It felt like we were in this other world.
There are dangerous pitfalls and sinkholes.
I can handle mud wrestling, but singing was the worst.
There were incredible challenges shooting there.
I said to Geeta, "This is an impossible shot."
Every time it happens, I was going, "How is that working?"
Bring on the birds!
It's about to kick off.
Come on, let's go.
(epic music playing)
(music fades out)
The cast has found their characters this season
in a way that is really fun to see.
They've been able to elevate the scenes
that were already wonderful.
Melissa Bernstein: We have five directors this season.
They are all incredibly talented.
Olivia Cooke: Every director brings their own perspectives
and it's been really fun to dance with them each episode.
Matt Smith: Every day I think the amount of work that goes in.
Thank you to everyone who does work on this show
because it is done with such grandeur.
Clare Kilner: Everyone is so skilled in their own department
that I just feel like the luckiest girl in the world
to really be able to work with these people.
Two years in, the sheer scope of it still stuns me.
Danny Gulliver: There's not an element of the day
that doesn't become a pinch me moment.
It's just turned into something bigger and grander
than I ever could've imagined.
It's been incredible. What a story to tell.
(upbeat, tense music playing)
When Tyland Lannister goes to the Tyroshi pavilion,
we needed to create a new world for him
to feel uncomfortable in.
It's an opportunity for us to explore this new world
that we haven't been to yet.
Geeta really seized that opportunity with both hands
and got everybody around the table to really build that world.
Ryan Condal: There was a good bit of concepting
to make it feel like it was one cohesive world.
The exotic location is to feel that this is a different culture
than the Westerosi culture that we're used to seeing.
Jim Clay: For the Tyroshi pavilion,
I was trying to strike a completely new
vernacular for that.
It's another look at
different architecture in the show.
Geeta Vasant Patel: Ryan and I started thinking about all the things
that a Westerner would feel uncomfortable around.
If you have to take off your shoes,
if you have to sit on the floor,
if there are wild animals around you.
We started trying to create a culture and put Tyland in it,
make him uncomfortable.
Kieran Belshaw: Geeta wanted a really wide shot
introducing this place in this really epic landscape.
The opening starts where they've been sitting there for hours.
It was Geeta's idea that we come in via a monkey.
We had a monkey. Yeah, Rosie.
The one issue was Jefferson doesn't like monkeys.
Jefferson Hall: I went up to the monkey handler
and I said, "Is the monkey gonna be okay?"
And she said, "Oh yeah, she's lovely.
"But if you look her in the eye,
she'll bite you in the face."
That monkey did not listen.
Jason Rickwood: There was one point where
Rosie started veering off towards Jefferson.
Jefferson could hear the handler saying,
"No, Rosie, no, Rosie, no, Rosie!"
So survived that, but that was intimidating.
(laughs)
Admiral Lohar, this is Tyland Lannister.
Well met, Lord Tywin.
It's Tyland.
Condal: Sharako is the commander of this fleet.
She feels like one of these very colorful characters
ripped right out of the pages of George's books.
They really listened to me and asked,
"Do you have ideas for the character?"
So I said, "Yeah, I'd love to take her in this dimension
"that she's, like, a female Blackbeard.
"Like, what if I was just absolutely, like,
covered in knives, just had all this stuff?"
We made a nice ornate sword which would sit on her hip
and eight different knives,
and then it was working closely with
the costume department as to where they would sit on the body.
Caroline McCall: That had to be built into the look.
She has a waistcoat piece and that's got all the trinkets,
coins, and things that she's pillaged.
I will not sail with a man who cannot best me.
At, at what?
I put him through absolute hell.
I can handle mud wrestling, but singing was the worst.
(sings) ♪ Cross the Narrow Sea to the ladies of King's Landing ♪
So it kinda worked. They're like, "You really can't sing."
Well done, Lord Tyrod!
And Jefferson is a natural comedic actor.
Having him reacting to the bonkersness around him is really enjoyable.
Hall: On reflection at the end he looks back, you know,
"Wow, that was a hell of a trip."
♪♪
Catherine Goldschmidt: The banquet scene in Dragonstone
between Rhaenyra and her dragonriders,
we wanted it to feel like a new space,
so we shot it in the chamber of the Painted Table,
but we removed the table,
and then we just wanted it to feel like an intimate feast
that she's throwing for the riders
so that she can tell them
(laughs) you're going to war and you might die.
(laughs)
I'm always, like, amazed by the creativity of the craftsmanship
of, like, pie, cakes, the puddings, the blancmanges.
So stunning. And such a contrast, actually,
to this granite brickwork of Dragonstone.
Claire Nia Richards: I love the pomegranates and those rich colors
and the figs and the artichokes.
What a beautiful thing that is.
It's like a little work of art.
Richards: I was trying to keep the opulent colors
and use flowers as well
that they could hit light off,
like pockets of fire almost.
Just try and give it different tiered levels,
so that you could have different height and candles amongst it.
And then I think it really pops beautifully.
It's hard work training dragons, you know?
So, just gotta store the protein
and, uh, get the carbs in, ya know?
I picked duck, which is probably a-- quite a bad decision
'cause we were just eatin' the whole day.
Tom Bennett: Actors have got a thing where if there is an eating scene,
they'll go, "I'll cut this raspberry in half
and I'll just pop that in."
I've got some raspberries and blackberries.
I was like, "Do you know what? We're gonna do this take a lot of times,
so I'm gonna munch on them berries."
I ate, probably, seven punnets of berries.
Kieran Bew: In King's Landing, you haven't had meat for months,
and suddenly, we're sitting at a table
and there's plates of meat.
I think I had, like, five slices of duck every take.
Clinton Liberty: Before we'd even gotten halfway through,
he was, like, stuffed with duck.
Thanks very much. Ah, magic.
And I was just there eatin' my berries like, "Aw, you guys."
I'm not eatin' a thing tonight.
It's gonna save me a fortune.
When you're the bloke saying, "More little birds."
And some more of these little birds.
When those little birds arrive, you have to fucking eat them.
Bring on the birds!
Tom ate two birds a take.
I said more of these little birds.
We're on bird number eight, nine?
He ate so many quails.
There comes a point in the day where you say to yourself,
"Okay, I'm being paid to eat birds today..."
Sixteen, 17 now.
"...and I'm gonna keep doing it until I'm sick."
Goldschmidt: He didn't look like he was sufferin',
but maybe he's just a really good actor.
Twenty.
I'm gonna make you all think
I'm so hungry,
that you want to eat the little birds.
Twenty-four.
At some point, he's gonna have to stop.
It was over 30... 30 quails.
I said more of these little birds.
A knight will comport himself with grace at the Queen's table.
Best make me a knight, then.
(tense music playing)
Coming into second season and having the honor
of directing the final vision was quite amazing for me.
Do you wish then to learn what is given to you?
We wanted Daemon to have this final experience
that was undeniable to him.
These visions are going to change his world outlook.
Patel: Ryan and Sara put together a list of all the things
that needed to be in the vision,
and then it was up to me
to visually connect everything and stylize it.
We came up with a tableau that really told the story quickly
with a palpable feeling.
We shot the beginning as a dire wolf point of view,
running through the snowy forest.
This wave of White Walkers starts walking towards you
and you just smash into their face basically.
Come on, that's cool.
Patel: In preparing for the White Walker scene,
we definitely went back to "Game of Thrones."
We looked at how their eyes were depicted.
We looked at makeup. We looked at costumes.
Waldo Mason: We're very lucky to have people on our crew
who actually worked on the White Walkers
in "Game of Thrones"
who were able to sorta tell us
what kinda color palette we should be using
to stay consistent with what's gone before.
From the time we knew we were gonna do a White Walker,
we had our performer in mind, Paul Casey.
He's a movement performer, stunt coordinator,
and he's got a very measured way of moving.
And Paul was amazing. He's like a prosthetics veteran.
So he's like a statue when you're stickin' stuff on him.
An old pro.
Patel: The first thing we need to do
-is just get all the basics right. -Timing, yes.
Mason: The set got quite busy.
As soon as Paul came on set in his White Walker makeup,
it suddenly started buzzing a little bit.
Rickwood: All of a sudden, there's 150 people in there
and I thought, the only reason all these people are here
is 'cause of these White Walkers, but I couldn't blame them.
crewmember: One, two, three, four, five.
-Marching. -(growling exhale)
There were 20 undead, slashes down their faces,
prosthetic cheekbones, contact lenses, dentures.
Our man who played the hero wight upstairs
with his, uh, teeth as part of the bust.
Adam Lawrence: We had the costume department green out areas,
so it appeared as though they were skeletons or missing limbs
and stuff like that.
It's just gonna be a really powerful part
of the end of the series, I think.
Patel: The White Walker moment
was something that took me back to the roots
of why I love George's writing
and why I love this world and this story.
Condal: This sequence is a way of showing how
our series does interconnect with that future series,
and the events that are happening now
do have an impact on how that future
is going to play out.
Ellie Murphy: Daemon is the one who finds these eggs,
and then we're goin' to see him have a vision
of Daenerys's eggs in the fire,
which are the fossilized lichen-covered eggs.
It's been really fun to make sure that these are
glisteny, shiny, lovely eggs that you could believe would hatch,
and then get to display Dany's eggs again,
which are canon to "Game of Thrones."
Goldschmidt: All of these epic tentpoles
of "Game of Thrones" universe were there.
What Geeta did, which was incredible,
was sort of piece them all together into a narrative
and have it have this arc.
It brings a lot of the different elements of this great,
brilliant show that we're all part of together.
And I think that's really exciting.
(echoes) You know your part.
♪♪
(whispers) There is a message from Harrenhal, Your Grace.
Daemon has raised his army, but Ser Simon fears treachery.
Condal: Harrenhal is a Riverlands location.
It's often ensconced in fog and mist.
When our line producer showed us this location,
all of us looked at it and said,
"That's the basis for Harrenhal."
I loved Wales. I just can't get over the landscape.
Patel: And the location was extraordinary.
It felt like we were in this other world.
I had some ideas of how Harrenhal should be
before we went to Wales,
but then, most definitely,
those Welsh locations fed into the whole design process.
Dominic Masters: It just felt like a perfect place
to stage a very lonely castle
to sit in a totally desolate, epic landscape.
♪♪
Addam... come with me.
Daemon and Rhaenyra approach Harrenhal via a dragon.
The approach to Harrenhal was one that we
spent a lot of time mapping it out
with visual effects in previs,
but then when we had an actual location,
it was important for us to take a drone up
and see what that approach would be like.
Thomas Horton: When Rhaenyra flies in,
that was massively complicated
'cause Harrenhal's so big
and we wanted to try and capture that scale,
but also capture the island and the Gods Eye lake.
Patel: As she flies around Harrenhal,
she just sees troops and troops and troops...
through visual effects,
then extended to thousands of army.
Horton: If you read the books,
these armies were 30,000 troops coming to war.
We literally were doing the maths
on how many tents we would need
to house about 30,000.
It's just a massive scale of army.
(all yelling)
(Syrax roaring)
This quarry had this magnificent ramp.
We really wanted to stage the scene on the ramp
because from the ramp is this incredible view down the valley.
But we had to get very special permission
to get everybody up on that ramp
because it's a rather dangerous place to be.
There are dangerous pitfalls and sinkholes
and sheer shafts of stone and reservoir runoffs.
Anything that's, that's off the beaten track, which that most certainly is,
and literally up a single road track,
halfway up a mountain, is always gonna be difficult
when you've got that amount of infrastructure
that comes with shooting a show like this.
There were incredible challenges shooting there
from a number of levels, but it was so worth it.
Those days are the ones you get home and think,
"Oh, we did it. Oh, we got it done."
Welcome to Harrenhal, my Queen.
I did not think to see you here yourself.
When we did Daemon bending the knee to Rhaenyra,
we did it on a blue screen stage.
We used some very high cranes.
We had a 70-foot crane on that occasion,
and a 40-foot crane working together.
Goldschmidt: We thought of the scene
"King in the North" with Jon Snow.
We also thought of, even from last season,
when Aegon gets crowned.
There's all these "sword in the air" moments in cinema history
and in "Game of Thrones" history.
Lev Kolobov: We had quite a lot of people,
but we need to make it a full army.
We shot different elements of this army
in order to replicate them
and, and make it much, much bigger.
It's also that castle environment outside of the windows, towers,
and other pieces of architecture.
Sean Savage: By the time the visual effects department
have put their touch to it,
I think it will be a spectacular sequence.
(shouts) We fight for our queen!
(all cheering)
Uh, ladies and gentlemen, that is a season wrap on Emma.
(all cheering, applause)
♪♪
I would take my daughter and her child and leave it all behind.
(scoffs) It's too late.
We end the season with Rhaenyra having been left
with the burden of decision
whether to move forward with the war
or trust Alicent
and take the throne.
(softly) Go.
Condal: We pop out of that very intimate moment
to remind people that armies are on the march,
and all of these big pieces on the chessboard are moving.
The montage was a very exciting thing
to read on a page, very epic.
We storyboarded it first
to get an idea of how it would flow
and we really wanted the camera to be moving
and show the epic scale.
We designed very specific shots, really,
for the different armies.
The shot on the bridge, when we boarded it,
I said to Geeta, "This is an impossible shot.
I have no idea how to do this."
Horton: It was one of those things that we previs'd
and we were like,
"Oh, I don't think you can shoot that."
Sometimes you have to build something,
which is what we did in that circumstance.
I described how we wanted the camera to move
and what we wanted it to do.
Working with our team, we figured it out.
My brilliant key grip, Alex Fraser,
designed a system that would run on, on ropes
that were controlled by guys pushin' dollies.
I had two tracks parallel to each other,
72 pulleys, 6,000 foot of tech line.
It worked beautifully. It was exactly what we wanted.
Three, two, one, action!
We'd start at a height of about 60 or 70 feet above the bridge.
And as the army marched towards us,
we approached on these cables.
We got lower and lower through moving dollies.
I had one grip to travel the camera on the wire.
And I had another to descend it down.
Alex caught the camera, and then we do an extraordinary pan around.
Rickwood: Even with me stood there watching it on the monitor,
knowing all my background,
and stepping out of the way of the camera and stepping back in,
every time it happens,
I was looking at the monitor going,
"How is that working?"
It was an incredible shot that is gonna
pickle people's brains for a little bit, I think.
Savage: We then drop down between the army
and saw their boots going past us,
about 40 or 50 soldiers.
They really gave us a very hard challenge,
which I was very proud of my grip team and camera team
because I think we met it
and it's a very spectacular shot
right at the end of this season.
Rickwood: I think it's gonna be a powerful moment in the end of episode eight,
jumping through all these characters and all their story arcs.
Goldschmidt: When you cut it all together,
you really want it to send chills
down everybody's spines and to be this memorable thing
that everybody thinks about while they wait
for the next season to come out.
It's definitely our show saying,
"You gotta come back and see what happens next."
Bew: The end of the episode is like a boiling pot.
It's incredibly exciting knowing that, now,
there are so many more dragonriders.
It certainly doesn't look too good for Team Green.
You shouldn't be puttin' your eggs in one basket at this point.
The pendulum could swing the other way very quickly.
♪♪
It's about to kick off big time. That's what I have to say.
(roars)
Sara Hess: It's been an incredible experience to see the things
that we wrote on the page come to life
and to see the hundreds and hundreds of people
that have poured their talent into it
is humbling and exciting
and it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience definitely.
I'm just intensely grateful for all of you,
and I'm in awe of the incredible talent and effort, dedication,
and the fact that you all still are smiling,
which touches my heart.
I feel kind of like Ulf at the very end of his story,
right before Silverwing finds him.
I've been running through a cave
in the dark with a torch.
I'm quite tired, but I think I claimed the dragon,
and I'm very proud of all the work
that the writers, directors, cast, and crew have done on this show
and I'm very, very grateful for it.
(dragon roars)