♪♪
This is an epic scene.
Jim Clay is a mad man of all the best kinds.
Oh, I couldn't wait, to be fair.
♪♪
She's badass. Why wouldn't you have a crossbow?
-It was a funeral. -(laughter)
But I had so much fun.
That's a shot.
I just had the best seats in the house.
(epic music playing)
(light, tense music playing)
Clare Kilner: I wanted to make the opening of the episode chaotic
and unfair and violent.
Because I felt everyone was blinded by the rage.
I also wanted to intercut it with Aegon smashing up
Viserys's model of Old Valyria.
♪♪
We shot a lot of that model in season one.
crew member: And action.
The Lady Alicent Hightower, Your Grace.
Alejandro Martínez: It was a beautiful, huge model
that took half of the king's apartment.
It's truly wondrous what you've built.
Martínez: But it was so nice and so beautiful
that it was just big part of the room,
so we got to destroy it...
and it was really fun.
The good news is, they made a stunt version that was
specifically for smashing, so the,
the beautiful Valyrian model is still intact.
Kilner: The incredible props people
made these, like, 3D-printed extra ones
that would look real when we smashed,
and that we could have the sort of powder of it into the air.
Katie Lodge: Has to be made out of really light material.
And that's, obviously, when our mold team
and, um, all their knowledge come into play there
and they give us-- and they do a few tests
and we do some smashes, and we just make sure that
we've got the look that they want.
Kilner: The actual 3D models are really expensive,
so we couldn't have many shots of it.
So I said, "Okay, Tom, you know, let's do this in one."
crew member: Action!
(yells) I'll kill them!
Tom Glynn-Carney: I had extreme pangs of guilt doing that
because I, I was aware how much work
goes into a piece like that.
Um, but I guess they made those pieces with the knowledge
that they were gonna be smashed to bits.
(yells) I'll kill them all!
I-I think that is exactly what was needed for us to see
where Aegon's energy was goin', you know?
He didn't have anywhere to put it,
and he had people around him tellin' him to make decisions
and be pragmatic.
And it's okay. It'll get better over time.
No, it fuckin' won't. I need to smash the crap outta this, ya know?
Sorry for swearing. (chuckles)
(grunting)
-(indistinct chatter) -speaker: Alright, brilliant.
♪♪
(somber music playing)
(bell tolling)
The funeral, it was very exciting to get that set piece.
-(singers vocalizing) -(bell tolling)
I sort of looked into, you know, "The Godfather"
and all those great movies who have these incredible funeral scenes.
And I also-- it also made me think very much about,
um, Princess Di's funeral and how slow the cortège was.
And it made me think about Alicent and Helaena
being forced to be public fodder in their grief.
♪♪
We always saw it as an opportunity to open the episode,
go outside, see King's Landing, see Flea Bottom.
And we wanted the funeral to become about the queen,
about what she's feeling about being exposed that way.
So it had to be scope-y,
but it had to be very intimate.
Welcome to Cáceres.
To shoot season two of "House of the Dragon"
in Spain has been amazing.
Ryan Condal: Spain is always great.
You know, we went back to Cáceres and Trujillo
to cover off, essentially, King's Landing
and its immediate surrounds.
Sara Hess: Locations give a real sense of just
scope and scale and then bigness.
There's a fullness to our world
that you couldn't get just on set.
Cáceres, where we filmed, was so beautiful,
and the people were so wonderful and kind and welcomin'.
Martínez: Spain was the place where we shot season one.
So, it was kinda like going back home.
We know the nooks and crooks.
We, we know where to place the lights.
Kilner: You know, you're hit by this big skies,
bright sunshine, this warm, glowing light.
And this beautiful, old stonework.
And that just influences you. You can't help it.
Olivia Cooke: It sort of does all the acting for you
being in environments like that.
You don't really have to pretend.
Welcome to King's Landing.
♪♪
Kilner: The incredible team of people
who put this funeral scene together,
from the building of the carriage
and the incredible, beautiful horses
and how well-behaved they are.
The armor that they are covered in.
It's just, like-- took my breath away when I saw it.
It's absolutely beautiful.
Then, the design of the costumes.
I loved the veils because I shot
all of the funeral at 40 frames per second,
so we could choose which bits we'd use in slow-mo or not.
And so, those veils in slow-mo are absolutely stunning.
And then, I also wanted to sort of fill the air.
So they're throwing hops.
So when we have these slow-mo moments,
we've got all these pieces slowly falling through the air.
And there's a sort of sad beauty to that.
And then, prosthetics with Jaehaerys,
little body of Jaehaerys.
♪♪
So, Jaehaerys was our first, uh, first scan.
So, we had him laid on the table.
We did a full-body scan.
We had a very good 3D, uh, cleanup person
who made a, an absolutely beautiful copy of his body,
which we then had, um, milled out
by an outside company,
molded and turned into a, a silicone body.
Once he was a silicone body, we just had to,
(chuckles) we just had to take his head off
and decide how to stitch it back on.
So, we went through a few different versions
of, um, sort of medieval stitch reference
and these kind of metal loops
that we had to sort of pin the neck together.
We're supposed to see that the head's very obviously stitched on
because, uh, the Greens want to demonstrate
how barbaric Rhaenyra has been.
-Behold the works of Rhaenyra Targaryen! -(drumming)
♪♪
-Defiler of the innocent! -(smallfolk chattering)
I saw how we could intercut the funeral pieces
with Aegon bludgeoning Blood.
And I started thinking about a drum and the beat of the drum,
and then matching the drumbeat to the use of the mace.
♪♪
So I asked for us to have a drummer
at the beginning of the procession,
so that we could use this drumbeat
to sort of increase and sort of get inside Helaena's head,
which is part of the building up of her panic attack.
smallfolk: A curse on Rhaenyra, the monstrous!
(smallfolk shouting)
Filming with Phia and seein'...
just, yeah, her, her grief come to life,
it was, it was really hard.
It was really beautiful and really movin'.
(laughs) Then she--
Then we, then we broke and she, like, wiped the tear
and she was like, "I really felt like you were my mummy then."
I was like, "Oh, good. Great!"
(indistinct chatter, laughter)
It was a funeral, but I had so much fun.
It was so fun. I mean, me and Phia get on really well,
so, like, in between takes, you know, very sad, very sad,
but, like, (laughs) singin', singin', ya know,
show tunes, doin' whatever.
You know, it was quite nice to sit down and be, like,
driven around by horse and cart.
Condal: Oh, it's so beautifully filmed.
All the layers of texture, Phia and Olivia's performance.
And I'm thrilled with the outcome of it.
♪♪
Nick Heckstall-Smith: The hanging of the ratcatchers was fun...
in a morbid kinda way.
It takes a village, really, to create a scene like that.
We wanted a mixture of prosthetic, fake bodies
and real-life people hanging there.
Tom Bennett: The bodies are incredible.
Like, I knew it was 50/50,
but you've gotta get really close.
I knew one of them was a stuntman
when he got hoicked up and started laughing.
He gave that, he shouldn't have done that on camera.
Very unprofessional.
-How does that feel, sir? -It's really nice.
-Really nice. -(laughter)
♪♪
-(indistinct chatter) -(laughter)
Rowley and his team had to work out these pulley systems
where people could look like they're hanging.
Rowley Irlam: We made a metal frame that goes over the shoulders.
From these shoulders, we have cables that go down, past the hips,
and we had stirrups that went underneath the feet.
So, basically, for all intents and purposes,
you're standing in your harness, not hanging in your harness.
It just means you can hang there almost indefinitely.
Now, we can push down on these legs.
When you're liftin' here,
so this, this-- the energy goes from here
all the way down the straps
down to the stirrups at the bottom.
It's like standing up in the air,
but we're actually not standing.
It's quite comfortable.
The other thing we did as well
was we concealed the wire within rope,
and it looks like the rope's just hanging on the davits,
but we put pulleys inside, to a system,
so we can literally lift people up and down
really quickly, really easily.
I think the first thing we did was looking for people that we could lifecast.
So, we would have people in our scanning tent.
We'd have to physically have a noose around their neck
and pull it up, so we'd get all the creasing and wrinkling,
which most people were up for.
Um, I think nobody complained.
Jamie's one of our ratcatchers.
So, you can see where the rope... went around there.
And Jamie just gave us a nice dead expression.
-(indistinct). -(laughs)
And, Danny-- We've kept these because I think
we're probably gonna have to let Danny have this.
Danny Gulliver: It is an honor to be used on a show
of this level and scale,
and also to see the intricate detail
and work that the prosthetic team have put into
all of those ratcatchers.
There's a lot of processes involved just to get, you know, the scan done.
Then we mold that and we get a plaster one that we tighten up,
mold that into a silicone,
and then paint it, do all the hair work.
And then we've gotta put 'em onto a body.
So, yeah, it's fairly convoluted.
It was great, actually, just seeing them all,
all hanging there, finally,
kinda finally take it in, you know?
You're like, oh, that looks, that's quite cool.
-Well done. -(chatter)
♪♪
Jim Clay is a mad man of all the best kinds.
He outdid himself with Dragonstone,
and we've expanded Dragonstone quite a bit.
Ryan had said that Dragonstone going to feature,
this was very early in the writing process,
so we decided to allocate
the big stage to build the set on.
Essentially, in season one with Dragonstone,
the main area we see is the Painted Table Room.
Dominic Masters: That room came originally from "Game of Thrones"
but we felt it was time to expand that world
into a bigger environment.
We wanted it to be one complete set
with these different rooms all interconnected.
It extended from the hall of the Painted Table
into, again, a composite world,
which is the corridors, Rhaenyra's bed chambers, the library set.
So, you have a set that is essentially a collection of many other mini sets,
so you can walk from one room to another
and make the audience feel like you're in a real castle.
It's crazy 'cause you can walk all the way down
and it's fantastic.
Kieran Belshaw: Rhaenyra's a very important character
so we wanted a room that sort of really echoed
the uniqueness of her character.
Jim really liked these sort of more cathedral-like,
sort of tall windows,
and it's got an interesting sort of asymmetrical shape
that just gives it this interesting kind of quirk.
Jim Clay: What we wanted to provide for Rhaenyra
is a sense of the history behind her and her family,
and the history of Dragonstone.
So that big sculpture in her room,
it's a temple to the history that's gone before.
It's like the engravings in Egyptian architecture.
(crew chatter)
Clay: The brief of the library set
was it was an enormous scrolls library
containing all of the Valyrian history,
essentially in the form of scrolls.
We were just trying to figure out a way to do that shelving,
so we came up with the, the diamond idea,
and that continued as a theme through that room.
And then Claire dressed it with many layers then
of other artifacts and element of Valyrian history.
That was phenomenal to do that set and combining marble,
really beautiful textures of marble
that has the oranges running through it,
which I took from doing the Painted Table
because of those rich colors and tones of heat, light, fire.
♪♪
Emma D'Arcy: For every book and document and scroll
operates hours of work,
um, that have been put into these objects.
You have ravens with messages, full messages written on them.
You have full family trees and it's all been handmade.
It's all thought through, every little bit of it,
every piece, every color, every texture,
every small item is thought about.
The detail and the craftsmanship that goes into these places,
it's just-- it's just amazing.
It didn't take any imagination
to put yourself where you need to be.
♪♪
(yells) Brother!
The Erryk and Arryk duel is a, is a giant moment in Westerosi history.
Brother against brother.
This is an epic scene because, you know,
the actors, Luke and Elliott, are brothers, are twins,
and they love each other deeply.
So much of our action in the show is dragon-based.
It’s fun to see, uh, two knights go at it, sword against sword.
Martínez: That was the first conversation we had when we arrived.
We sat down, we said, "Okay, let's talk about the twins."
And we started thinking about ways of shooting it,
how the fight should look like.
Rowley then did extensive rehearsals and blocking with his team,
which would then be filmed and presented to Clare.
That would be tweaked,
and then Rowley introduced the twins into that.
Those guys performed that entire scene themselves.
They trained for it, they learned it.
They got themselves in shape for it.
Oh, I couldn't wait, to be fair.
Me and El have got martial art backgrounds
and we're quite active, physical lads,
so the activeness of it
and throwin' ourselves into it was never a worry really.
It was just making sure that we'd learned the dance
to really throw ourselves at it
with the energy it needed.
Really, it was just about gettin' it as tight and as clean as we could,
and then, just comin' on to set on the day and just smashing it out.
Fortunately, we didn't lose any fingers
(laughs) so we did do that right.
We knew from season one, um, how hard,
um, Elliott and Luke would work.
And the only thing I wouldn't let 'em do
was actually just to smash into the pot.
Everything else they did.
Eddie, the stunt guy, bless him, like,
he clamored this pot so hard, smashed it.
And rather Eddie than me. He's earned his money today, that's for sure anyway.
(crew applauding)
♪♪
crew member: Marker.
We all agreed there should be a moment in the fight
where you don't know who's Arryk and who's Erryk.
You really get confused.
Irlam: So, even with the choreography,
if you watch it really carefully,
you'll see that they each get wounded the same.
It's just so that if anyone was to piece-- go through it
at any one moment and go, "Right, well, I kn-- I know he's Erryk
because his leg was cut here or his arm was cut here,"
it won't work because, during the fight,
they both end up with the same injuries.
Although, we don't telegraph that's what we're doing.
-(jiggles doorknob) -(grunting)
Which?! Which is Erryk?!
Martínez: That was the whole point. That, that kinda what gives it
emotion that you become really neutral about it.
And it-- It, it-- The fight becomes about them.
It's about the fifth time, at least, it's been
-mixed up today on set. -On camera as well.
Just keepin' everybody on their toes.
(interviewer speaking)
Who's the better? I suppose it's debatable,
but I think Elliott would probably say him
because I hit him a couple of times with the sword.
Think I did catch him once, so I've gotta say
that he's probably better.
If I could tell them apart when they're in their armor,
I might have half a chance of telling you,
but the actual truth of the matter is
they're pretty, pretty evenly matched.
D'Arcy: Luke and Elliott are amazing.
They are so amazing.
That's what I spent the two days saying to anyone who'd listen.
Not only have they done a beautiful job of Rowley's choreography,
but the emotion that they filled it with
was such a privilege to watch.
-We were born together. -You parted us!
I still love you, brother.
Seeing the divide between them and seeing the humanity
that they both bring to those, to those roles,
I think it really lands in a absolutely brutal way.
It's another awe-inspiring moment directed by Clare.
Luke Tittensor: Clare is such a beautiful spirit.
Before we did that scene,
Clare comes up to us and she's like,
I've called the scene "Searching for Love."
And I just thought that was such a sweet thing
because that kind of emotional,
personal side of it was so important,
so outside of the-the fight, we were gonna capture
the right emotion that needed to be captured.
These guys were training from day one in this fight
and I, you know, I thought, what can I bring to this,
you know, in terms of looking at it in an interesting way.
So, throughout the whole scene,
I was looking to find moments of connection
between these two guys.
So, you know, whilst they're striking each other
and their eyes meet,
like, what are the questions?
What are they saying to each other,
and it-- why is it so hard?
It's because they love each other so deeply.
So, for me, this was a story about brotherly love
like no other.
♪♪
(music fades out)