House of the Dragon: The House that Dragons Built

We went to some pretty gnarly places.

It was like, "How are we gonna make that?"

Shit, that's the throne.

I was so excited at the idea.

It feels like it's gonna hit you in areas I don't think you want to be hit in.

You are awe-inspired by it.

You're just kind of like, "Oh, my God. This is serious."

Right from the beginning, we had to live up to the huge,

almost unscalable expectations of the original series.

Game of Thrones was its own thing.

And it was a cultural phenomenon, and it was brilliant.

This is something else. It's a different story.

The scale of this story is told in a different way.

Something that set the original Game of Thrones

apart from any other fantasy series is that, ultimately,

you cared about those characters.

What I liked was that it still had the Game of Thrones flavor,

but actually was a different take.

This is our journey now,

and we've got to make the most of our experience on this show.

I can't tell you how many conversations there have been about,

"Let's start at Thrones,

and then let's be good at Thrones, and let's evolve it out."

And I realized that we need a combination of old hands and new blood.

It was quite a lot of pressure

because the work was so good, of course, on Game of Thrones.

We've got a standard to live up to.

And we talked a lot about, "How can we make this different,

but still keeping it within the Game of Thrones world?"

The intention was never to do season nine of Game of Thrones.

It was to try to find something new and different.

It's always a weird moment because you get that great call,

which is that we're gonna go make this thing.

And you're happy for a few seconds.

And then you realize, "Oh, shit, I now have to go make this thing."

The Great Council felt like a good way to start people off.

So it's the first scene of the pilot.

It's the opening scene. It's really important to get it right.

Go, two, three. One, two, three. One.

Viserys was on one side and Rhaenys was on the other side.

And literally, in front of the whole court,

the council voted for who was going to succeed.

Rhaenys is standing there feeling like she's a contestant on Blind Date.

That's great. And then, Paddy, if I could step you out.

So we're gonna do the same thing, but without Paddy in.

So I'll tell you a secret. It's actually been shot in the Throne Room.

Halfway through building the Throne Room proper,

we get them to paint it mostly green. And then build the stand and the throne.

A lot of VFX work, so it seemed we don't need to spend a load of money

building the whole Harrenhal as a kind of practical set.

What we need is the background, the throne.

So we built one end section in a green-screen stage,

and then the rest is placed virtually.

Harrenhal is semi-destroyed.

So you're seeing outside of the hall itself into the environment outside,

which is fully CG, which is great.

Harrenhal had been seen in Game of Thrones,

but what we had to do in this one is invent a lot more detail.

If you look closely, you can see there's a number of English cathedrals

and churches that we referenced. There's a bit of Whitby Abbey in there.

And we integrated key references in George R.R. Martin's books.

It's meant to be a huge hall,

so we've tried to get that sense of scale in the opening shots.

You are awe-inspired by it, and it's kind of like,

"Oh, my God, this is serious."

I remember we spent the whole day on that with the crowd and the maesters

walking the box up to the old king.

And the actor who played the king did not want to do any speaking parts,

but loved the idea of doing a non-speaking one.

It was actually Michael Carter, Bib Fortuna from Return of the Jedi.

So I was losing my mind and telling myself to be cool,

and not go start quoting Huttese to him or anything like that.

Our reference for this was a really royal, flamboyant,

kind of wedding almost.

And so, I wanted to sort of bring that element of grandeur to it,

but obviously in a space that's quite derelict.

It was one of those kind of, "I hope this all looks okay when we're done."

Because if you saw that set, it's kind of insane

when you see the finished product that, "Wow, this is really epic."

'Cause so much of it was green screen.

It is declared that Prince Viserys remain heir to the Iron Throne.

In the original books,

George always described the throne as being made from thousands of swords.

I wanted to make a hybrid version that still honored the throne

from the original series.

The throne kind of spread out and became this carpet of swords.

Suggesting that, at some point in time, the throne changes.

So Ryan had said to me, "This throne is made from the swords of the conquered."

And somehow, that was a key thing,

that this was all about the power of this Targaryen dynasty.

When I first approached it, I just duplicated lots and lots of swords.

And that sort of killed the computer, basically,

because there was just so many swords.

It looked great in concept, but it was like, "How are we gonna make that?"

So my idea was, basically, to create a structure out of steel rods,

and we wrapped the whole thing in plaster bandage.

So when it was wet, it just sagged on that steel structure.

So it looks like it was melted already.

This is the biggest hero prop I've made, really. And it's the most recognizable.

We probably had about six or eight people for four, five months of that.

I think we purchased, made,

and cast about two and a half thousand swords, minimum.

And there was a lot of logistics

and working out how that can be done safely as well.

There's a lot of blades poking out of the ground there.

When we showed up the first time,

there were these signs that just said, "Danger."

They were terrified that somebody was just going to trip and impale themselves.

We realized we needed to change the columns in the throne room.

And that needed to be a way in which we could show the past.

So we did a lot of artwork before Conrad and his team got those.

And then it was turned into a three-dimensional model

before we then cast into the bigger scale.

They look great on a drawing that big.

But when that is a six-meter item, you have a lot of planned area.

So we wanted to put some detail in those.

We looked at the history of the Targaryen battles and dragons

and all that kind of stuff for what that history and that tale could be.

It had a lot of emotional impact as well because when Viserys sits on the throne,

the weight of history is on his shoulders

because his previous kings are looking down upon him.

And then at the end of the room, there's the partially carved column,

which will eventually become him.

It speaks to how important the history of the lineage is to the Targaryen dynasty.

I mean, that whole set is fantastic. It does exactly what it's meant to do.

It's big, it's intimidating, and it looks cool.

It is one of the most beautiful sets I've ever seen in my entire life.

And I think because that throne is so iconic,

to be able to build on what has already been established

has been pretty unbelievable.

When I walked on that stage the first time,

it was an emotional moment, I think.

Seeing that realized, and realizing that we're actually making this thing.

It was just kind of like, "Oh, shit. That's the throne."

When I walked into the throne room for the first time,

there was a sort of moment that I had of like, "Oh, wow."

And then the first thing I did, you know, was climb up the stairs and sit on it.

I did not get to sit on the throne, and I'm furious about that.

I'm disappointed that I'm not sitting in it right now.

And I was a bit, sort of, like, precious on it.

I didn't want to turn around and see someone sitting on it.

I want to sort of sling 'em off.

This is the age of dragons. At this point in the history,

there have never been as many dragons in the world since the time

of Old Valyria when there a thousand dragons alive.

And what we really tried to do was create a world where dragons existed.

I think that dragons in this are symbolic of a number of things.

The reason that the Targaryens are considered

as being closer to gods is because of their dragons.

So symbolically, they have this role.

Father, has something happened?

Balerion was the last living creature to have seen Old Valyria before the Doom.

It's greatness and its flaws.

When you look at the dragons, what do you see?

Cut.

-A big fat... -A dragon.

You see Balerion's skull and you see the size of dragons.

Because the size of dragons then were much larger than the dragons

that you saw in Game of Thrones.

I mean, that thing is epic. You would not want to face down the Black Dread.

We did some very rough original sketches

that very quickly went to the concept artists.

I sculpted it in ZBrush, and then we 3-D printed a version of it.

And that was really useful for the sculptors.

That was a brilliant thing to make.

And it was about nine meters long, so it's huge.

A shortcut, structurally, when you make something big,

is let the teeth rest on each other and become columns, effectively.

To make this look more aggressive, we wanted thinner, spikier teeth.

So we made the teeth separately.

We rigged out the mouth with metalwork so it would stay open of its own accord.

We made it over about seven weeks with about four sculptors.

And then, of course, at the end, there's a lot of painting to do.

Texturing, alterations, you know.

These things can go on forever.

Powerful, but not invincible.

At the time that Game of Thrones took place,

there was less respect for the dragons.

And therefore, we felt this time,

it should be in more of a respectful cathedral.

So we build this set with a big dome ceiling

and placed it on an altar so that it paid due deference

to the importance of the dragons in our story.

Straightaway, if you want to just frame up on the whole of Balerion's skull,

you're shooting off the set.

You can only build a set to a certain height within a stage.

In most of the shots in there,

you're looking slightly up at that enormous skull.

So we're adding ceiling to that.

On the set, I like to sort of doodle

and figure out how we're going to do a set extension.

So I do a bit of photoshop paint mode.

And it allows me, occasionally, to actually turn it round and show

it to the director and say, "What do you think of that?"

And then sort of get sign off on a concept art piece.

And then that goes to me and it goes straight to whichever vendor

we're gonna use to do that work. It's turned out beautifully.

A Targaryen must understand this to be king... or queen.

When you see her there,

it is a bit of deer in the headlights because her father's told her,