Original subtitles

Breathtaking, slightly terrifying,

exhilarating. All the emotions at once.

It felt good to finally step forward

and to get the show going.

RYAN J. CONDAL: 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.

EMMA D'ARCY: 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 go home or get 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, in fact, 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 first 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-- 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 were very helpful,

and, um, 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 shooting,

I think I had stamped my foot, and it was like,

"Oh, that's not stone at all. Oh, 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 shoot there,

I just-- I couldn't believe we were so lucky.

So seamless.

It seemed like the gods had built those cliffs

exactly-- 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 shooting 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-- It was a really difficult location.

It was a hard one. We made a rig,

a lo-fi 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 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'd-- 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-- it's gonna have a lot of, um,

battle damage on it.

So there's-- Yeah, we're-- we're thinking about

how to-- how to do it, so it survives lots and lots of takes.

Normally, you would do that kind of thing on a tank

in a studio, but we actually did it in the sea.

It was tidal,

so you had to wait until it was the right time to shoot it.

And if it's drifted out to sea,

then you've lost it forever, haven't you?

I know this is an emotional, 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.

But 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 shoot

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 Mother 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 shoot 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! Cut.

We were shooting 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?"

There were so many people on that tiny bit of set.

These, these, and in there.

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 that the weather could throw at us.

Fabian pulling his hair out...

...trying to match, one day, beautiful sunshine,

next day, howling gale.

That's the death of me, those scenes.

Those are the scenes that were shot over five days

and you just shoot everywhere

and you have to try and match it somehow.

But you're shooting this side one day,

and you're shooting 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 night-time scene.

There were days that were very sunny and strong,

and there were days that were windy and gray.

And some of the shots that were supposed to be

in the middle of the daytime are now night shots.

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 it 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, who's 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 is 130 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, 150 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 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."

They 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!

Cut!

This is a three-axis motion base that we built.

Visual Effects can give us pre-vis, we can feed that in.

It will move exactly as the pre-vis,

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 you 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."

SPEAKER 2: Three, two, one. Action!

I think it kind of overwhelmed me at some points, you know?

Trying to focus on so many different things,

like 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 shooting 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 shoot this sequence?

I've never done a fight-- fighting before.

The questions are, "Can we do it?"

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

We had, like, a week of just stunts.

And 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 your arm do that,

as if it's made contact with something.

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.

Leo Ashton, back up again. Leo. And do the walk in again.

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 kind of surprised that he had managed to get them

as affective 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.

Star jumps, please.

You need to be way out of breath.

♪ (CHILDREN SING TUNE) ♪

- And three, two, one, and action. - Harvey, shh.

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 the Prosthetics Team's work, which is brilliant.

They had to put blood in my mouth.

It was 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.

Action.

The thing about kids fighting is you need every hit to land.

Because otherwise, it looks staged.

And 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 sewing the cheek up.

Prosthetics team did a great job.

We don't shy away from those details,

so you do see, you know, 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 an appliance on 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 shooting 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 shoot, 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. Shooting!

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,

you say those lines, and that's the, "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.

EMMA D'ARCY: 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.

♪ (MUSIC CLIMAXES) ♪