Original subtitles

It's all designed to count.

In all weddings in Game of Thrones, something is gonna happen.

So much fun.

You can sort of feel the air come out of the room.

It was absolutely amazing.

It got very hot in here.

We did start to go a little bit insane,

but it was the best time.

Take one.

The Hall of Nine was just an incredible set to walk onto.

It's got this sort of snail shape to it.

It was the first set that we built, first set that we shot on.

And it was a rather large

kind of departure from the usual Game of Thrones set.

RYAN J. CONDAL: The Sea Snake has earned enough wealth in this time

to build his own new castle, a better castle for himself.

Our idea, our concept for it was what does a new castle look like?

I think Jim Clay and his design team did a wonderful job.

Hall of Nine was very much about Sea Snake's character.

His journeys throughout the world.

The artifacts that he's brought back from his conquests.

And so, in a way, it was going to be a museum of his life.

It was the first thing we shot.

It was never-wracking making sure we hit it right.

Time frames are always tight on every job I've ever done.

And this was no exception.

We were pushing our way in there

while the paint was still wet on the walls.

It was a battle to get it done on time.

It was the start of many, many, many months of filming.

If that was to fail, then, I'm sure they would have brought in

a Targaryen production designer, at that point.

Perhaps I overextended myself.

Pushed him to close to the edge.

My cousin chose to sail into this tempest, husband.

It's undignified of the King to drag himself here and beg for Laenor's hand.

The term we were all looking at

is that they're a fairly showy lot.

Rather than some of the more austere interiors that we have elsewhere,

this needed to be more colorful, a bit more flamboyant.

This is essentially his throne room.

It also serves as his study, you know, sort of multi-function room.

But it needs to be grand and get across the feeling

that it's almost as grand as the throne room in the Red Keep.

The walls of Hightide never fail to impress.

Jim gave me a good brief

from the looks at the plan of how we think we should lay it out.

I wanted a grand entrance staircase,

in the way that I'd done the staircase in the Red Keep.

The central piece,

we decided to use this curved, semi-spiral staircase.

And that provided that corridor at the back of the stair.

It's lovely the way it spirals down to the balcony,

and it's quite a difficult bit of architecture and quite difficult to produce.

When you're doing architecture, when it's sort of more circular,

rather than just square, flat surfaces,

it's always a bit more difficult to model, but it's worth it, because it looks beautiful.

Compared with all the huge spaces that are in King's Landing,

it's actually much more contained.

Jim wanted to sort of push a certain style of architecture,

With the show in general, he's gone for a lot of Byzantine stuff.

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was a big reference for the set,

We tried to match a similar kind of architecture

with the big arches and windows

and the way that's sort of painted.

The other main aspect was this fantastic mural, which Steve Mitchell painted.

Which was meant to be a mural paying homage to the Sea Snake's nine voyages.

The ship, the Sea Snake, is depicted in that mural.

Logic, to me, says he made a map

out of the places he'd conquered.

So maybe it's better to get a map out of that, depending--

It's time permitting basically.

Love the painting, just sort of evoking that sort of feeling

that this is what family is, what the House represents.

It went through a couple of changes.

I think visually, it's a difficult thing to kind of nail

You're thinking of a medieval painting.

There's a certain look and style that you sort of feel you have to hit the right note

and the right period, and so you're thinking

that all your perspectives are skewed and wrong,

'cause they haven't figured out how to do perspective properly in those days.

There wasn't a brief. That was something I just thought was a powerful thing.

I think around about that time, I'd been

to the Turner exhibition at the Tate.

I looked at all of his seascape paintings.

They're so powerful. They're so strong.

I think that was the spark for me to introduce that for Corlys.

All these wonderful objects are an incredible tribute

to the Sea Snake's life.

It is a vanity.

Because, of course, it's like, "Yeah, I did that. I did that. And I did that.

And what did you do? Oh, you were born into royalty. Well, I made myself."

And so there are all these wonderful objects and mementos from his voyages,

his legendary nine voyages.

We really just gave Clare and Jim what we know about the Sea Snake.

And we really turn them loose.

I mean, the collaboration with the set decorator

on every movie is absolutely key.

And with Clare, it is very much a harmonious collaboration.

We literally went back to the history of Corlys

and his story, which then helped us

with the different artifacts that we made for that set.

He would take a treasure from each place,

and that's what kind of became a big part of the set.

We talked a lot about that and what they should be.

We looked at various art exhibitions and pieces in the British Museum.

And then she went off and designed her own pieces to represent his life.

How are you?

I'm fine... I'm melting.

LAUGHTER)

Before we started shooting in there, I had asked Ryan

for some information about the voyages

or at least about the mementos, so when I, as the Sea Snake,

look at those things, I had a memory.

It was not going to be in the script. It was just going to be me.

We really pointed a lot at Hearst Castle

what William Randolph Hearst built with his family's wealth

and then filled it with the treasures and artifacts he was able to acquire.

The Sea Snake did the same thing, but these were artifacts

that he essentially won or purchased on his own travels,

being the Sinbad of this time.

I just want the cameras to go through every single thing

that is in that set.

The detail is unbelievable. It's so beautiful.

It's amazing in the Hall of Nine. We did some fantastic pieces for that.

I think we're very lucky. We've got some very talented people in the workshop.

The concepts come in, and you look at some of them

and you think "How in the hell are we gonna do that?"

You know, between the guys in there, we work out a formula.

All sorts of weird and wonderful stuff

we've never done before, so they're all very unique.

It was amazing. Everything was creative.

Everything had to be made from scratch.

Stuff we've never made before.

Everything was influenced by things

already made around the world.

And we basically tried to copy

what they wanted and make it better.

The Hanging City had to be made really lightweight.

But it had to be made so it looked like bone ivory.

So, we had to think of a method that we could do

that was easily to be hung up really lightly.

That took a lot of thinking of how we're going to make it.

We ended up using loft insulation boards.

We used those different thicknesses to carve,

and we basically layered it all together to create the structure.

It was lightweight, but strong as well.

You never quite know how they're going to turn out when you start them.

And a lot of the times... trial and error to get where we are with it, but...

When you see it, then you can stand back, and that's a kind of reward.

I like the snake orrery.

It was two snakes intertwined,

and you see the globe in the middle.

By the time it was all painted, you wouldn't know

it was just polystyrene, or insulation foam, underneath it.

I constantly get amazed at what we can do.

And I think, "Did we make that? Are you sure we made that?

Are we that clever to make that?" But we did.

The Driftwood Throne was really interesting

because that was the Sea Snake's ancestral seat.

We wanted to build it and do it service

'cause the Sea Snake is a proud guy,

and Jim and Clare went out and actually built

a throne out of driftwood. It's an incredible piece of work.

And really the only person whose feet touched the ground

when they sat on it was Steve Toussaint, the Sea Snake himself.

The Hall of Nine was lovely to see it

as it developed over the weeks as they were building it.

And then, you actually walk on there, and it's all dressed and ready for filming.

That's when you sort of realize yeah, Game of Thrones is back. We're doing it again.

The banquet in the wedding scene is amazing.

When I first got my episode, "Oh, yeah! It's a wedding."

Every episode I ever done in my life, every film I've done

seems to have a wedding in it, but this wedding was different.

It was a typical wedding. There was music.

There was booze. There was speeches.

There was fights. It was great!

Lord Corlys of House Velaryon!

When the doors opened and we looked out

and walked down there in this huge hall

all of these supporting artists. It was incredible.

I think I, sort of, pinched myself.

I realized we weren't "in Kansas anymore"

when we had every family they'd introduce

walking down the stairs in the middle of this wedding sequence.

That was the time when I really realized

the scale of the show.

It was the banners of the house sigils that got me.

They just blew me away.

I mean, it was fun. It was funny.

We had to do the dance here.

Spoke a bit of High Valyrian with Matt. There was a fight.

It was very eventful. It was a good wedding.

With all of these scripts, I sat down, read them,

decided how I would shoot them, and then gave them away to someone else.

So, when I saw it for the first time,

it was a real, kind of shock to suddenly see

somebody else had gone and made this thing.

The attention to detail that went into creating the wedding was extraordinary.

Every table was laden with meats and fruits.

All of the sort of set dressing on food and banquet stuff, is really brilliant.

I think the props boys had a really tough couple weeks

and were working their ass off.

We set the tables up I can't remember how many times

for all of the scenes and how they needed to play out.

And the home economist, obviously, was super key to that set.

This is one of the biggest things I've ever done.

We've got eight tables of food and a top table,

and some other tables set-dressed on the side.

So, it's a massive deal, and it's being shot

every ten days. So we're having to really ramp it up a bit.

We just wanted it to be, sort of, black and gold and red

and really narrow the palette,

so it had a sort of eerie quality in a way.

They said, "This is how we visualize it,"

wanting it to be quite visceral and dark and bloody and gory.

We've got roast lambs, tomahawk steaks,

massive chickens, red chickens, black chickens,

piles and piles of quails, pigeons with their heads on,

sheep's heads, calves' trotters, soup...

And then I go, "Well, that's gotta be fake." And it's like, "No, it's real."

Jesus Christ!

We've got a really good butcher.

And we phone him up, and we say, "Right. We're gonna need

this amount on this day, and this amount on this day."

And then, we phone him and say, "We want more."

Some of it has to be specially ordered.

It's all available. It's all stuff that's out there.

It's pretty gruesome, but I wanted to show the savagery

of these characters and these people

once they've had a few drinks and once they let loose.

Ready... And action!

Congratulations, Your Grace.

You have made a fine match for the princess.

Let's reset.

When I first read 105, I started reading

and then reading, and then I realized it's a 25-page-long scene.

So it's half an episode.

We wanted everything. We wanted dancing

and speeches and conspiracy and threats.

That was a really complicated shoot.

I remember first talking to Clare about it

and her being very much like, "Yeah, no problem."

And me sitting there thinking, "Mm..."

I don't know if you know what you're getting into.

I'm actually... a bit scared.

There was a lot happening.

Nick Heckstall-Smith, the first AD, was brilliant at

really working out what shots, when.

NICK HECKSTALL-SMITH: The wedding was a great sequence to read.

For myself, I started breaking the script down into basically beats.

From there, started talking to Clare and Alejandro, the DP,

about the shot list for the whole sequence.

And then, I can break that down, day by day.

Once you start breaking it down, you still got shot one, two, three, four, five.

You're telling this story.

It's amazingly written.

But, of course, as a filmmaker, you're worried about the 25-page wedding.

And how are you going to keep the audience interested?

How are we going to pace it? What's the tone?

How are you gonna build it up?

It took us days to come up with the right blocking, rehearsing.

And... action!

And tonight is only at the beginning.

We all know the crown's oldest and fiercest ally.

There was months of deciding how we're gonna light it.

How we're gonna light it for this amount of time?

How is it going to progress during the night?

In that case, we had fire and moon.

As a cinematographer, you play with those elements.

So that was a lot of testing, a lot of pre-rigging,

a lot of lighting, and then came the shooting days.

And... action!

I loved doing the wedding scene.

I think that was the first time I'd been working with Clare and Alejandro.

So it was quite a baptism of fire with them

because it was a two-week-long shoot

with about 200 supporting artists every day.

Those scenes, I'm not gonna lie,

they are hard to shoot.

You've got to break them down and come about it in a real tactical way.

It neatly divided itself into three,

and we approached each section sort of separately.

As a visual storyteller how do we end up where the story ends up?

In case of the wedding, it was going from a more static camera

to a more moving and then flowy and then chaotic camera.

Be welcome.

As we join together in celebration

with House Targaryen and H--

In the middle of this speech, he just looks

and sees something at the other end of the room.

And everyone follows his gaze.

And there stands Alicent, dressed in green.

It was such a fun scene to play.

The power that I felt in that moment

was unlike any other.

It's such a stand-out point in the series.

In a way, it's a coming of age for Alicent.

And it's also the first time that she moves against the patriarchy.

On the day, I didn't have to think about it,

because we'd shot pretty much all

of my pivotal scenes in four and five.

And so I sort of had most of that journey and most of that build up.

It was almost like a release.

Congratulations, step-daughter.

What a blessing this is for you.

We played a lot of different things with her look for that.

I mean, to give that strength she's got suddenly

from being the fresh-faced young girl.

She's got a stronger makeup on. She means business.

I worried that, given leave of your father's shadow,

you might wither in King's Landing's sun.

But you stood tall.

It's a collaboration. She's gotta have the strength from everyone.

So if everyone can play their little role of giving her

a strong costume, strong hair, that strong makeup look.

When she makes the entrance, you think,

"Oh! What's happened here?"

She gate-crashes that wedding.

She comes in late. She's breaking the rules.

And Tanya did that beautiful cage and put it all up.

It looked stunning. It's been designed that it's, "Look at me. I've entered."

And we've made it quite a statement.

She wears a lot of green, and with her beautiful hair color,

it just compliments it very well.

In the book, Fire and Blood, there's this very seminal moment

where Alicent wears a green dress to a tournament.

And we decided to play that here in this wedding.

SPEAKER 2: Your-- Your Grace?

It was not so much the dress. It was more...

how we can make the green look even greener.

So we had to find a fabric

where the green was very intense.

And I had to find another fabric where the green was shining.

It's green and green and greener.

That dress probably took around four weeks

to make from start to finish.

It involved several fittings.

The main process was the fabric choice.

And once we had the fabric right,

we knew that it would be fantastic.

We do source green fabric.

We also have an incredible textile and dyeing department here.

They are amazing and have created these fabrics

and textures which are far better than anything you can buy.

Because they've been made bespoke for the show.

That wedding, there was so much gold and so much glitter

that she had to be the greenest thing where she was.

It's interesting. It is all about the dress.

But in order to make the dress stand out,

we had to be really careful with how we dressed the other people in the scene.

Apart from the other Hightowers, that should be the only green thing in the entire room.

The beacon on the Hightower.

Do you know what color it glows

when Oldtown calls its banners to war?

Green.

'Cause when you read the script, and you think,

"I'm not going to miss that one."

No pressure.

And take one. Action.

HECKSTALL-SMITH: The important thing with a lengthy sequence

is that you don't lose track of where you need to be

at certain points during the shoot.

If I haven't got targets to reach to

and an understanding of the overall schedule,

then I can't make sure that we're on track.

So I knew that by the end of day two of the wedding,

we had to start dancing.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

One and two, three, four, five, six, seven.

That's where you'll come to, yeah.

We prepped it so intensely.

We rehearsed it before we shot it.

I worked with a really brilliant choreographer

who I've actually worked with before.

We had to create the House of the Dragons dance,

which we really had no references for.

And I saw this as a great responsibility.

I really wanted people to believe in it.

The movement can actually go with the dialogue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The choreography evolved.

We thought about, "What is the best way?

Does it look too modern?" But pretty much in every culture

since early, early years,

people tend to dance in a semi-choreographed way.

And so we talked about prehistoric birds,

and we sort of drew from images and movements

of these prehistoric birds.

When we first did it, it felt a little bit too contemporary, so we pulled it back.

We didn't want it to be too fussy.

But I think we landed on something interesting.

All of us called it "the smelly fart."

There's a bit when we-- are like this, and then we go--

and we'd kinda bend down, so everyone would giggle.

Milly was great. I think the hardest part

was doing it in the closed space.

Because when we rehearsed,

there was, like, five people in the room.

You know what I mean? And then you get up,

and a lot of the people there are dancers.

So you think, "Oh, they're watching."

There were a lot of dancers.

It was actually really hard to remember where we were.

But once you got into the rhythm of it,

we pretty much shot the whole thing

front-to-back within a take.

It was all on Steadicam with just the dancers.

So it was like three dances back-to-back. And everyone kind of going in

and you have to lremember where you were and not bump into anyone.

But it was so much fun, a lot of fun.

And then we had to think about how they could do

these movements in the costumes that they had.

And the costumes didn't necessarily have the give because they're all sort of,

tight here, so the costume department

very kindly sort of loosened all the underarms

of every single costume so people could raise their arms for the dance.

Hey!

Whilst we were working on the choreography,

I spoke to Ramin about what sort of music we could use.

And he came up with something that we then set the dance to.

And we could play whilst we were shooting.

Hearing that music, oh my god, it literally sent chills down my spine.

Those-- Those drumbeats,

and then watching them do this dragon dance,

it was almost hypnotic, in a weird way.

I love working when there's music playing.

And I feel like whenever that happens for the actors, I find my operating improves,

because it gives a sense of rhythm and movement.

At that point, it was quite fun for me,

because once people started moving a bit more,

I got the Steadicam out and got to play around with

a bit more kind of creative camera movement.

I think we had four or five cameras shooting simultaneously.

We really wanted to get the grandeur.

The dancing is beautiful.

When you see it within the scene, it makes a lot of sense.

And it gives the whole thing a rhythm.

And it actually motivates what happens next.

Six years of peace and prosperity, there's a lot of tension built up.

And you just don't know where the explosion is going to come from,

and then it comes from the most unexpected place,

when Criston Cole finally just snaps.

I really wanted to lens it out, to get some long lenses on it.

So we were seeing our characters through people.

So, you know, everyone had a different agenda.

We didn't know where the drama was gonna erupt.

It's a bit like an Agatha Christie,

like, you know, set up all these explosive points.

The fun of that sequence is playing on

the audience's expectations of a Game of Thrones wedding,

and knowing that these things tend not to go well.

Rowley is a brilliant stunt coordinator.

And what I soon learned was I'd just say,

"Oh, Rowley, can you just have a little fight here?"

And before you know it, there's an explosion

of something that looks very real and very scary.

We used a Steadicam in there and some handheld,

but the bigger, wider stuff is the stuff that's trickier.

You know, trying to make it all look realistic at the same time.

I think Rowley has this kind of filmmaker side to him.

So he knows how to shoot stuff,

and this is actually the hardest part for a stunt coordinator.

You're having to incorporate his vision of a stunt to the storytelling.

He knows how to tone it down or tone it up.

That fight was super easy to shoot

after rehearsing it with Rowley so many times.

A lot of it is off-screen, a lot of it is on Fabien beating one of my mats up.

The sheer amount of punches that he threw,

when I was there, it was like, it was like, "Are we done?"

Go again!

From Viserys' point of view, to just see this sea of people

rolling from one side of the room

to the other side of the room.

I didn't have that many stunt people there, probably 20 stunt people.

I mean, and there's what? Two, three hundred people in the room?

So it's a lot of people to control.

And we did do this kind of wave thing as well.

Like at a concert, if something happens, and you get a surge.

So we tried to do that,

which takes a bit of looking after people

to make sure that we don't trample anybody or hurt anybody.

Hours and hours have gone into making each fight perfect,

so that it all feels fluid and brilliant.

And then our whole stunt team is just great.

Clare was just not saying, "cut," and he was screaming and...

And I was like, "Okay, okay."

Eyes closed kind of scene, when they would come in,

it was completely chaotic, it was great fun.

There were a lot of elements about that wedding. It was a big thing.

Day-by-day, you just chip away at it, and then you've got the whole.

I think it's a great, great scene.

And it's one of my proudest scenes of House of the Dragon.