The Dance of the Dragons is fully kicked off.
Everything just feels like it's times 10.
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? -(laughs)
I've never eaten so much Manchego.
It gets messy.
It's good to be back in the saddle.
(epic music playing)
-(soundstage bell rings) -crew member: Okay, guys, we're rolling sound.
Please be quiet.
And... action!
It's a bit of a dance, this.
(laughter)
-Woo! -What the hell?
Well...
Whoa! 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.
Emma D'Arcy: Feels good, you know?
I work with such amazing and beautiful people.
Ugh, this is the best cast that I've worked with.
We're all such a unit. I love them so much.
-Is this BTS? -crew member: Yes.
-Hi. Welcome. -(laughter)
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 gang.
This is genuinely my favorite cast I've ever worked with.
♪♪
Tom Glynn-Carney: 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.
Ewan Mitchell: It's bigger, it's badder.
We've got more dragons.
We've just taken it to a 10 in every department.
Dragon!
(roaring)
Ryan Condal: Yeah. It's massive. We had two main units.
So you're shooting two movies, every day, all at the same time.
Kevin De La Noy: Oh, it's very similar to a big film,
but the fundamental difference is there are five directors.
Alan Taylor: We've made the slightly crazy but efficient choice
to block shoot the entire season,
which means we have two units
shooting 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.
♪♪
Danny Gulliver: 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.
♪♪
Taylor: As a director, you're not quite sure
what you're going to be handed,
and you look for the things and find the 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, (laughs) I-I just went with it.
Condal: 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.
Taylor: Walking on the Wall, being surrounded by Starks,
that was one of the best moments.
PJ Dillon: 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 shooting 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. (laughs)
Jim Clay: Quite a part of that set, actually, is digital,
so we'd done all of those drawings prior to shooting.
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.
Dadi Einarsson: 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.
Harry Collett: 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, were trying to do our lines
and, you know, you just get a couple of snow up the nose
(laughing) 'cause it's just snow everywhere.
Mike Dawson: 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 will dress it with, like--
make it sparkly and all that kinda stuff.
Paddy Connolly: 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.
We'll probably use one or two of them,
depending on how big the dress is.
♪♪
Dominic Masters: 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.
Condal: 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 graffitied her walls with her dreams,
and we think it really imbued the place
with a great deal of character for her.
Claire Nia Richards: 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.
Olivia Cooke: 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.
(laughing)
Ah, 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.
Clay: 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.
Cooke: 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.
Condal: 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 war
and got people up and moving around a bit.
Those council sessions can be challenging to shoot
because everybody's sitting down, sipping wine.
(indistinct chatter)
♪♪
Ellie Murphy: 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 War 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.
Lee Wiseman: 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.
♪♪
De La Noy: 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.
♪♪
Clay: So far, we've done our King's Landing scenes
in a beautiful medieval town in Spain called Cáceres.
Condal: The problem with shooting 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.
(laughs) Nice.
Clay: 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.
Fuck the Hightowers.
Condal: The boldest thing that I think we did there
was decide to give the last 10 minutes of the episode
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 from you,
from where, hopefully, is the fun
and the, 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 co--
♪♪
Philippa Goslett: 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.
Clay: 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.
Dawson: 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.
Dawson: 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."
Condal: They're all mad men.
It was incredible and kind of horrible.
A medieval sewer. I can imagine better places to spend time.
♪♪
Dawson: 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.
That's 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.
Dawson: 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 shooting right here for the, um, sewer entrance.
♪♪
Sam C. Wilson: 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.
Mark Stobbart: The water's waist-high, carrying a dog and a torch.
It's like, we're in a hangar 20 minutes from where I live.
And here I am at the Red Keep. Yeah. It's just-- It's bonkers.
Okay, send the, uh, water, please, Tommy.
Taylor: 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.
Dillon: 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.
Sean Savage: The design team on this
have just surpassed themselves.
We rarely double up on angles
because of the opportunities this set gives us.
Dillon: 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.
Wilson: 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. -(Helaena grunting)
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-- We're-- 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.
crew member: Yeah.
Iain Mackay: 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.
Condal: 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.
♪♪