01x07 - Driftmark

[bunniefuu]

Breathtaking, slightly terrifying,

exhilarating. All the emotions at once.

It felt good to finally step forward

and to get the show going.

Once we rolled on that first shot,

I knew we were off and running

on a great adventure.

Episode seven

was the one that we shot first.

It was necessary for Miguel

to set the tone right out of the gate

with the cast and the crew

and everything.

It was a good one to pluck out, because

by the time you come around to it,

everybody's here in this alien place

at a funeral.

And nobody

really knows how to feel or act.

High Tide is a different feel

to the rest of the show.

It's a standalone castle

belonging to Lord Corlys.

We decided very early on

that St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall

would be the main location for that.

St. Michael's Mount

was absolutely glorious.

Seeing it in the show,

you see that location and you think,

"Well, this has to be a green screen

or a set or something."

I tell you, it is not.

That is a real place.

It's a tidal island,

which means that depending on the tide,

if the tide's up, you're gonna catch

a ferry to work. Heaven.

Or if the tide's down,

there's a road that emerges.

You travel there by boat

at a certain time of day.

And other times of day,

this path appears out of the sea.

You can just walk back.

No acting required.

I mean, it does feel like

you're in another world.

It makes perfect sense for the House

of Velaryon to have that as their seat,

because they are sea people.

Any island is

a nightmare for a film crew.

And most producers will say,

"If it's an island, walk away from it."

But on this occasion,

it was such a powerful location

we decided to go with it.

Logistically, it's difficult

because at high tide, twice a day,

it is inaccessible.

So we had narrow windows

to get trucks across the causeway.

You've gotta time everything

perfectly within that window,

to make sure you're not left

stranded on either side,

wanting to get home

or go to work.

We had to preload all the costumes

in and we had an awful lot of armor.

So we went down about a week before

and started setting up the locations

and the tents and getting ready.

We spent the first two weeks just

getting the equipment onto the island.

And we got everything over there,

and then we started to build.

When I went and saw the sheer drop

of where we had to put the set,

I was thinking, "How on earth

are we gonna do this?"

We were having to build platforms

right down on the water's edge,

right on the rock.

We were all very nervous about that,

I think just because

of the sheer uncertainty

of what weather we were gonna

face, and tides.

It was a logistical problem

for the art department.

They can't drill into

the rocks of St. Michael's Mount,

so they have to strap it down.

It was slightly nerve-racking, that

whole experience of making that work.

Worries about, "Is the tide gonna

come in and wash it all away?"

The number of conversations about

how we couldn't possibly build

an extension to the rock pool,

because of the tides and this

that and the other.

There were just so many

reasons why we shouldn't do it.

Which was, to me,

so many reasons why we did.

When you choose a location like that,

which is a difficult location,

you want to take advantage

of what's there.

You don't want to be hiding everything.

We built a courtyard in the grounds,

so we used a lot of the original

architecture and the stone walls.

You have to then

make those walls believable.

You couldn't take plants

onto St. Michael's Mount.

Their gardeners are very helpful,

and we used their stuff

rather than our normal way.

You couldn't tell what they had created

and what was already there.

And so, we're up on a platform,

three or four days into sh**ting,

I had stubbed my foot and it was like,

"Oh, that's not stone at all. My God!"

The more that's done around you,

the less you have to use your

imagination because it's there.

I can't even believe

that actually exists.

To be able to sh**t there,

I couldn't believe we were so lucky.

So seamless.

It seemed like the gods had built

those cliffs exactly for that funeral.

We did two scenes up there

that were quite hard to pull off.

The first day,

and then the next four days.

The first day

was the funeral.

We didn't really have a sense

of what a Velaryon funeral was,

but we decided to take what we knew,

which is they're a house

that's all about the salt and the sea,

and build a ritual around it.

It's called "The Seat of the Sea."

And the idea is that all those stone

sarcophaguses build up at the bottom.

And over the centuries, have built the

foundation for the island of High Tide.

That was my first scene.

For me, it was nearly

three months prep

because I had to learn

all the High Valyrian.

I drilled those lines every single day

until I got to the point where I thought,

"Okay, I know this backwards."

We had around 50 extras

for the Seat of the Sea,

it was the first thing

that we shot.

So it was really the first time that we

saw our nobles

and our citizens of King's Landing

and High Tide for the first time,

it was exciting to create those looks.

Cut.

First week of sh**ting out of the

studio, all our cast standing around

in the intermittent pissing rain

with this sarcophagus

that needed to be hoisted up

and over and fall into the ocean,

and be picked up, and pulled out,

and put back in.

And et cetera, et cetera,

with the resets taking 20 minutes.

It was a really difficult location.

It was a hard one.

We made a rig, a conveyer belt,

that was drawn

by the guards using rope.

And we had to build that out

over the edge of a cliff.

We had to build a stone coffin

and we had to weight it.

Basically, whatever we put into

the water, we had to get it out again.

When it hit the water, it looked like it

was gonna sink, but it didn't.

It would bob up really quick. And then

we could take it, and do it again,

and again, and again.

We've got to make this fiberglass

really strong,

because it's gonna have a lot

of battle damage on it.

Yeah, we're thinking about how to do it,

so it survives lots and lots of takes.

Normally, you would do that kind

of thing on a tank and in a studio.

We actually did it

in the sea.

It was tidal, so you had to wait until

it was the right time to sh**t it.

And if it's drifting out to sea,

then you lost it forever, haven't you?

I know this is an emotional

and sad scene,

but it was really funny when I saw

the little coffin go into the water,

they had to drag it out again and go

and re-start again.

When the actual sarcophagus falls off,

and we go under water,

that will be a fully-CG

shot there.

The outcropping that the sarcophagus

comes off

of was brought in by our art

department.

The scaffolding that's underneath it,

and all of the safety fellows who were

underneath it,

we all had to paint those out.

For all intents and purposes,

we should not have made that day.

But then once we did, we then moved

into a four-day sequence of the wake.

In episode seven, which is in part why

we chose it to be the first episode,

they are all out of sorts.

We thought, "Well, what better

way to start the process,

because our actors

need to find their characters."

The Lord of the Tides

rules the sea.

Even Harvey, little Harvey,

was not able to play himself.

We wrote a lot of these,

like, 10-12-15-17 page scenes

that all take place in one place

with all of our cast and crew.

Which are, of course,

incredibly difficult to sh**t

but they're really compelling pieces

of drama because you have all these

little mini scenes happening within

the larger overall scene.

And that wake sequence

is a great example of that.

We have nothing in common.

She's our sister.

You marry her, then.

I would perform my duty,

if mom had only betrothed us.

It was an experience for me in terms

of learning how to direct theater,

because it quickly became apparent that

the best way to sh**t it was to have

the entire sequence play as one,

and then go around

picking pieces of it off much

to the chagrin of the actors.

No matter how fat the leech grows,

it always wants for another meal.

Cut! I need it right there.

We're sh**ting with four cameras

on a very small little bit of set

that had been built on this sort of

sea-facing side of Michael's Mount.

I think everybody was a bit like,

"What are we doing?"

It was so many people

on that tiny bit of set.

We couldn't get dollies or cranes down

there, so moving the camera,

adjusting height during shot

was really difficult.

It was very much a scene that he'll use

all four cameras, longer lenses,

focus pulls between foreground

and background.

It was shot over five days, and we had

everything but the weather confer us.

Fabian pulling his hair out,

trying to match, one day,

beautiful sunshine, next day,

howling gale.

That's definitely those scenes.

Those are the scenes that are shot over

five days and you just sh**t everywhere

and you have to try

and match it somehow.

But you're sh**ting this side one day,

and you're sh**ting this

side the other day.

This scene was supposed

to take place over the course of a day.

So, we had to have a daytime scene,

dusk, and a nighttime scene.

There were days that were

very sunny and strong

and there were days

that were windy and grey.

And some of the shots that were supposed

to be in the middle of the daytime,

are now night shots.

And so, you can't really have very, very

strong shadows in night shots.

So, we're having to roto-out all

the people, get rid of all the shadows,

and then relight a lot of those scenes.

A lot of the boats that were out to sea,

we're painting all of those out,

the farms and the towns that are along

the coastline in the background.

Where we shot, down in Cornwall, was

such a beautiful location to start with,

so it's just augmenting that real

location and making it feel lived-in

and the right period.

It was a very interesting experience

and a really good learning curve.

And surprisingly,

I mean, it came out quite well.

Looking back now,

in hindsight,

at some of the stuff that

we shot there, I thought was great.

Like the funeral, even though it was

tricky and dangerous, it really worked.

We were all on this island together,

and it was just a really nice experience

to kick things off.

We hold back the reveal on this a bit

because it is the most exciting dragon.

Vhagar, the oldest,

largest dragon in the world,

certainly the largest dragon

you've ever seen on Game of Thrones,

many times bigger than Drogon was,

and Drogon was a huge dragon.

Vhagar was

a hundred and thirty years old.

One of the concepts of this series is

that dragons keep growing and growing.

As they get older and older, we see they

get more battered, more weather-worn,

and they start to struggle to support

their own weight.

Dragons just, essentially,

grow until they die.

And part of their death-cycle is getting

too large, too big for the world.

And Vhagar's so large that she doesn't

really fit anywhere anymore.

In our story, she doesn't even fit

in the dragon pit anymore,

and that's created a bit of a loner

personality to her.

She's very grumpy, she sleeps a lot,

you know, she's like an old cat.

Aemond finds Vhagar hiding in the dunes

and Vhagar becomes his ride.

It's such an important

growth moment for him.

He claims the biggest dragon who's ever

existed, which, in the beginning,

is terrifying because she's, you know,

a hundred and fifty meters long.

It's one of the sequences

that we first started pre-vising.

We shot day one on day two, him

approaching Vhagar on Holywell Beach.

Because it was so complex, we had

to stick pretty-much to the pre-vis.

I had him running around

these sand dunes for two days.

The wind's going and, and like,

literally, he looks at me, and he's got,

kind of, he's encrusted with sand

in his eyes.

And I'm like,

"Just one more take."

We shot dragon-riding

in The Volume nearly six months later.

Filming on a dragon. Obviously,

you don't get much better than that.

Hello, guys.

We are going on to set.

Dragon riding again.

You do the drop, boom. And as you drop,

the camera comes up, and then you

Gonna be very fun.

Special Effects, Mike Dawson and his

team, they developed a new motion base,

which has much-more extreme angles

than I've used before,

so it can be more dynamic.

We used it on what's known

as The Volume, which is new technology.

Basically, the environment

is surrounded by,

I think it's, two and a

half thousand LED TV screens.

Three, two, one. Line!

This is a three-axis

motion base that we built.

Visual Effects can give us previs.

We can feed that in.

It will move exactly as the previs,

so all the movements can be repeated.

It's all got to be quite precise.

We had a special-rigged seat,

which was rigged vertically,

so we could hang out of the saddle.

The first day was quite hard.

And the next day I came in,

I felt so much power.

And I was like,

"I need to get this as well as I can."

Three, two, one. Action!

I think it, kind of, overwhelmed me

at some point, you know?

Trying to focus on so many different

things, hanging off ten feet in the air.

It's a stunt.

That's why they call it "Stunts."

Leo is a natural, an absolute natural.

We shot additional, final approach

moments on blue screen

almost seven months later, so

Actually, one of our concerns was making

sure he doesn't look like he's growing up

during the course of the scene.

We started sh**ting one year,

and we finished a year later.

I'm surprised we made it.

I loved every second of it.

And I think it came out pretty well.

Prior to starting, the most concerning

sequence for everybody is this fight

when Aemond comes back after having

ridden the dragon.

Vhagar is my mother's dragon.

Your mother's dead.

Vhagar has a new rider now.

The goal of it was always to make it feel

like a fight amongst young adults.

The actors are aged from nine to twelve.

How do I manage these five kids and

get them ready to sh**t this sequence?

I've never done a fight

fighting before.

The questions are, "Can we do it?"

And the answer always has to be, "Yes."

We had, like, a week of just stunts.

You'd have, like, a couple of hours

of just rehearsing, over and over again.

Punching and, like, kicking,

and, like, practice fighting.

It gave us the ability to teach them

how to fight, how to maintain distance,

how to maintain control.

It's more about making them

go up and out.

It also taught them,

when the camera's over here,

you might have to change

a punch to go across the face.

It taught them how to film fight.

I shouldn't do it like that.

I should do it like that, at the bottom.

When it's an angle at the camera.

And cut.

I would always be kinda surprised that

he had managed to get them

as effective at doing

these sequences as he had.

Rowley very smartly wanted them to show

up on set with all that muscle memory

built into them so that they could just

worry about their performance stuff.

We're all really good friends,

all of us kids who are fighting,

but we just have to hate each other.

You're in this cramped space,

and it's really hot.

And you're just going at it every time.

And you need to give it a hundred

percent energy every single time.

Jumping jacks, please.

Way out of breath.

And three, two, one,

and action.

You'll die screaming in vain

just as your father did.

Because it's children, you can't really

get them to throw dirt

in each other's eyes or cut their

eyeballs out,

so there's a lot of blade

replacements and blood added.

But most of it is, is the Prosthetics

Team's work, which is brilliant.

They had to put blood in my mouth.

It's a disgusting taste. I'm sorry.

But I had to, like, spit it out.

I had to have some Listerine

just to wipe that all out.

And then, again!

I had to do it again!

We had a laugh, that's for sure.

There was a couple hilarious moments.

They had fun with it. They made it like

camp. They really did a great job of it.

The thing about kids fighting

is you need every hit to land.

Because otherwise, it looks like staged.

I've seen the cut and it does look pretty

feral what they're doing to each other.

It was hard. And I'm so proud

of everyone who was involved.

Well done, guys. Well done.

Very good.

Working with other actors, choreographing

a long scene, and just getting it done,

and having the feeling that you've

just completed something incredible,

it just makes you feel so good inside.

Gods be good.

The episode is really bookended

by these two very long scenes,

"The Wake" being one that doesn't

really end in much resolution.

And this one is

"The Great Coming Together"

that ends with a very final

punch to it.

We got it up and running

as 15 or so actors,

and then we added

40 extras into the mix.

It felt like we started to really,

sort of, be the characters.

Miguel and people around

could see the thing come to life

just a little bit more.

Losing an eye is quite something.

There was so much work

going into that makeup.

We created an appliance which went over

the one side of his face.

We had this slash which went basically

down his forehead through his eyeball

and onto his cheek and the maester's

sowing the cheek up.

Prosthetics team did a great job.

We don't shy away from those details,

so you do see the skin being sewn up.

Jace? Luke!

The nature of prosthetics are

they always take a long time

in the chair in the morning.

But with a young child when you've got

reduced day, obviously,

the pressure's on to get it applied onto

somebody's face as quick as possible.

I was just coated. It was all

down the side of my face and hair.

There were a lot of jokes about

"Oh, you've been a fight."

-Enough.

-It should be my son telling the tale!

-He called us

-Silence!

Cut.

I've never shot scenes for as long as we

have on this, ever. But I enjoyed that.

Yeah, it was a huge scene

that we did over days and days and days.

I realized very quickly that

the ringmaster in the scene was Paddy.

He was tired, but he was kind of elated

at this performance he was having to do.

And he really

just kept everybody's energy up.

I loved sh**ting that.

I thought it was a fantastic scene.

There was a lot going on in it.

It was so, like,

meticulously choreographed.

It's a family saga.

It's all about the relationships

between the individual characters.

So, everybody in that scene

has a different motive,

and is therefore looking at certain

people at certain times.

We shot, again, with four cameras.

A lot of it was about,

"How can we get one camera here

and not see another camera there?"

But if you take the time

to make that work,

then you can be really efficient with it.

I shall have one

of her son's eyes in return.

It's a long sh**t, but in between takes,

everyone was having a laugh.

Paddy, like, fell over at one point,

which was hilarious.

There were so many funny moments.

But at the same time,

there were so many incredible moments,

to witness from my position,

of excellence in acting.

And it's so mesmerizing to watch,

even from an actor's kind of vision.

Where is duty?

Where is sacrifice?

That's actually one of my favorite scenes

that we shot in the season.

It's finally boiling over,

all these years, and it's a joy to watch.

Now they see you as you are.

Rhaenyra and Daemon

are old-school Targaryens.

They really are all about fire and blood.

The writers took what material we had,

knowing what we knew about Old Valyria,

knowing that any kind of marriage

ceremony would probably be a bit primal.

And so, one of our writers wrote vows,

which we gave off to David J. Peterson,

our Valyrian translator,

to translate into High Valyrian.

And we turned it all into

a ceremonial Valyrian wedding.

All right, quiet please, everyone.

Here we go. sh**ting!

Whether it's a wedding or a funeral,

it's a ceremony.

And they will present themselves

for a ceremony.

And we have to back that up

with hair, jewelry, and looks.

All of that has to be thought out.

We gave them quite a stark makeup.

They meant business.

That love in that wedding is a real love.

It's not for show. She's not marrying

someone she's been told to marry.

Emma's got quite a big hair ornament.

There's almost a little mirror.

If you look at them, there's a slight

twist that echoes each other.

It's a nice look.

Those last two lines that you said,

like, you say those lines,

and then, "You may kiss the bride."

That was actually

one of the most difficult costumes.

I couldn't do more than what I had done

before for the different wedding.

So I thought it would be a good approach

to do something completely different.

We thought, "What about going in

the direction of the dragonkeeper?"

Something very simple, very kimono-like,

which seemed to have been created

before the Targaryens.

I wanted

the red blood-elements in it.

We had to create the tie-dye,

going from red into the purity of white,

and that was a lot of work.

The costumes were

beautifully hand-printed by our team,

and required a huge amount of work

to finish, get ready, and then age.

Because they had to look like

they were thousands of years old

and to be ready for Matt and Emma

to wear them on the day,

was quite a challenge.

Rhaenyra and Daemon,

they're normally a potent chemical mix.

But briefly, during this ceremony,

I don't know,

there's something quite

peaceful about it.

It's just magical.