The House That Dragons Built

Sorry. Rob, Rob, and Ben. Could we...

Good morning.

Hope everyone had a good weekend.

I did because I went to editorial

and watched our stuff all cut in, which is exceptional.

Everything is really delivering, so keep working at that high level.

We continue to push ourselves to get the best work.

Alright? Go, team.

Three, two, one!

Action!

When we kicked off 301, on the page, Ryan Condal wrote,

"In the vast landscape. In the windy hills of Westeros.

A sheep bleats."

The very first scene in Episode One, we shot in Wales,

a beautiful remote location.

We were toing and froing about

what would actually be the best conditions to shoot it in.

Should it be bright sunshine?

Or actually, should it be this

incredibly kind of oppressive, overcast look?

And, of course, in the end that was given to us, opposed to choice.

We want this to be a scenic painting of horror.

This is a turbulent space

that the character of Rhaena Targaryen has inhabited

alone on her quest to claim the wild dragon.

When I was at drama school and it was like,

how to deal with CGI and acting with things that aren't there,

you detail it as much as you can.

Give them like specific features, yada yada.

And, like, low key, Tina looks like Sheep stealer.

So, that was really helpful to be like, "It's just the baby."

Tina's auditioning for House of the Dragon to play Dragon.

Yeah, I mean, it's more of a scream, but yeah.

The buck is the best-kept secret on set.

I don't know why people don't talk about it enough.

And they're snakes for not doing it because it is the coolest thing ever.

Buck work can form quite a generic work flow.

But actually that was very different

because we had to build the side of the dragon

to allow Phoebe to then get handholds

to climb up the side of the buck, to be on the buck,

to then ride the buck.

This is on the six-axis motion base.

And one of the protocols is that you put somebody on it,

you tether them on for safety,

you mount all around it.

But then it was, well, we want her to get on

to the six-axis motion base, in camera, all in one shot.

So, it was like, "Okay, right, so how do we do this?"

Because I hadn't seen one before,

I sort of assumed everyone's looked like mine.

The changes, we put the boulders on there for your hands.

That's for your right foot.

Just before we start moving, can I just try climbing up?

Yeah, you can do it now if you want.

-Is that right? -Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, go on.

You know, you do this thing of like all this prep of like,

"Oh, and I have to imagine it's this and this."

There was none of that that I had to do

because it's just there and it's massive.

One of the things I want to make sure

that we think about as we're laying this out

is it's spread out.

So you have little bits and bobs of interest

throughout this view that we're looking at.

Stray horses,

stray battles,

mutilated head,

head being cut off a lion,

bodies being thrown into inferno.

Here we go, stand by.

Stand by. Pre clearing, please!

Here we are in Episode One and we find Daemon on fire,

literally!

You know, my big thought this year

was I wanted a lot more violence.

And they gave it to me.

We wanted to give it some action.

So we built some pretty interesting shots

to convey the idea that there's been a battle.

It's just tailing off now,

and we're coming in right at the end of the action.

Look what I found.

It's amazing what you find in Surrey.

We should also give a big shout out

to the prosthetics team for the Lannister lion,

which was absolutely gorgeous.

So in the case of the lion we made,

Darren Robinson sculpted the lion's head.

The teeth were made from dental acrylic,

so once we'd sculpted them and molded them,

we made the teeth and the gums as one big set of dentures

which fitted into the lion's mouth.

And Maria Cork then flocked it,

did all the hair punching on the mane, and then we put the teeth in

and add all the gore into the stump underneath.

We did have a fair bit of mess on the lion.

It has to look like it's been hunted down and hacked a bit,

so we wanted it to be kind of quite weathered

and broken down.

We staged it as if someone's sitting on it.

Like this, kinda chopping it.

There was an extra guy here just kind of pulling it.

Got ahold of the mane out of it, pulling it out.

We just really want to see...

-Okay. -all that.

So we'll get him dressed and looking as it should.

We do loads of arrows, blood, mud, the works.

-On all of them. -Yeah.

There we go. We're in.

Oh, God, I'm sorry, lion.

Continue checks back there...

Give it a go. In like...

Can I hold above?

Yeah. Go on, try it.

-Yeah. That'll fuckin' launch. -Yeah.

Fucking on the money!

Come on, mate!

Fucking, come on.

Fucking get in, I love that.

Then old Roddy walks up with Lannister's head

and he says...

We have come to die

for the Dragon Queen.

We've got Tommy Flanagan, who's come in, he's a brilliant actor,

who is Daemon's ally. He's one of the Winter Wolves.

March forward.

To battle!

Get in there, Wolves.

Cut there. Cut there. Cut there.

The Winter Wolves. There you go.

And he's just been a great addition.

He's really understood the tone of the show and what it is.

Hey, it's been great having you here.

I have to say, it's made my life infinitely better.

It's been a pleasure, Matt.

It's my favorite character this year, yours.

Alright, cut.

Come on. Just a bunch of fucking lunatics

-coming out of the forest. -Yeah.

Just a reminder that at the start of every day,

a writer on set is going to do a brief tone recap

just because there's going to be increasing distance

between those tone meetings and the scenes that we're shooting,

especially once we get into the summer and the fall.

We wanted to get everybody together and kind of pitch out

the sequence exactly what it is.

And the great thing about this sequence, as you'll see, is,

so much of this from this moment

is practical, it's in camera.

And that's what makes it so exciting.

And I think that's what's gonna make it really visceral.

The Battle of the Gullet was such a sea-change moment

in the story, and I knew that we had to do it

and we had to do it well.

So often with filming,

you're coming into a stage and you'll hire it.

Or you go to a location which exists and you film that.

This particular episode,

we had to build the outdoor stage to mount the scene.

I had very fixed ideas on how to do that,

based on previous experience, when I was a young man on Titanic,

and what I learned there from Jim Cameron

and Jon Landau.

In the early stages of production,

Kevin had this idea of building both a dry and a wet tank.

And I asked him, like, "What do you need a dry tank for

and a wet tank for? Why can't you just use one tank?"

And he said, "Well, you want people to go into the water, don't you?"

And I said,

"You built the Titanic, I trust you."

We wrapped Season Two,

having developed the ground that was on the back lot,

ready for future set builds,

to then come in at Season Three and Kevin say,

"Just so you know, we're gonna dig two big holes

"and we're gonna fill one

"full of three million liters of water.

And the other one, we're gonna put a huge rolling sea gimbal in."

And you go, "Okay."

The dry tank had a massive gimbal in

which would allow pitch and roll and from bow to stern.

So we could have that huge motion of a ship

going through the ocean.

The first ship that went on it was The Queen That Never Was

which is over 125 feet long.

And action!

At one point, that whole ship was moving

with 115 people on board.

What's interesting is that if you're on it,

the camera movement eradicates it.

So, in our dry tank, we tend to keep away from the ship

so we could see it have lots of things moving in the shot,

and that will give us the transit.

The issue is that it's too much fun.

It feels like you're on a ride,

and you're having to quell the excitement

and giddy feeling of wearing armor and pretending to play pirates.

Hello! Listen up, listen up, listen up.

I just want to reiterate, okay,