And... action.
We faced those icy fucks,
looked right into their blue eyes...
The feast was a wonderful sequence.
It was seventeen pages long,
in one room,
and many different things going on.
That was really fun,
the feast scene being one of the first scenes we shot.
And... Act...
We had a room full of cast,
and it was like coming back to school on the first few days,
when everyone's just so hyper to be back.
We were, like, having fun, cracking jokes,
like, having a really good time.
Yeah, it was good fun.
You didn't know Denmark was a country
till you met Nikolaj?
How f...
For characters like me, it's great, you know?
You get to relax for a little bit,
you know, have a drink,
hang out will my pals.
And obviously after what happened in Season 3,
rumors obviously got around that he's, uh, talented, so...
Yeah, there's... there's that, that's...
It's holiday time for Pod.
Of course, it's horrible that so many people has died,
but still, the show must go on.
Life must go on, you have to celebrate it somehow.
So, the only way is to get very drunk
and to have a lot of fun.
To Arya Stark, the hero of Winterfell.
That feast scene in episode 4 is... that was a bitch.
That was a bitch to plot out, it was a real bitch to shoot,
and it's because so much of the scene,
like a lot of, I think, the best scenes on Game of Thrones,
are about what's not being said.
If you turn off the sound on that scene,
the hope would be that you're really following
all of the emotional arcs
through the looks that all the characters are giving to each other
and that's very difficult to pull off,
and it takes a director of precision like David Nutter,
it takes actors of extraordinary intelligence
and empathy and patience.
And it takes writers like David and Dan who can really structure it.
Yeah.
That was a fun sequence.
We had to catch all these,
"You looking at him looking at you, but you're not seeing me looking at him looking at you."
A lot of glances, and that happens at parties.
I had to do this in a way that everything's connected,
but also, everything's not connected.
So, it's all about a question of where you put people
and how you set it up.
So, the plan which David came up with was:
you put them into groups and isolate them to a degree,
which we can do with camera angles,
so that once a certain group has shot out its piece,
we have them travelling up the hall which connects to the next group.
So, just clever choreography.
As far as the lighting, it's always tough
because you want... you have all those people eating,
you want it shot multiple-camera
because there's multiple people talking,
and so you wanna create something that is flexible.
So, my trick was candles.
What we did, we built some boxes under the candles,
like some little riser, and inside I had little lights,
so the light was coming from the glow inside the table
and not just a general top light.
Most of our drama scenes were action scenes
simply in terms of the number of bodies that we had on the ground.
When you have that many moving parts, it's always going on
and you're always painting a picture behind the actors
who are giving the dialogue or walking through the frame.
If I was to try and find you and Dan somewhere in the episodes,
would I be able to?
Uh, I think, maybe.
A mad man! Or a king.
Cut.
Please take the juice out of this cup.
Leave it in there, leave it in, it's good.
We're there. Well hidden.
- Well hidden? - Yeah... Giant beard.
Uh, I was concerned we were going to ruin that, but I don't think we did.
Yeah, let's give some notes to the director.
What a day at Wildling University.
Sean...
I'd smile but my beard... my beard will pop off.
The funeral pyres were a big undertaking for us.
They were wood construction over a metal frame,
that being because Sam Conway, special effects,
had to have burn rigs inside all of these pyres
to be able to burn them at different... at varying rates.
The heroes lying down,
we did a process of toughened glass
and bulletproof plastic underneath.
And then the hero would go in and put the torch
underneath the actor,
uh, and then you'd see... beneath them, you'd see the flames spread.
There would be flame reacting around the sides of them,
but not actually touching them.
But because you're seeing the flame through glass,
for all intents and purposes you're seeing flame,
which is really extraordinary.
Once we'd finished with the real people in the funeral pyres,
they were switched out by the props department
for burning bodies,
chicken wire bodies that were costumed
'cause we were actually setting fire to the funeral pyres for real.
It was a huge burn, in terms of fire.
So, we had fire support, medical support,
and that was the classic,
biggest, widest shot of Winterfell,
with the hugest effect in the front of it.
What I remember is that it was incredibly hard to put out,
which... I did say it would be very difficult to put out.
Gets very hot.
Everyone has to move back 'cause they feel the flames.
I knew the shot was over when I saw Bran running past me.
I was like, "Well, it's gotta be over
if Bran's started to walk again."
Episode three is such a massive battle,
and so many people fall during that episode,
and part of that is about our heroes, you know,
the characters that we really know,
and part of it is just seeing the sheer number
of other folks who fell.
We've got real pyres that were built by our department,
and then the VFX team extended them so you can see
there's actually thousands and thousands of fallen.
So, what was important with respect to the funeral
on episode four was the fact that...
I wanted to make sure that...
there's some big-scope stuff that was important,
but also, there were some really intimate moments
between the characters that I didn't want to lose.
There was a moment in which Dany says goodbye to Jorah,
where Sansa says goodbye to Theon,
so I wanted to make sure that...
that was really covered in the proper fashion.
That was really hard.
I remember right before my take,
putting the pin on Alfie,
David Nutter came up, the director, and he was like,
"You never got to say goodbye."
"And you never told him...
that you saw him as a Stark."
And then I was, like, bawling,
because I'm thinking, like,
I will never properly get to say goodbye to Alfie
as Theon. Like, that will be so crazy.
It was something in which...
We all have situations in our life,
where people die at the wrong time,
and things happen before you expect it to happen,
where you say to yourself,
"I wish I had said this, I wish I had done that."
So, I wanted to make sure
that there was something gnawing at her.
She took that nugget, made it into something special.
She's that great of an actress.
She really did a tremendous job there with that.
The emotion was easy to capture
because the emotion was... was very real.
These are people who have been working together,
some of them for 10 years.
Yeah, it was a very difficult thing
to say goodbye.
Even if the ceremony was fictional,
the goodbye and the emotions in the goodbye were very real.
The new Scorpion this year is phenomenal.
The thing with Dave and Dan,
they just want to scale everything up.
Everything had to be better, bolder, for this year.
I was hoping to use the same one again,
thinking, "Oh, it was great last year."
I mean, what could you possibly...
What more could you want?
We saw in Season 7 that Qyburn had invented this Scorpion,
this giant, dragon-killing Scorpion,
and it didn't quite work.
So, Qyburn went back to the drawing board,
and he made an even larger, more powerful Scorpion.
What we need to create with this one
is to make it bigger, stronger, and a bit more dynamic.
It's 65 percent bigger than we did previously
on Season 7.
Euron has added a few little touches for himself.
The seat on the back,
and added four more cross limbs for more power
and a bit more... madness.
The bolts are a nice design, a bit more of a barbaric style.
When you see it first, it'll be in this closed mold,
and when you see it the second time,
once it fires the projectile,
it leaves the limb, it opens up, and it rotates
so it'll rip open anything that it hits.
It's absolutely incredible work.
The whole production this season is just amazing,
what they've been creating for us actors.
You really feel that you're part of the biggest show in the world
when you're sitting on a Scorpion
and everything is just going around.
You really feel... wonderful.
We have Euron sitting on the seat,
he's in the back, he's like king of the castle,
being swung around by four brutes.
So these guys are lifting him up and down,
doing the trajectory left and right.
But he loved it. He loved it.
He'd have been still on it if he could.
I'm gonna be brutally honest.
I've talked to my wife about it.
'Cause you have to talk to someone, right?
And I've mentioned to my wife,
"How awesome is it that I killed a dragon?
And I killed it with a Scorpion."
Episode 4 has this little thing called Rhaegal's death.
And his demise
is some of the gnarliest-looking animation I've ever seen,
where they did an amazing job putting that together.
In the end, we have a couple of shots
of the destruction of Dany's ships.
So again, we kind of are in a completely digital scenario
to sort of show how these boats, up close,
puncture into the ship and tear it apart.
And the last shot is a very special one.
It's one of Tyrion having this long shot,
running across the deck.
That was another oner, but kind of a cheated oner.
So we had him running around the deck,
we had some physical effects there,
- but a lot of it we did later. - ...2, 1, go!
Love it. Love it.
Um, and when they're done in one shot,
like this is, one continuous thing,
it doesn't let the viewer off the hook.
All the boat work for Game of Thrones
essentially is done on a set piece
that's out in this location in Bainbridge.
Everything that you've ever seen on a boat in Game of Thrones
where people are standing, walking or talking on a boat
has been done on that ship.
It's surrounded by green screen, and everything around the boat
will have to be replaced with CG water
or water photography.
And then at one point, the railing gets blown away,
which the section that gets blown away is actually CG, so,
when all the pieces come together,
you see the special effects,
you see the CG, a lot of atmospherics,
you see Peter going up to the water,
it's a pretty spiffy moment.
The King's Landing city wall and gates,
we sort of saw this as a sort of fortification
around the whole of King's Landing,
loosely based around the walls of Dubrovnik,
which have a particular sort of style to the stonework
which we were trying to hint at.
By the time the platforms are on,
we're looking at not far off from about 57 feet,
56, 57 feet to the top of the platforms.
The towers are 49 feet high, the wall is about 200 feet long.
The King's Landing parlay,
the challenge is the size of the set.
So we quickly decided and convinced everybody
that most of the close-up work would be done
on a separate set piece that would be built on the ground,
right on the ground, and would put them
probably at about eight feet up.
So you're able to talk to the actor,
bring the camera in at a proper,
you know, reasonable level to be able to achieve
- all the shots we had. - Stand down!
But it's a little bit of, you know, Hollywood magic.
Another challenge was that, of course, this set...
is incredibly visible from the surrounding area.
I mean, and the big concern,
of course for this season more than ever,
was the secrecy of the plot.
In other words, um, we wouldn't want to give away
that Missandei is going to be executed,
so having her stand up there, you know, 40 feet high,
there was no way to hide that.
So again, later on, we're adding her in there now,
often times as a digi-double, but for the closeup work,
we shot her separately on stage to composite her on that
per location so we could put it together in the end
as a seamless "Oh, this has all been shot in the same place."
When I read that, it made sense to me immediately.
I was like, "When is she ever going to do something
when someone tells her to do?" She's not going to go, "Okay."
She's going to think, "Fuck you."
Also, it's, you know, Dany's best friend,
so she's like, "Fuck you, too."
She's fun at parties, that's all I can say.
The parley is a Hail Mary pass from Tyrion.
He's hoping that maybe, if he brings up Cersei's child,
he can talk some kind of sense into Cersei.
Tyrion talks to his sister in a way that you think
that she may actually listen to him for a change.
She may listen to her heart and listen to what he has to say
and understand it.
You've always loved your children...
more than yourself.
So we wanted to be able to just hang out there just long enough
to have it so that...
you would think that she may change,
but she's got this look on her face where it's just like...
that's just who I am. I can't help it.
And Lena's a tremendous actor, and that played out beautifully.
Bravo marker.
There's such a kind of basic kid in her still,
so I think she sees him in the moment asking her
to do something for him...
I beg you, if not for yourself, then for your child.
And she can't do what he's... She cannot.
It's like a kid in a...
She can't do what he tells her to do.
Because that would be... surrendering.
If you have any last words, now is the time.
To play that despair, but also that fire
and finding that duality in that moment,
it was quite challenging.
But David Nutter, who's, you know, wonderful,
was really great and supportive and was really good at helping
to support me in that scene.
It's sad, it's a sad moment for her 'cause she's...
to have liberation and then have it just taken from you...
It's heartbreaking.
Dracarys.
For Grey Worm, losing her... is just, like...
there's nothing left.
There's just nothing, he has nothing left now.
She has taught him how to be a human being.
Like, her and Dany have nurtured him into being human.
And then it's just taken away.
And the final shot of Dany walking away,
we knew it would be the last shot,
there wasn't any question
of how we were going to go out of the episode,
so it was really a question of how Emilia would convey...
a kind of almost unimaginable
sense of anger and rage and vengeance...
while walking towards the camera
and past the camera without saying a word,
but, uh, I would say she did it.