Original subtitles

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 war,

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 shoot 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 shoot,

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 shoot.

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.

Ow!

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 shoot...

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 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, uh, 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 fucking asshole.

No... Hey, guys!

RYAN J. CONDAL: 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.

I always wonder if that guy, for all future time, says, "deer's ass" or "stag's end."

Go, Chrissy! Go, Chrissy!

- Chrissy, man. Yeah! Woo! - Freedom!

Kill 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 assault.

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.

And 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 battlefield.

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 shoot

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 tidal issues in Cornwall,

and on the beaches in general, the idea was to recreate

a beach in a controllable environment.

So we could shoot continuously,

and get the same environments every day.

The joke on set became 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.

There's 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.

Eh, 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 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's 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 mindblowing.

I knew we hadn't yet earned our ability

to do "The Long Night" or the "Battle of the Bastards."

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 shoot.

Not dissimilar to "Battle of the Bastards."

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 achieved.

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 Crabfeeder'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, 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 kill, torture, 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 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 shoot 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 killing machine.

They're extraordinary.

One of the things you haven't seen

is the real power of the dragon strife.

See smoke comes in, and blasts dragon strife.

As close as I am to you, what does that blast feel like?

We had loads of people getting full burns.

We would need to put charges 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 stuntees and extras.

Yeah, he-- he loves it.

Yeah, yeah, 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!

And 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 shooting 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.