How to Film An Epic Sea Battle Behind the Scenes Season 3 Episode 1 House of the Dragon HBO

Good morning. Hope everyone had a good weekend. I did because I went to editorial and watched our stuff all cut in, which is exceptional. Everything is really delivering, so keep working at that high level. We'll continue to push ourselves to get the best work. All right. Go team. Three, two, one, action. When we kicked off 301, on the page, Ryan Condal wrote, in the vast landscape, in the windy hills of Westeros, a sheep bleats. The very first scene in episode one, we shot in Wales, a beautiful remote location. We were toing and froing about what would actually be the best conditions to shoot it in. Should it be bright sunshine, or actually, should it be this incredibly oppressive overcast look? And of course, in the end, that was given to us, opposed to choice. We want this to be a scenic painting of horror. This is a turbulent space that the character of Rhaena Targaryen has inhabited, alone, on her quest to claim the Wild Dragon. When I was at drama school, and it was, like, how to deal with CGI, and acting with things that aren't there. You detail it as much as you can, give them, like, specific features, yada, yada, and, like, low-key, Tina looks like Sheepstealer, so that was really helpful, to be like, it's just the baby. Tina's auditioning for House of the Dragon, to play a dragon. I bet Tina's going to cry a lot. Yeah, I mean, it's more of a scream, but yeah. SHE SCREAMS The buck is the best-kept secret on set. I don't know why people don't talk about it enough, and there's snakes for not doing it, because it is the coolest thing ever. Buck work can form quite a generic workflow, but actually, that was very different, because we had to build the side of the dragon to allow Phoebe to then get handholds to climb up the side of the buck, to be on the buck, to then ride the buck. This is on the six-axis motion base, and one of the protocols is that you put somebody on it, you tether them on for safety, you mat all around it, but then it was, well, we wanted to get on to the six-axis motion base, in camera, all in one shot. So it's like, OK, right, so how do we do this? Because I hadn't seen one before, I sort of assumed everyone's looked like mine. The changes, we put the boulders on there for your hands, that's for your right foot. Just before we start moving, can I just try climbing up? Yeah, you can do it now. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, go on. You know, you do this thing of, like, all this prep of, like, and I have to imagine it's this and this, there was none of that that I had to do, because it's just there, and it's massive. One of the things I want to make sure that we think about as we're laying this out is it's spread out, so you have little bits and bobs of interest throughout this view that we're looking at. Stray horses, stray battles, mutilated head, head being cut off a lion, bottoms being thrown into inferno. Here we are in episode one, and we find Damon on fire, literally. You know, my big thought this year was I wanted a lot more violence. And they gave it to me. We wanted to give it some action, so we built some pretty interesting shots to convey the idea that there's been a battle, it's just tailing off now, and we're coming in right at the end of the action. Look what I found. It's amazing what you find in Surrey. We should also give a big shout-out to the prosthetics team for the Lannister lion, which was absolutely gorgeous. So in the case of the lion we made, Darren Robinson sculpted the lion's head. The teeth were made from dental acrylic, so once we'd sculpted them and molded them, we made the teeth and the gums as one big set of dentures, which fitted into the lion's mouth. Maria Cork then flocked it, did all the hair-punching on the mane, and then we put the teeth in and add all the gore into the stump underneath. We did have a fair bit of mess on the lion. It has to look like it's been hunted down and hacked to bits, so we wanted it to be kind of quite weathered and broken down. Stage there's been someone sitting on it like this, kind of chopping it, and there was an extra guy here just kind of pulling it on the mane out of the way. We just really want to see all that. So we'll get it all dressed and looking as it should. We'd do loads of arrows, blood, mud, the world. There we go, we're in. Oh God, I'm sorry lion. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's all right, it's all right. Can I hold it back? Yeah, go on. Yeah, that'll ******* munch. ------- hand of money. Come on, mate. ------- come on. ------- get in, I have that. Then old Roddy walks up with Linus's head and says, We have come to die for the Dragon Queen. You've got Tommy Flanagan who's come in, who's a brilliant actor, who is Damon's ally. He's one of the Winterwolves. What are you calling? It's a bottle. Get in there, boss. Cut there, cut there, cut there. The Winterwolves, there you go. And he's just been a great addition. He's really understood the tone of the show and what it is. It's been great having you here. I have to say, it's made my life a bit better. It's been a pleasure, pal. It's my favourite character this year. There's a bunch of ******* lunatics coming out. Just a reminder that at the start of every day, a writer on set is going to do a brief tone recap, just because there's going to be increasing distance between those tone meetings and the scenes that we're shooting, especially once we get into the summer and the fall. I, we wanted to get everybody together and kind of pitch out the sequence exactly what it is. And the great thing about this sequence, as you'll see, is so much of this, from this moment, was practical, it's in-camera, and that's what makes it so exciting, and I think that's what's going to make it really visceral. The Battle of the Gullet was such a sea-change moment in the story, and I knew that we had to do it, and we had to do it well. So often with filming, you're coming into a stage and you're a pirate, or you go to a location which exists and you film that. This particular episode, we had to build the outdoor stage to mount the scene. I had very fixed ideas on how to do that based on previous experience when I was a young man on Titanic and what I learnt there from Jim Cameron and John Landau. In the early stages of production, Kevin had this idea of building both a dry and a wet tank, and I asked him, what do you need a dry tank for and a wet tank for? Why can't you just use one tank? And he said, well, you want people to go into the water, don't you? And I said, you build the Titanic, I trust you. We wrapped Season 2 having developed the ground that was on the back lot ready for future set builds to then come in at Season 3 and Kevin say, just so you know, we're going to dig two big holes and we're going to fill one full of three million litres of water and the other one we're going to put a huge rolling sea gimbal in. And you go, OK. The dry tank had a massive gimbal in which would allow pitch and roll and from bow to stern so we could have that huge motion of a ship going through the ocean. The first ship that went on it was The Queen That Never Was, which was over 125 feet long. At one point, that whole ship was moving with 115 people on board. What's interesting is that if you're on it, the camera movement eradicates it, so in our dry tank, we tend to keep away from the ship so we could see it have lots of things moving in shot and that will give us the transit. The issue is that it's too much fun. It feels like you're on a ride and you're having to quell the excitement and giddy feeling of wearing armour and pretending to play pirates. No pair of socks? Do you want to piss it off? Yeah. No, piss it off, piss it off, piss it off. I just want to reiterate, OK? It's a 10-second count, it's a short burn. When you guys get put out, I don't want anyone being called a cucumber, standing up or casual. Stay down and make sure nobody reignites, OK? We're not just going to do this willy-nilly. We want to make sure this is executed with clinical precision. Very clear, guys, yeah? All right, good. Have a good one. Rowley and Team Stunts put together an extraordinary bit of action where we get to see the live deck of the ship come alive with fire. We ended up doing a ten-man burn on the boat and we'd never strafed an entire boat before. So often we do these burns and the men are all isolated on a flat area of land, whereas here suddenly you're confined with all the rigging, with all the dressing on the set, with the stuntmen. Where do you put your safety? There's nowhere to hide on the deck of a ship. Therefore it had to be planned much tighter. We fully intend to set ten people on fire. They are not distressed. Oh, ----! Oh, my God! Everyone's so impressed with that. When they came to see it, they're like, this is amazing, this is so good, and I'm like, the one over there is going to be this on steroids. When you interact directly with the water and you're in close, then it needs to be wet, so we built the second tank. Here we were with two full-scale ships all put together through movement and control. Special Effects did a marvellous job and we worked very tightly with them, making sure our designs fit the gimbals and there was a lot of collaboration between swapping of digital models between us to make sure that everything was going to rock and roll without hitting various elements of the other boat that we didn't want it to hit. You've got one gimbal driving the pitchfist and then you've got the queen that never was, which has now been cut in half, and each moves independently to each other and it can give you some really acute angles. No one expected the pitchfist to come in with such heft. This thing not only accelerated really quickly, but then when it hit, it then pitched and rolled like one would expect a ship to do. There wasn't one person who didn't see it and their jaw dropped. You could actually physically see people drop their jaw. It's really hard to stop smiling as this thing is tilting and moving and shifting. We knew in the wet tank, we had responsibility for cast and crew working in the water, that we had to maintain the quality of water. And back in July, I designed pipe systems so that we could pump water in and we could pump water out. It takes us two and a half hours to fill it from empty and it's three million litres of water. We change the water twice a day, so that is six million litres of water being filtered every day. We have these huge silos. We said we'd just put a concrete pad down for the water. And by the time the engineers came back, they said, well, you've got 3,000 tonnes of water in silos, so the concrete is just under a metre thick. It was a big operation. We are on board the Pitchfist, which is my ship, and we are about to ram it directly into that ship right there. I think the title of the Pitchfist was quite a sort of guiding light on what it should look like. I did quite a bit of research on early Korean boats, Roman boats, and gradually we built this pirate ship. The dressing of the Pitchfist, I really took inspiration from pirates. I mean, that just sort of blew my mind there. I thought, yeah, we can just go to the extremes. I was bringing rustic colours, very natural, earthy tones to that, but very broken down, which was really great because you could push the boundaries with that and actually just use things that they would have picked up on their journey. Tonight we shall walk in the ashes of high tide! We essentially came up with there are three theatres. There's the aerial theatre with Jace and Bela and then later with Reyna, and then there's the sea theatre with Alan and Corliss and on the trilogy side with Lohar and Tylan. And as you watch the battle, you will see we're not just telling the story of random ships fighting each other. So that was the big structural challenge of building this thing around those points of view that we had and telling their story through this massive battle. Take the ship. That was the moment where I realised, oh, okay, this is real, this is a thing we're doing. It's action, acting, close-ups, all at the same time. This is good, this is a challenge, this is how we get better. As long as you get the other person's eye before you make a move, it is the safest place on the set. It seems weird when you're swinging blades and hammers and all that stuff at each other and punching each other in the face, but as long as you have that trust and that connection, it is a dance. Yeah, it was an absolute joy. The very real-life stunts, it's Abu's fist in their face. I'm running the ship, mate. It's Abigail's sword in their stomach. It is Steve with his arach. Over the course of a year it took for them to get ready and Steve, Abu and Abigail knocked it out of the park. Occasionally in this business you kind of stand in things that makes you feel like you're on a living fairground ride. The below deck set would actually sink and we had Abigail and Abu in a heavy fist fight. We're not having to do a lot of work. I mean, we're fighting in water chest deep, trying to get these hits and punches in. It's incredible. I mean, when I was a kid I really wanted to be in Pirates of the Caribbean. That's one of the reasons I became an actor, because I wanted to be a pirate. And now as soon as I stepped onto my pirate ship for the first time, it's like, oh, yes, I'm home. I've done so much internal practice, sort of create a character and then get into them, but I'm going to miss Sarah quite a bit, actually. That's me wrapped. That was actually my final scene on the show. I just came out of the tank. That's three years of being on House of the Dragon and now I'm done. I'll always be your pirate queen. She lives on forever in our hearts. The dragon battle above the sea battle is extraordinary. One of the things we wanted to do was, rather than tell that story solely with the actors, you know, so close-ups on actors on dragons, we wanted to be able to try and tell that story with the dragons themselves and the choreography of the dragons. We really found a kind of a sweet spot of dynamic, loose, organic flying bug shots. It was amazing, and Lonnie was in his element, which made us be in our element, and he sent us off on horse-riding lessons this season, and I think it worked. I think it really helped. I think we were, like, really in tune with the movements of the book. We actually animated all of those dragon battles in advance and we actually got editors involved. Everyone bought in with the overall story arc because the battle on the ships with the battle with the dragons, they were so interconnected, so we really had to lock that in. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So it has a green dot that bleeps, which is when the grapnel goes... Super tricky to figure out, like, what's dynamic? How do we build that tension? How do we kind of foreshadow or plant the seeds of what's going to happen? The buck really helped with that because every time a sort of grapnel hit, you'd feel a big jolt. So I kind of didn't really look at the rehearsals of what the buck was doing, so when I got on it, I didn't want to know what was coming. Three, two, one, action. Jeeze! Shorten it, and three, two, one, action. Jeeze! Shorter. Jeeze! Good. Cutting. Are you cutting the wildcat? I think he's dead. Harry had it coming. He's such a diva with his pretty hair and all that. Everybody wanted to see him. Now, unfortunately, I mean, Harry's just like the nicest human. You'd feel terrible doing it. The guy, bless him, is game for anything. Ready for this? Yeah. It was good yesterday. It looks awesome. Yeah. I feel good about it. I saw you actually in the water. Yeah, yeah. One beat, the line. It's almost before the dragon's sinking, so you still have hope. So command dromax. Look for gain of hope. You're filming split-second clips of the scene, which is hard to keep the energy up the whole time. I can't be in one shot looking scared and then in the next shot looking erratic. You've got to follow the same energy the whole way through. He will just look at me and give me words of wisdom for, like, two minutes and tell me what's happened. He'll tell me, say, get my heartbeat up. He'll give me a minute before, and I'll get my heart rate up. And he really just keeps the power going. He's shouting down this megaphone. He's absolutely brilliant. Three, two, one, action. Face. Command dromax. Steven. Line dromax. Stop it. So I drowned him not once, not twice, but six times. The guy never cracked. He just said, yes, sir. Let's do it again. By having your left hand on the handle, it makes this feel like you've only got one hand to do it. Otherwise, it's much more achievable. We had this harness that they're strapped in, and he's getting dragged under, and he can't undo the clip. So we have all of that tension and the jeopardy, and he ends up going underwater. We had to have a number of tests with him, because he was sitting on a dragon saddle that was mounted on a gimbal so we could submerge him as the dragon was drowning. We have an underwater six axis, which gives you a different kind of movement. So you can go up and down and thrash about. Six axes aren't made to go into water. They're not. They don't like it. But this one does. I think that will be really exciting for him to be on that. I'm here to see you, Mum. Make it so you're not like that, actually. Because that's just because I'm back in this bed, which is how I'm meant to be. There was something really therapeutic about the loudness of on set and the waves. And then when I get dragged down underwater, it's just silent. So I was actually staying underneath the water for as long as possible, because I could just hear the diver, Harry, we've cut. Harry, we've cut. And I'm like, I'm just going to stay under here. It's the real trick with that sequence. So much of it happens in the spectacle of flying on a dragon in the CG. Really, it relies on Harry's performance to make you feel the tragedy of this loss. That's almost a kill shot. It would have been if I escaped even. Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't have survived that one. Harry was an absolute trooper, and I think has one of the most special on screen deaths I've ever been a part of.