It's the movie magic behind the curtain.
Explosions. There is a lot of explosions.
The level of preparation.
Those guys are puttin' their lives at risk
on a constant basis.
Three dragons, not two.
That's gonna be a huge thing for the audience.
They're so clever, those guys.
Once dragons get introduced that way, there's no turning back.
We've talked about this since creating Daemon as a character
is George always said about Daemon,
"He's heroic and villainous in equal parts,"
and that's what makes him fascinating as a character.
Well, that was the first shot of the whole season.
- Set. - Here we go. Cameras set and action!
And we were the first actors there because Mills was goin' off to do a play.
So, we were just right into the sort of nuts and bolts of it, really.
There was a lot of conversation ahead of time
and also during the shooting as to whether these were
dreams we were experiencing or visions
or something magical.
Should we shoot it on different lenses?
Should we light it in a very distinctive way?
Should we give it its own visual signature
that would signal to the audience immediately,
"Oh, okay, this is a dream"?
And the decision led, of course, by Ryan and by Alan
was that, no, we shouldn't do that.
That we should shoot it as we would shoot a normal scene
and let the content of the narrative make it apparent that it was a dream.
I can't understand.
This felt like a real way to dramatize something
very core to Daemon's character that was going on with him.
It's a throwback to a scene from season one.
In season one, Daemon was sitting on the throne
and Rhaenyra comes in to meet him.
This time, we reverse that, so that Rhaenyra's on the throne
and Daemon comes in to meet her.
It's Rhaenyra, but it's the wrong Rhaenyra.
The fact that it meant that we got to bring back Milly delighted me
because I adore her and all that she brought to the show.
And I really did know that the fan base would really delight
in, hopefully, the surprise of seeing her come back.
Feels like I never left, which is what's kind of weird.
It's nice to be back.
And it was one of those very "House of the Dragon" moments
where we're doing the scene and, finally, she comes down into a close-up
which is sort of the crescendo of what's goin' on between them.
And she's radiant and there's tears in her eyes
and she's speaking full Valyrian the entire time
without stumbling in perfect accent.
And we cut. Brilliant.
So my brief encounter with her was great.
And then I chopped her head off.
Well, I loved that when I read it.
I always wanted the dream sequences,
or whatever you call them, I was always pushing that
they felt mad and horror-like as possible.
If we're gonna go for it, let's go for it. Great having Milly back.
We really miss her.
So much fun, I love Matt.
Matt's such a sweetheart. And he's incredibly talented.
It was actually really nostalgic.
I sat on the throne
which is actually kind of lopsided.
It's a throne made out of swords, so it doesn't look very comfortable.
- Don't listen to her, honestly. - Go on.
It was great seeing the warmth between them because they know each other so well
so, there was that.
And I think they were both very happy to get back together, even if violently.
Very nice. And we cut. Very nice.
It's a touch late to be stalkin' about a strange castle
putting its people to the sword.
- You. - I'm called Alys.
Alys Rivers was definitely one of the iconic costumes
in that she's residing at Harrenhal
but shouldn't really look like she belongs there.
...take one, and marker.
We didn't want to lean too much into the witch thing.
She just needed to look like a sort of strange member
of the household.
We wanted it to have this kind of aged grandeur to it.
And that the palette there is purples and lavenders.
When I saw that they'd cast Gayle,
it was a dream come true.
I always had a vision of that porcelain skin.
We embraced her paleness.
When I read the book, I saw long hair,
and we managed to pick quite an inky raven color
which, you know, is so beautiful against
the complexion of her skin tone and her eye color.
And I don't think there's anything witchy about it.
Thirteen delta, take two.
Gayle was very happy and she looks fantastic.
It's been a complete, complete pleasure.
To feel embraced by the cast and the crew was just really special.
Matt and I got to have the experience of meeting each other for the first time.
And he's such a generous actor, and just so fun to work with.
She's a fabulous, fabulous actor,
and I think she's created a really great character.
Here, drink this.
You'll need your sleep if you're to win this place to your side.
Rook's Rest is the biggest thing that
"House of the Dragon" has mounted, to date,
in terms of the size and expense of a set piece
and we needed to get it right.
Rook's Rest, for us, is a big setup.
You never quite can understand how big something is
until you really turn up on the day,
and you see the size of the operation.
Stand by, guys, stand by to shoot.
And this is a big operation.
Rook's Rest was our biggest obstacle of this season for sure.
We were shooting down in the home counties.
We had 500 crowd in total, four different houses.
So, we had Rosby, Stokeworth, Darklyn, and Hightower,
all in different looks, in different stages of the battle.
Oh, it was brilliant.
- It's alright? - Yes, that was great.
Good, good, good.
That was a complicated scene. Big battle.
Dragons, dragon fire, horses, dead people.
Complex, logistical thing to put together.
What should be a small campaign to take a small keep
turns into a kind of watershed moment
that tilts the war.
We experienced what it really is like to unleash dragons for the first time.
Dragon!
Advance!
Thankfully, we had Alan Taylor, the veteran filmmaker on "Game of Thrones"
and countless other shows to do it.
Alan came to it and really brought just kind of another level of scale to it.
Working with Alan's fantastic 'cause he's one of those directors
who knows what he wants before he gets there.
The thing with Rook's Rest is that Alan storyboarded
Rook's Rest really, really carefully in advance.
Shout out to Jane Wu, our main storyboard artist,
because I was collaborating with her, that designed the action,
both in the air and on the ground
and sort of shaped it into the story
that we wound up shooting and telling.
And then I was shown Bourne Wood.
Bourne Wood is a bit of a popular location
because it goes back to "Gladiator" days and Ridley Scott.
So you think, "If Ridley Scott chose it,
then it's gotta be pretty good."
And it is.
I had been out there before 'cause we had,
I think we had scouted it in season one.
It was pointed out to me, and I just said, "Oh, we have to come back here."
We needed a tree line and we also needed an open space
and a ridge where the castle could be based.
So we did look at a number of different places.
And Bourne was the winner.
King Aegon!
You really felt like you were at a battle.
You know, what was so amazing is that it felt like
we were talking about it for such a long time,
Alan and I, and Freddie and Ryan.
It felt like we were in endless conversations about it
and watching previs, and talking through each beat
of every single scene, and then you finally get there
and it's just this incredibly iconic set.
It's like one of those moments, me and Freddie were talking about it,
where you go like, "Ah, this is pretty amazing."
I mean, the battles in episode four, I think,
are probably gonna be water cooler conversation
for quite some time.
I never really thought it was a battle until I got there
and saw the scale that we were bringing with us.
So, you know, four battering rams moving across the field
and more horses than I can count, all in full armor.
Not just the riders, but the horses.
Three or four houses with different livery
and different banners and different insignia
all marshaling together.
Sadly for them, most of them are there as dragon fodder
and they don't know it.
It was a much bigger dress time
for set dec when we had various army encampments.
We did all the tents and the bivouacs
and our fabulous drapes department made all of those for us
and then, props department put them together.
Rook's Rest was a logistical issue for us to make sure we had enough bodies,
we had enough dead horses, we had enough war machines
and that we could move 'em around.
It's a big location,
multiple cameras shootin' in multiple areas.
It was about havin' the right crew there that could cope with
rushing things from one area to the next.
We had our main unit working for us
and a sizable splinter unit working for us.
Any of the larger kind of stunts or tricks and flicks
were led by Rowley Irlam, the stunt coordinator.
...battering ram dropping down, yeah? That's where it goes from.
I worked with Rowley many times before.
His field of operations was close to mine
so he could send me images and I could watch takes
and ask for adjustments if necessary
but he also embellishes things and raises things.
And then guys doin' the arrow hits, you can come a little bit closer
to the battering ram, please.
The huge setup there with the big burns of dragons.
So Meleys would be flying through
and setting fire to people.
We can do things in CGI, but actually shooting
real people doing these things,
it just gives it another level of authenticity.
That was kind of our big number.
There was a lot of stuff done in the tree line.
We did a lot of fire work there.
We burned eight people on a battering ram with a strafe.
Every time there's a dragon strafe, it's just so much fun.
Dragon roaring flame is different, but when you're in the field and it...
it's quite exciting.
I've never seen another human so happy to burn people alive,
let me tell you.
So we should do another one
- at 45 degree, then, yeah? - Yeah.
We set down 20 (indistinct), which we bury in the ground
and special effects basically ignites the flames.
So you end up with a sort of 12-, 15-foot fireball.
Please clear behind the barriers!
We had eight of my guys in there.
They're all covered in, like, really
flammable accelerant gel.
I, personally, would turn and run
but they just stand there and it just comes towards them
and they're engulfed in it.
We ended up doing these garments
which had burns built into them, so you've got a shirt like this
with the burn makeup on it
so you could, literally, pull it on
without having to do an application.
We are, and we should be, quite good at settin' people on fire by now.
The big dragon fight that's happening in the sky,
a lot of it was shot on something that's a cross
between a Volume and a blue screen stage.
This was buck 2.0 this year.
I mean, they did learn from the first season and improve it.
It can be programmed in ways that the other one was not.
So, to simulate the flaps of wing movement and sudden changes in direction.
It's very animal-like.
You know, almost feel the breath of the beast.
The camera's adjustin' to your movements as well.
We did it slightly differently this year.
We have a robot camera.
We worked out a plan to attach the camera
to the buck rig
and having the movement match to the buck.
And the two working together can provide almost any angle.
The way World War II dogfights were shot, plane to plane,
most of our stuff is shot dragon to dragon.
You want the camera to feel like it's, essentially, on another dragon.
And three, two, one, action.
The buck work, all of my-- only memory of the buck work
is a large amount of wind on the face.
The Rook's Rest work,
this saddle's throwing itself around all over the place.
- Action. - Angos Meleys!
The most critical character work has to happen,
you know, while bein' slammed around.
The quality of performance you're used to with her was all there
even though she's being flung around on a bucking dragon
and chased by a robotic camera.
Fuck me sideways.
Fire in three, two, one!
We have a set on the backlot pickin' up lots of different elements
so we don't have to go for a CG approach
because, of course, real fire looks real.
It is mental, yeah. I wanted to go bigger.
Because we've got Vhagar,
I really wanted to go dirty burn,
you know, like, an intense burn and big burn.
And it is horrific.
And it goes 50 foot maybe.
It's a weapon of mass destruction really.
I think the most showstopping moment
is when the two bigger dragons engage in the air
and it comes to a death spiral.
What Alan did was went back and actually
did a bunch of research around birds of prey
and how they fight with each other.
Alan was really keen on this kind of ritual
where they lock talons and they spin around.
A lot of the work was dumped on previs 'cause you can have two dragons spiraling
in a kind of triple-axis turn to the ground blowing fire
but it takes a lotta work to work out what that really means.
I kept trying to protect that as the "nuclear event" in the story.
Storywise, is the kind of the turning of the tides
in terms of what kind of war people have experienced.
The idea was that Cole has been broken by this experience
and he's basically been completely knocked out.
And when he wakes up, it's to a new world sort of.
And the world had to feel almost surreal in its level of devastation.
You've got people crawling along.
We had amputees with their legs burnt off, with arms burnt off.
People walkin' around on fire.
Waldo and his team created
the Dust Man, as we called him.
When I, you know, went to touch it,
it was just a really intricate affair where you had to time it just right,
touch it with just the right amount of pressure,
so they could pull it.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing.
Every time they had to reset that, I was like,
I don't envy them.
Just sort of crumbles into ash, that was a way of saying,
whatever you thought you knew about soldiery
has been burned to a crisp and you're on your own.
And we cut. Checking.
I mean, I think it's a Pyrrhic victory for both sides.
The Blacks lose Rhaenys's dragon and a dragonrider
and one of Rhaenyra's most trusted councilors.
And the Greens, we don't really know the condition
of Sunfyre or Aegon, but certainly,
Sunfyre is not going to fly again tomorrow and the king is not in good shape.
Well, I mean, all of Aegon's worst fears come true when
he's plummetin' to the Earth after being hit by a ball of fire.
Because they cross the nuclear line,
it's been devastating for everybody.
Both sides have lost something major.
Oh, my God, massive loss. What a disaster. Total disaster.
Best fighter down and best dragon down.
I mean, the whole thing's total chaos.
But, yes, if you've gotta go, going on the back of a dragon
in the middle of the best, kickass fight
that there's ever been, is quite a good way.
It's never nice. As particularly, someone who is such a wonderful person
and such a brilliantly talented performer
and we've become very close and very good friends
over this short period of time.
But it's an absolute, absolute dream to work with her.
So, it was a bit, like, "Oh, wow.
Oh, that's really, you know,"
but we're not gonna stop being friends so, you know.
To deliver these really dynamic dragon flying shots
and have those intercut with this sort of drama and action
happenin' on the ground, it's comin' together to be
a really incredible scene.
I think Alan pretty much got, an incredible
battle sequence that he's put together.
Really proud to be a part of that.
You're in the middle of something so huge that the kind of thing that, as actors,
you don't get to do very often.
Alright, mate. Thanks, Alan.
You just have to pinch yourself every so often that you're on this thing.
I sincerely doubt I'll ever be a part of this grand
scene again for the rest of my career, so I felt very, very lucky.
It's the hardest thing that I've ever done as a producer and a showrunner
and frankly, as a writer.
But I'm very, very proud of the result.