So, we picked out this T-lens, the "hero lens," we called it.

In every scene, we shot something from her POV,

and we wanted to take risks and be quite daring with it.

It worked out really well, and we evolved the look

with Sean, the camera operator, and Ren, the brilliant focus-puller.

We'll get a few of these and then we'll break it down

a little bit more. Thank you.

The hardest challenge was to take yourself away

from a conventional approach to any scene.

Especially when we had five or six other players in the scene.

In an environment like the small council chamber

or the Red Keep, where we are now,

where you were so used to that environment

and you were so familiar with the angles,

to almost start again and write a new language

for that particular story.

It required a great deal of patience and concentration.

We did some very delicate moves, which Emma was fantastic at.

It was quite daunting.

Something that I felt I needed to be super clear about

was the sort of driving machinery, I suppose, of the episode.

You see Rhaenyra come up against a lot of obstacles.

But as an actor, one can't play obstacle,

that can only sort of stand in the way of a character's objective.

So, really sort of understanding

what it is that's driving her. And I think the thing that,

in conversation with Ryan and Sara and Clare,

the thing that became really clear was that it's a growing obsession

with formalized legitimacy that carries us through Three.

You've been invited into the castle

to meet with the queen, a private dinner with the queen.

A great honor afforded to all of you.

-It's a new era. And, yeah. -Waiting to see our new queen.

We're having great wine,

and waiting to see what food we're gonna have.

We're hoping for an amazing feast.

Rhaenyra has a wonderful plan.

And that is to feed disgusting rats and gruel and worms

to these very rich, entitled people.

Boiled rats or whatever,

whatever those were. I don't even want to know.

I walked in that day, I saw that, and I was like,

okay, I'm just gonna give my notes on this scene

and then move on to whatever else is shooting on the other stage.

I'm gonna start taking stuff over.

Alright.

It's really exciting to have a rat banquet.

I mean, that's brilliant. I mean, you know,

nobody gets to do that very often, you know?

It's a bit gore-ish and nasty.

And, you know, it just makes you think a little bit differently.

We had various conversations about it.

At first we thought it was going to be rats and squirrels,

chicken feet and just unpleasant heads and things.

And Clare said, "No, I just want it to be very, very simple.

Some sort of gruel. And the rat."

He gave me rat side.

We weren't gonna kill any pet rats,

so, obviously we had prosthetic rats made to go on plates.

We're just serving our lovely food.

-Rat. -So, we've got some rat.

And beetroot.

Yeah, really delish.

I'm perpetually amazed at the things

served in this show that are allegedly edible...

'Cause that's the amazing thing. All of it. Eat all...

You can have what you like.

On here, it's just rice.

Just black rice and beetroot and aubergine and some dates.

And the eels are just--

they're made out of the same stuff as fish sticks.

And it did look amazing.

Like, the Set Dec team did such an incredible job.

-It's very liquidy, this one. -Okay.

-Very soupy. -Thank you.

And I really remember, actually, that when they were first served out,

there was quite a strong response

from the actors playing the nobles.

So, I think that's when you know that the job's working.

The fuck is this?!

-He's my friend. -Yeah.

His name is Gertrude.

And he's going "Ack!"

Yummy.

-Okay? -'Kay, thank you.

Hello!

Sorry, that was-- you don't want that on film.

Rolling!

The way we planned the scene is like presenting the army first

and seeing how powerful this army could be.

But then, showing the other side...

...which was Daemon, Ulf, and Hugh with their dragons.

And how they were overpowering this,

you know, 10,000-people army.

Thank you, everyone. Standing up, please. Thank you.

From my side, it was about how to deal with the crowd replication,

to turn 150 into 15,000.

You have to plan the replication work very carefully with Visual Effects,

and with Clare and Alejandro.

We decided that we were gonna tile some shots.

When we want to increase the army, we scan lots of people on the day,

and then we turn them into digital soldiers

and we replicate them with CG.

A lot of shows don't do it anymore.

It takes time to do.

We're gonna move that group from here.

So, we have to shoot the army in one position,

then ask them all to move along,

shoot them in another position, then move along again.

You have to shuffle them

'cause you don't want the same people at the front of the line.

You're group A, yeah.

You're group B. Come on in for me.

-Yes. -Thank you very much.

They were-- you A or B?

-A. -A.

-A group's there, mate. -Yeah.

Keep going! Keep going!

There's a lot of prep work up front

with our military advisor, Paul Biddiss, and our crowd team, and myself.

So, working out the best layout for the army,

that looked good visually,

and then worked well for Visual Effects,

in terms of giving them the ease of replication

by placing certain things like a line of horses,

would maybe block what we don't want to see behind.

Shermy!

-There's nothing left... -Shermy.