01x03 - Second of His Name

[bunniefuu]

I remember thinking,

"This is gonna be a nightmare."

Are we actually gonna do this,

and do this here?

It's literally like playing Cowboys

and Indians when you were a kid.

There's been a lot of tough challenges.

That was up there.

It was epic.

This is exactly what you signed up

for in the first place.

This is why you do it.

Essentially, the concept of the episode

is: while Daemon goes off to real w*r,

Viserys, again, as he did with

the tournament in the pilot,

plays a blood sport.

In this case, the blood sport is a hunt.

We treated that

as another show of power.

That when the King goes out on a hunt,

thousands of people go with him.

Here's to his Grace

on his second name day.

We spent a lot of time researching

medieval hunts

and the kinds of things

that would go on,

so we could get the details

of that correct.

We looked at medieval tapestries,

of which a lot of that world is sewn

into history anyway.

So you can glean ideas

of who arrived at such events.

The important thing was to really

expand on the idea of decadence.

It was a really impressive undertaking

from the art department

to create what was effectively

a kind of a festival.

It wasn't like, "Oh, we'll just

sh**t in this back bit here."

I mean, it was like the whole

It was like a whole town that they built.

And background action,

and horses, and dogs.

Look at all the dogs!

They'll eat you for lunch.

The hunt was a massive sequence

for us to sh**t

because we had all walks

of life there.

We have nobles, we have knights on

horseback, we have chicken pluckers,

we have latrine diggers.

We have dressed over 118 principal

actors and 12,000 extras

over the course of this sh**t.

And the fires, the cooking,

the preparing, the weapons.

All of these different sort of stations

within the camp have to be established.

An awful lot of that was props.

We put up so many tents.

And every tent needed to be dressed.

Inside some of them, outside all of them.

It was absolutely

full of detail wherever you looked.

It just brought that world to life.

Love acting. Again?

The process of that is getting it right,

sooner rather than later.

I think that's what's helped us along

the way

is a lot of really great

communication.

-Is it sharp?

-No.

Miguel and Ryan, at the beginning,

they'd come up

to the art department set dec,

and we'd show them the model makers

and what they were doing.

All the different

ideas for the props, the sets.

God, the work is unbelievable.

That's one of the things about this

as well, is all the work that goes on.

And you just turn up

in the morning with your coffee.

And people have been here with hammers

and nails and God knows what,

at all hours,

making this world real for you.

The Aldershot location

was just incredible.

But Charlie had an expression

that carried through all production,

which was, "There will be weather."

We were lucky in that

the dressing time we had there,

the weather was pretty good.

You know, it stayed dry,

we didn't have a lot of wind or anything.

But the morning of the sh**t

We arrived at silly o'clock in the

morning, and a security guard said,

"It's nice now, but at nine o'clock,

it's going to be biblical."

And I just remember

that word "biblical."

It poured!

I mean, we got slammed.

There was sideways winds and there was

tents flapping and trim coming off.

It feels like almost an English

version of monsoon weather.

There was a point where it looked like

there was gonna be a repeat

of the Terry Gilliam Lost in La Mancha,

where you see his entire set

drifting away, down a mudslide.

All the makeup and costume tents had

to be evacuated because of the river

that was running through

the middle of the set.

It was mental!

It was mental.

I think we just thought,

"Our game is up."

I am constantly surprised

at the English weather.

But it really makes for an incredible

beauty that we've been able to capture.

The nature of filming is:

the show must go on.

There's a lot of characters in the story.

And we have to introduce

them kind of quickly and efficiently,

in a way that feels organic

to the storytelling.

It's just this f*cking as*h*le.

No Hey, guys!

Those royal hunts were the

that was the event

that was looked forward

to all year long in those times.

And only the you know, the most-elite

had been invited to this thing.

Helmet. Pommel.

Anthony, we'll put you onto the bus.

Fierce, loyal expression.

I love when the Lannisters,

and the Starks, and the Baratheons,

and you hear these names

that you know.

And, you know, these are the ancestors

of the people

that you came to know

on the show.

And action!

I mean, those days are fun, just

'cause you get to finally see everyone.

It was just really nice to just all be

together and just, like, have a laugh.

It was amazing

just to see everything in motion.

Luckily, for my first few weeks,

I did nothing but, sort of,

skulk in the background,

which is quite handy.

You have Jason and Tyland

who are twin brothers on the show.

It's really great to watch Jefferson

play both characters

because he plays Jason Lannister

with that Gaston, you know,

"Of course, you'll wanna be with me!"

And it's really great to watch.

-I'd do anything for my queen.

-Thank you for the wine.

The secret agenda of the nameday

is to also marry Rhaenyra.

Once she figures it out, she ends up

retreating, and blowing off the party,

and going off into the woods

for the bulk of it.

You have everybody in medieval

and beautiful bespoke costumes.

And then you have guys running

around in blue leotards.

And it's just like, "What is that show?"

Ah, the Blue Man Group?

Yeah, it's really cool to

see all that stuff come together.

It's amazing how much goes into it.

On the day, we had one of my guys

playing the boar.

So, he would run around

and knock over the actors.

It was just this man in a blue morph

suit with, like, a face mask on.

Kind of like Spider-Man,

but just blue.

Just pelting at me.

It was actually quite terrifying.

She had to have something,

or someone, to fight against.

It's much easier for us

if there's a person

who is happy to put on a Lycra suit

and interact with our actors.

It means that the cameraman's

got something to follow.

You can see the action.

You can see the flow.

You can cut the scene to that action.

And it just makes it

feel more realistic as a result.

Milly doesn't like boars, and she stabs

them whenever she gets the opportunity.

That poor boar. Yeah.

The white stag is not really something

from George's mythology per se.

I mean, that's something that

we borrowed from Arthurian tales.

It is a combination effort between

stunts, special effects,

and visual effects really,

to get the thing right.

Quite a lot of animals

are in this episode, too.

And all of them are completely CG.

Who's gonna be the front and the back?

I think they just tossed a coin.

'Cause I always wonder if

that guy, for all future time, says,

"deer's a*s" or "stag's end."

Go, Chrissy! Go, Chrissy!

-Chrissy, man. Yeah!

-Freedom!

k*ll that Smurf! Yeah!

Miguel wanted me to come in and do

episode three. It was a huge episode.

It had, really,

one of the big battles for the season.

You open with Daemon on a full as*ault.

Also, to give us the geography

of the battle

that's to come later

in the episode.

You're trying to quickly set the stage

for what this conflict in the Stepstones

has been like for three years.

The Crabfeeder and his men

are coming out, doing a bit of fighting,

and then running back inside

when the dragons come.

It's tiring, and it's exhausting, and

we're not seem to be getting anywhere.

We wanted a gritty, kind of,

Vietnam battle against a guerrilla army.

And how do we use the landscape

and the technology to tell that story?

That whole storyline is sort

of explained in one big, long shot.

There's a lot of exposition that takes

place in there and our work,

in particular,

carries quite a lot of that.

To have a volume available, we were

learning a lot as we were going along.

We learned how much more we could do

than we thought we could do.

What was brilliant about the volume was

that that interactive light

on the gentlemen riding dragons, that

just ties you perfectly into the scene.

This is a case where we weren't using

the volume as a real-time set extension.

We're just using it as

the ultimate lighting space.

Daemon has been failing upwards.

And now he's faced with an opportunity

to be taken seriously,

and he's finding it

very hard to fulfill.

I bring word from His Grace,

Viserys Targaryen.

Rather than have his brother come

to again get him out of trouble,

he would just rather go and,

like, die on the b*ttlefield.

As Daemon was

coming up the beach in Cornwall,

we now see that beach from episode two,

now fully covered in bodies.

The whole battle itself was originally

set to take place on that beach.

And I scouted it,

and was like, there's no way.

We literally would have been able

to sh**t for about three or four hours,

and there just wasn't the time to get

through the workload.

Even if the weather was kind.

Because of all our title issues in

Cornwall, and on the beaches in general,

the idea was to recreate a beach

in a controllable environment.

So we could sh**t continuously, and get

the same environments every day.

The joke on set became

that it was the Battle of the Backlot.

The challenge is,

with moving it to the studio,

is suddenly,

everything feels fake.

You know that it's gonna be a real team

effort to make all that work together.

So to create the soldiers and sailors,

we would all get together.

Prosthetics, hair,

costume, makeup.

Once we'd created them, it took weeks

to age them and break them down.

It was a lot of seaweed

and we've got that going in.

We've been burning timbers left,

right, and center,

to do a kind of post-burn

dragon attack look.

That axe?

I'm gonna stick it in Theo's head.

I'm glad there's a camera here

"Pineapple juice" is my safe word.

At the beginning of production,

it's always important to find out

what your big set-up is.

And for us,

it was the Stepstones battle.

One hundred and sixty-five a side.

Valyrians and Westerosy soldiers on one.

And then we've got the

Triarchy Tyroshi pirates on the other.

Ryan's keen to have

the Valyrians come across as rich.

And it's not just those

single characters.

We have all the armies

to deal with as well.

And all the shields to paint.

We had about six bodies.

We also had extras

who were covered in prosthetics.

Huge slashes. Stakes through

the hands and through the wrists.

The head and torso section

of the craft figure

is quite an extensive build

for us.

Sculpted the cross-section of the torso

with an articulated armature.

So when Matt drags him along,

everything kind of moves correctly.

Yeah. That was really heavy, actually.

It kept getting waterlogged.

It's, like, the weight of half a human.

Bless his heart.

There was this moment for Daemon when

he thought, "The game's up. This is it."

We looked at Black Hawk Down

and the scene in the ruined helicopter,

and the soldier in there,

knowing that he was going to die.

And so we came up with the boat wreck

and the skeletal frame of a boat

washed up on the beach.

It was really incredible,

what they were able to do.

But then, also, they have these amazing,

painted 2D backings that they put onto

the containers that surrounded the set.

Scenic art in our industry is often

referred to as a "dying art."

I honestly don't think

it is at all.

People were in awe

of how believable it was.

Essentially, an old

Wile E. Coyote gag.

And it worked.

That's a silent era filmmaking

technique that he used.

And it was mind blowing.

I knew we hadn't yet earned our

ability to do the long night

of the Battle of the b*stards.

But I wanted to try to create

a memorable battle episode

that's something

that we hadn't seen before.

Very early on,

Greg and I started breaking it down.

We had, like,

goji berries and pumpkin seeds.

So we started

playing on the table with that.

This is Daemon's coming out party

as a warrior and a character.

That's all designed in little moments

that happen throughout

the course of the sh**t.

Not dissimilar

to Battle of the b*stards.

It's really

a character's journey.

You're really with

Matt's character all the way through.

Size and scan

and all that is irrelevant, really.

It's what you

get right with it.

A few of those things come together,

and you think,

"Well, this could be exciting."

It's a sequence that underwent many,

many transformations.

And in the end, I think what was

most important about it

We needed to show

Daemon fail before he succeeds.

You don't want a Bruce Willis

action hero thing going on.

It's got to be about him

going and losing.

Crabfeeder

is at the cave at the very end.

Daemon is driving to the end zone.

And as he's doing it every day,

we would redress the set

to be further and further

down there.

We had some interesting camera moves

that needed to be cued.

We did quite a lot with Rowley's wire

cam. Chasing people down.

Sometimes,

we used a rig called a Maxima.

Two grips run through the sand,

and I just sit in a nice, comfy chair

and control the tilt and the pan.

All those tools are at your disposal,

and that's been really liberating,

'cause then nothing's off the table.

Unreasonable violence, please.

That's what I want.

Chaos and mayhem.

He had never done

a sequence like that before.

I come from a long,

long action background,

so it was great to have him put his trust

in me and really create a sequence

that felt emotional all the way through.

The guy takes over, and you get to swing

a sword and be covered in blood.

I mean, he was slathered in so much

blood by the end of that thing,

he said it like took two days to really

get it all off of him at the end of it.

After he's chopped off

the Crab Feeder's head, I thought,

"Yeah, now we've got Daemon,

now we've got Game of Thrones,

now we've got that look

that everyone wants."

Good job, well done, everybody.

Thank you very much, appreciate it.

So, we've seen him in episode one

where he lost to Criston Cole,

so this really is the bit to show

Daemon as being really skillful.

And we're trying and saying,

"Again and again,"

to deliver something that doesn't look

like something that we've done before,

and we just rehashed it,

and put a different costume on.

We're trying to find inventive ways

to k*ll, t*rture, maim people, basically.

If it moves, beat it up.

Three, two, one Action!

I don't think anyone

can prepare you for how hard it is.

There's real smoke, and real fire and

wind, and it all has to happen together

at the same time,

and you have to still hit your mark.

And you have to be go and do it

day in, day out. That's a challenge.

-You look great, Steve.

- Thank you.

Once a week, I go and choreograph

this fight every day.

Cutting heads, I'm smashing the armor,

cutting your limb off.

And then, the day finally comes

when you got to sh**t it.

You start off being balletic,

when you start doing it.

And when they're actually

coming at you, you're going

And somehow, they create something that

makes you look like you know

what you're doing, and like some sort

of lethal k*lling machine.

They're extraordinary.

One of the things you haven't seen is

the real power of the dragon strife.

See smoke come in,

and blast, dragon strife.

As close as I am to you,

what does that, like, blast feel like?

We had loads of people

getting full burns.

We would need put charged on the ground

that would engulf them in flame.

And then they're gelled up

and they just go up.

When you run 160 people for a set

like this, it's just incredible.

And then set them on fire.

We had 65 stunts, and we sourced about

140 background special action extras.

Rowley's always in his element

when he's holding his bullhorn,

and yelling at the stunt d's and extras.

Yeah, he loves it.

Yeah. I want him on fire. That's

the whole point of it, it's a fire job.

We've often had like maces

about this big.

And then I thought,

"Well, let's just go bigger."

So, we made blood maces

about this big.

They're made of sort of plastic-y wax,

and we fill them

with about a liter of blood.

In the moments prior to impact,

it looks like a big metal ball.

And when it hits, it just explodes,

blood everywhere.

Action!

They actually get paid every time they

get hit for these, 'cause they aren't

I won't say they're comfortable,

you're definitely getting hit with

something quite hard around the head.

I'm really excited about these.

I think we used every one we had.

When I came out of the battle,

I felt that was

That was one of those things where

we didn't know if we had enough time

for the ambition that we wanted,

and we pulled it all off.

You know, the battles are legendary

on Game of Thrones,

so being given one was

incredibly intimidating.

And to complete it was like

glorious feeling to finally finish it.

When I looked around at everybody

sh**ting that battle sequence,

everybody was like smiling and laughing,

and throwing dirt and blood, and

We had a blast.

When you're watching the monitors, and

you realize you're bouncing up and down,

you realize that actually,

you're in the moment.

That's when it's just fun.

I wanted to go fight with a broadsword

and get tugged on a wire rig.

But they don't let me do that,

because they need me hunched over a

keyboard writing these scripts for them.