Original subtitles

I think that's what really gives this the proper kind of scale.

This used to be my favorite set.

Like, that's, that's it.

I was nearly crashin' the car 'cause it was just so beautiful.

Blows my mind.

Someone told me that in Spain.

It gets messy.

It just makes everything a little bit more excitin'.

Episode five is called "Regent."

And it's, you know... That, obviously, refers

to Aemond taking control.

And cut. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Thanks.

This episode is very much a power grab.

People vying for power,

but also, it's very much about that happening through grief.

So, when we meet Corlys in episode five, he's devastated.

She gets the death, I guess, that she would want,

in the sense that... I think Baela says it, you know, she dies by dragon fire.

But, of course, that doesn't take away the pain.

Sitting in the Hall of Nine, but it means nothing to him anymore

because she's gone.

Steve is an incredible actor.

He has such deep soul to all of his performances.

When you're dealing with grief,

I don't really talk to them that much about it.

It's such a vulnerable place

to be mining your grief of your own personal life,

which is kind of what you have to do,

and then, let them find it and you see what they bring.

And, with Corlys,

I had no clue that he was gonna have this tear.

Like, this silent tear roll down his face.

It was incredibly moving to see it.

Yeah, that was a beautiful scene.

Corlys was shot in the Hall of Nine, which had to be a blue screen

because the original big set, we don't have it anymore.

So what we did is we built part of it and then everything else was blue screen.

So that was a nice challenge.

The advantage was we had shot on season one

so we knew what the set was, we knew how the set felt.

And also, the actors, or Steve himself,

obviously, had worked in that set extensively on season one

so he knew kind of where he was, even though 90% of it was blue.

So, this used to be my favorite set

and I don't know what they've done with it.

It's now a warehouse, and I'm embarrassed and hurt.

Personally offended by it, but I'm sure with the CGI stuff,

it'll look wonderful.

The Cyclops was really helpful, especially in sets like Hall of Nine,

because the cameras and us understand exactly what we're seeing

wherever we place the camera in that environment.

The Cyclops the visual effects guys use is enormously important

and, especially, for directors and actors as well

to be able to look around a blue screen stage

and then see what the final image will be.

Rolling!

That's brilliant!

This is the best set, you know?

We had a fully textured scan of the set and I remember opening the scan and going,

"Like, that's, that's it."

You know, like, literally, the kind of the fine detail.

So it was a pretty straightforward rebuild for us

'cause we had all of the material.

The cost of rebuilding the whole set for that,

as opposed to picking our angles and saying,

"Right, we need this angle, we need that angle, we don't need that,"

we worked it out what was essential to build

and what could be put in digitally

to recreate the set and not have to build the whole thing again.

And that, hopefully, has proved very successful.

Cut. Thank you.

Behold! The traitor dragon Meleys!

Parading Meleys's head, it's sort of grotesque.

It's also a reminder of a battle gone bad.

And also, Cole perceives quite quickly

has the reverse effect of what is intended.

It's intended to be a sort of rallying call

to the people of King's Landing and, "Look how we're doing."

But, of course, the people of King's Landing

see the beginnings of nuclear warfare, and they're like, "I wanna get out."

'Tis an abomination.

Don't they realize we won the battle?

Strange victory.

Yeah, I mean, it was amazing.

Any time I get to work with Clare Kilner is a joy.

And she makes me laugh very, very much,

and I think she takes some sort of small pleasure

in watching me and Freddie struggle on these horses.

It was really, really great.

The way we shot it is big parade, streets of Spain,

streets of Trujillo, and streets of back lot,

and the whole procession. And it's Meleys's head,

which it was just, like, a big, blue head.

But I think once the whole scene is finished

and once you can actually see that dragon head,

it's gonna be quite amazing.

Rhaenyra will answer this.

So that obviously will be a fully CG dragon head,

kinda more complicated than some in that, you know,

lot of blood and guts and gore.

In all of our sequences, the starting point is always an incredible concept.

And so, there was a lot of iterations

that went through to get the right type of dragon head,

the right amount of gore and blood

and we'll, literally, be taking that, you know,

those concepts and, you know, making them real

but the dragon head was created from our real dragon head model

and then scaled down a little

and we had the horns on it because it's got massive horns

and it's a big show, big dragons.

Slain at Rook's Rest by your king. To Aegon!

The victory parade with the dragon head

was a massive amount of wagons and horses

and characters that needed to march through the streets.

It was a challenge to move that parade back and forth.

You could never turn it 'round and reset back to a first position easily.

You had to unhitch all the horses,

push the wagons back, push the horses back,

re-hitch again.

It was 15 minutes before you could roll

the cameras again, so that was challenging.

Trujillo was built for medieval parades for sure.

A lot of our street, street-based shooting was actually done in Trujillo

'cause it offered these wider streets and these grand squares

and the right looks of the buildings.

So definitely lend itself, you know, very well to staging this action.

The dragon Meleys!

I thought the dragons was gods.

It's just meat.

Shooting in Spain was surreal

because the set is just... It's just there, you know?

I can understand why they shoot there.

The other thing about Spain is it was an opportunity

to spend time with some of the cast, and it's always nice to meet your costars.

But I find the stuff that they manage to do when we're away

like dressing up Cáceres...

That's how you pronounce it. Someone told me that in Spain.

Don't tell anyone. Pretend camera.

You know, to look like the "Game of Thrones" film set

or Trujillo, which we shot in as well, or, you know...

I find that stuff pretty amazing.

I think that's the key factor, to shoot on real locations.

It has the feeling of reality, of course, but once you arrive here,

it feels like the birth of the sets, where all of these locations started here,

so you really feel that you are in King's Landing.

And action.

And also, going back to the stage,

back in England, it's weird because you can feel that this is there, somehow,

so you kinda feel both worlds in the different locations.

I think you always go through that process right at the very beginning.

Should this be a location?

So it had been my ambition on this season to build part of King's Landing.

So, everything that you're about to see is season two.

So let's walk through.

And you can see the colors of the Red Keep now blend into the sandstone

of Cáceres and Trujillo with streets going off

and, clearly, blue screens goin' behind the background there

so we can extend and put in the streets that we filmed in Spain.

King's Landing, large set,

now occupying several acres on the back lot.

This section still remains dressed.

We complete photography in three more days

and then, all of the dressing will go

and the sets will weather their way through the winter.

And now if we look back from here, you can see the approach to the Red Keep

and how this set all ties together.

So it's quite an expansive set and allows us to play a lot of action out

and to change it and dress it and replicate the areas

of King's Landing to flesh out the story.

Aegon's story here is absolutely tragic

so they hide Aegon's body.

I wanted to really shoot Aegon's litter

and really get the sense that he is dead, you know,

so that when they pull him out,

it's a shock, one, that he's alive

and then to see the state of disrepair that he's in,

how burnt he is.

We also elongated that journey from the script

because we wanted to follow him with Steadicam into the Red Keep,

up the steps, through the hallways, and into the room.

Then, I wanted to sort of see the lid come off

but still not see what was inside.

So, really sort of tease the audience

with the mystery of what's inside that box.

We always thought about it as a dark scene.

It's really gritty.

Even the script talks about curtains being closed.

It's supposed to be a grim and dark scene, so we always saw it that way.

We wanted to leave a lot for the imagination

so somebody that's been... half the body's been burned,

you can only imagine his wounds.

Dracarys.

No, no!

Things like breastplate being stuck to the flesh

or, you know, things like that that we wanted to show,

but not too much, so the dark environment helped

but it was a lot about the amazing prosthetic work that they did.

It looked really, really good.

I think people are gonna be a bit in shock when they see Aegon.

When we did the return to the Red Keep with Aegon

after he's been burnt,

him coming back and everything being peeled off him

and I see what's actually happened to him

was, yeah, a big one for Clare

so we wanted to make sure we sold that enough

and made it kind of disgusting enough.

So we start with our kind of pussiest version

because he's been brought straight off the battlefield.

So that would've been time for infection to set in

so we've got a lot of pus going on, a lot of wetness.

Then we kind of reveal, in stages, how burnt his chest is

and how extensive the damage is.

- It's all fuckin' melted. - What's happenin' here?

What's this? Oh, psoriasis. Sorry.

I don't like that bit.

My self-esteem is rock bottom.

Move it there.

It was great. Tom was really into it as well.

The whole thing of his burn is it's not a direct burn.

It's not a burn from the flame. It's where his armor has become super hot

and it's burned into his face like a hot plate.

Valyrian armor, in "Game of Thrones" lore, is flame-resistant,

as opposed to a normal armor, which will just melt.

So that was a big breakdown job for Tim, our chief of breakdown.

And so, he blackened it.

He did some really lovely techniques on it.

And then, David, who does sort of specialist jewelry

and he made some of the chain mail look like it was melted,

tried to make it look as real as possible of somethin' that had been up in flames.

We love getting to those moments in the script.

And you see that and you think burns and think,

oh, well, you know there's gonna be burns in a story like this.

With dragons, there's gonna be some burns.

And it's great because that's allowing us to play

and to find those characters and to research.

We've gotta think about the shooting schedule as well.

It's gotta be viable that it can work every day.

With the severe burns, it's a six-hour makeup.

You can't sustain that over the course of a whole show.

Tom's been brilliant. He's been amazing.

He's sat there and allowed us to do it.

It's amazing. The team I have around me is...

are just phenomenal.

They're an absolute dream team.

The detail they can see that they go, "Oh yeah, this needs doin'."

I just can't see that sort of thing.

But we've all got to know each other very well.

There's been a lot of time in the chair.

We had a day where it was, like, close to seven.

It's a process, but these guys are so good at what they do.

If it looked rubbish, then you'd be devastated

that you were in the chair for that long, but it doesn't.

It looks incredible.

These guys put their heart and souls into it.

Blows my mind.

The hour is late and my dragon is hungry.

Our terms are simple, Lord Bracken.

Renounce the false king Aegon as a usurper

and bend the knee to me.

Or your house burns.

These are not a people that can be forced into submission.

And then he's shocked here to learn that the Brackens

would rather burn in dragon fire than submit to the Blackwoods.

And he's frustrated, but he also says,

"Hey, I kinda like these guys and I could use people like this on my team."

We really believed in that scene.

We really thought the tone of the scene

can be really fun, but yet really sarcastic.

We created a lot of tension

but it was just, like, a really nice acting scene.

I would sooner be the Lord of Bones and Cinders

than bend my knee before some heathen Blackwood cunt.

There was a lot of help from VFX.

We previs'd that scene because that dragon was,

you know, played such a big role in the scene

and it's just a dragon standing, which we haven't seen much.

So it was very challenging but it was really cool.

We choose fire.

It was storyboarded by Alejandro and Clare

and with the Cyclops there on the day of,

that was quite kind of involved in setting up

just the staging of the scene.

How big is Caraxes in that space? Is he gonna fit?

We kind of previs'd that.

And on the day, it just, with every shot,

it's kind of, you hand over the iPad and you can line it up.

So we talked with Matt about this buck,

so he could sit really, really high up in the saddle

on this mechanical buck that would move as he moved.

Yeah, that was an interesting one where we started as a blue screen,

you know, shot at the studio, and we were like,

"No, no, we wanna do it there."

And the location was just stunning, so,

you know, the performances were all heightened,

I think, because of that.

It was very different from our usual buck work.

Matt, he enjoyed it. He loved it.

Every location gave the show the scale

and these amazing landscapes, so it was great.

I just love being on a big, grand location like that.

It was lovely to be outside. And it was raining and I was on a plinth.

And it was, like, sideways rain.

I think that's what really gives us the proper kind of scale,

those beaches and those vistas, and it's a show that really needs that.

And so, it's good.

I think as much location as we can have, really,

I think really adds to it.

Having North Wales as this really dense set of locations

that could play Dragonstone and the Riverlands

and the Crownlands was really useful.

And I, honestly, I don't know that we would've been able

to produce a season two as we did without the abundance of North Wales.

It just opens up the doors

'cause, you know, as wonderful and as beautiful

as these sets are and designed,

you can't fit a dragon in Dragonstone, but you can definitely fit it

on the Welsh countryside hillsides.

I spent a lot of time on the Welsh shoot

but any time you're shooting on location,

the thing you're gonna come up against is the weather.

And Wales gets every kind of weather there is.

And I think that we have been, overall, very lucky

in that the weather we've got seems to have perfectly matched

the scenes that we had to film it in.

This rich scenery.

You know, we're on top of mountains with the wind in our hair.

Like, you can't fake that.

There'd been torrential rain

but we were lucky not to be in that torrential rain.

Locations are a big logistics operation.

Just creating the facility to be able to shoot what you want

and build what you want there.

They are headaches and those places are often inaccessible to equipment

and we are not a small footprint.

We have heavy equipment and cranes that we haul everywhere.

Some of these locations are quite tough in that

they are special places.

A lot of them are SSSI locations, which means they are protected.

And so it limits some of the work, you know.

Some of our greatest ideas, you can't achieve them.

And action.

There was a lot of remodeling, recontouring

of the landscape to get those sets in.

Other problems there is they're all SSSI,

which is, you know, special sites of scientific interest.

So, certain plants you can't move, you can't touch, you have to protect.

So, there was a lot, a lot of juggling going on there,

right, and that was just like a bit of a playground for us.

Clearing, leveling, bringing in, redressing,

just changing it to what we required really.

I think whenever you go to a different space, it informs you.

You know, the history is ingrained in the woods and the stones of a place

and that just influences you. You can't help it.

When I saw the work and I saw the artwork

of season one, I said to guys, "You have to go to Wales.

"The mountains are bigger. It's visceral.

There's something magical about it."

This does not belong to humans. It does not belong to us.

And I think that fits in the world of "House of the Dragon" so well

about what is ours and what we can claim and what is bigger than us.

Staring into nothing but landscape and nature

with no man-made things, it does something to ya.

It's amazing shooting in Wales.

I mean, first of all, it's incredible

that those kind of landscapes,

we don't have to fly a million miles away. They're right here.

I remember I was driving up and I was like a tourist,

you know, I was nearly crashin' the car 'cause it was just so beautiful.

Unimaginable how they got an entire crew of,

I don't know, maybe 2,000 people up a mountain

that was kind of almost impassable, I don't know, yeah, brilliant.

It makes you feel like you're in that period of time.

There's not really any cars. There's no roads. It's all just scenery.

It's nice to have a change of scenery.

I think if we was all in the studio for the whole shoot,

we would start to go a little bit crazy.

It's like going to school and goin' on a school trip

because it just makes everything a little bit more excitin'.