Episode five should just be called "Holy Shit,"
because we started reading the outline
and just went, "Holy shit!"
Doing lots of dragon strafe runs,
burning most of the set.
We set fire to 22 people.
Twice.
We've been doing many burns, amputees, mutilated bodies.
We had three motion control rigs going, a spider cam.
Our King's Landing set is round about 650 extras.
We had three units going, and now, at the end, four.
We've been just slammed since day one.
Big telescopic cranes, up to nine cameras.
It was off the scale, really, in every way.
And then we saw the set
and what Deb Riley and her team was building,
and we just said, "Wow, this is amazing."
King's Landing, traditionally, has been Dubrovnik.
The thing about Dubrovnik is, it's a really beautiful city,
and they love it, and they don't want us
to, you know, burn it down.
We've had this area out the back of the office.
It's been there for, you know, since we ever started here.
It's so close and so easy, and Belfast needs a backlot.
Why don't we just call this a backlot and build the set for real?
There's no such thing as a set you can just walk onto and shoot
when you're planning on destroying it.
There was so much thought that went into every single section
because it had so many requirements.
While we were designing the buildings,
we were designing the destruction at the same time.
So, for every lovely drawing of plans and elevations of the building,
we had lovely plans and elevations of the buildings destroyed.
It's not just a set that stands there and people walk in and out.
It goes through all these changes.
We're gonna see the plaza on Main Street all on fire.
In order to supply all the flames,
each building has its own manifold system
that gets broken up into many, many different pipes
to each window or doorway or roof.
- Stand there, mate. - Yep, we're on now.
It's all kind of steel and hoses
and cryogenic hoses and valves, and normal valves,
and two-ton gas tanks, three-ton gas tanks,
five-ton gas trucks.
It makes for a heavily propane-filled set.
There wasn't a lot of time up our sleeve
that we could take weeks to change the set over into a destructed stage.
So, Tom Martin, our construction manager, came up with the genius idea
of building the set in its destroyed stage first
and then cladding it so that it was perfect to begin with.
No crew member that wasn't there during the build process
had any idea that the destroyed version
was sitting underneath, waiting to be revealed.
I took a little video for myself on my phone
of the backstreets, not even the main drag.
The lanes, the offshoots, and the aged doors,
with tear stains of rust running down them.
It absolutely looks like it's been there for hundreds and hundreds of years.
So, it's loads of detail, loads of cornices and pillars and friezes,
corbels, all over the set.
It's been a lot of scenic sculpture.
We did a quite large relief plaque
with the letter "D" quite prominently.
Both Dan and David.
So we had two of them, obviously.
From a set dec perspective,
Deb wanted an authentic sort of place,
with the shopfronts, you know, and the color palette,
all the doors, all the studs, you know,
all that sort of detail we wanted as real as possible.
It's shocking when you go behind one of these doors and you see scaffolding,
'cause you really think you're in these places.
Nikolaj and I said the other day,
"We'll never be on anything that is this vast ever again.
They've built Croatia.
And not, like, a street,
they've built, like, 17 streets and alleys.
It has its drawbacks,
because it's right in the middle of the city.
The King's Landing set
was sprawling within Belfast within view of a number of raised buildings.
We had an unprecedented number of drones, paparazzi attention,
people just following the show around and trying to get a sneak peek.
What we didn't want them to see
was get the view looking down the King's Landing street,
so we stuck up a five-high container wall
and that problem died down pretty quick after that.
One of the great things about going to Dubrovnik was there was a reality there
that it was impossible to recapture with a set.
And this year, Deb recaptured that reality with the set.
It felt like you were wandering through Dubrovnik,
but we were in Belfast. We were in a parking lot
across from the Harland and Wolff cranes.
It was just, you know, her crowning achievement.
Three, two, one, action.
There's something you need to know.
Someone's betrayed me.
Yes.
We enter into five...
with a broken Dany.
Jon Snow.
Varys.
He knows the truth about Jon.
He does.
Because you told him.
If Jon hadn't told her the truth,
if Cersei hadn't betrayed her,
if Cersei hadn't executed Missandei,
if all these things had happened in any different way,
then I don't think we'd be seeing
this side of Daenerys Targaryen.
I, Daenerys of House Targaryen,
sentence you to die.
What? If Tyrion betrayed Varys,
Tyrion is responsible for Varys's execution?
They're best of friends.
Not really.
There's other things at play here.
It was me.
He has to betray somebody, right?
It's a choice between betraying your best friend or your queen,
and he chooses to remain loyal to his queen.
♪ We all need somebody To lean on ♪
No, just... chillin' with the harmony, babe.
- That was really nice, That was good. - Yeah, with the harmonizing.
Here we go, guys. Shooting.
C marker. Action!
It was scripted that he puts his hand up to touch Varys.
What Conleth did that I really, really liked
was his reaction, which was shock.
He did that this one time, and I said to him, "Why'd you do that?"
He said, "Well, he's never been touched before.
And it was cool, and it was just something like, "Wow.
Okay. That... I mean, it made lots of sense."
It was like, suddenly he was being touched,
and he... this is not a man who's ever been touched.
Well, it was one of the first scenes we shot.
We got to a certain point, and then it started raining,
and it started pouring, and then, basically,
the only time I've ever been on Thrones when we got shut down because it was torrential rain.
Then we went back and we re-shot the wides of that scene.
And then we realized that we owed all the parts
from one side, where you have the dragon behind.
So, basically, it was shot over seven months,
and each time, you know, poor Conleth had to kind of show up again,
Varys had to just stand there going,
"Okay, I guess I'm dying again."
Dracarys.
We thought it was important,
in the siege of King's Landing,
that the good guys not be good guys anymore,
and that the lines between good and bad
and right and wrong get erased.
We mirrored a lot of the Battle of Bastards shots,
but instead of having the Boltons be the invading army,
we had the allied troops.
There's a shot that pulls up behind Jon
and reveals the Bolton army for the first time in "Battle of the Bastards,"
and we do the same thing but from behind
the leader of the mercenary group.
What we need to understand, as an audience,
is that these people have come here for blood.
The hardest series of shots is the moment that
the King's Landing gate is obliterated by dragonfire.
It's covered by eight cameras,
one explosion over all of these camera views,
each camera view is carrying the explosion further.
The complexity of breaking not only the gate,
but destroying the wall, wiping out the people,
getting the fire element, you know,
big enough to travel as we needed it to...
Then there was this whole series of live action components,
Harry Strickland's horse that gets annihilated.
Three, two, one.
Action!
A real Gold Company and digital Gold Company.
Jump straight in, make your arm into a shield, and that's it.
Do you wanna close down, mate.
We trained them the same as we trained the Unsullied,
but just changed a few of their drill movements
to define them from being Unsullied.
Rolling!
Forty-four bigger, take five, eight camera mark.
Then there was a half-scale gate built by Sam Conway.
The half-scale gate explosion.
We've been building it out of, like, basically,
biscuit foam and balsa.
We're gonna be blasting it out of the way with, uh,
with many air mortars.
Three, two, one.
So, basically, what the idea is
to achieve this 60-foot explosion
coming out of the center of the gates,
and also some flame bangs too.
You know, it was a lot of planning for production and a lot of work for Sam,
and now it's a lot of work for us.
Don't fall on him.
Don't drop your fire extinguisher on his head.
Three, two, one, action.
As the dragons have gotten bigger,
they've been lighting more and more people on fire,
and I believe... I believe this year,
one of the things that Rowley brought to the table
was the most people that have ever been burned
onscreen for a production.
Yeah, that's fine.
...if you haven't done this before.
That's the director just locking my head off.
I just know what he's doing.
I wish he wouldn't touch it.
The 22 burns is actually 44 burns. Um... It's two halves.
And five of the 22 were full burns, but with no masks.
When the time comes and the call's given,
there's a process of getting them ready.
They're all wearing two-mil wetsuits
covered with three layers of Nomex race underwear
soaked in Zel-Jel.
On top of that is a race suit covered with a boiler-suit
and then a costume. And then they have
silicon masks on and gloves on.
What we essentially did was we lit the five guys manually,
and then we detonated 17 Taymars,
which are basically, um, gas camping canisters
inside metal cages. And they create a 15-foot fireball.
"Three, two, one, action!" 17 poppers go off
amongst all the full fire jobs, yeah?
Then "Three, two, one, action!" everybody reacts forward.
The full burns go on the "A" of "action,"
the partials go on "- tion," these guys go
after I've finished saying the word "action."
Okay? So we get a tiny ripple effect.
We'll do a rehearsal.
When he first lit me up, my trousers were quite baggy,
so they had to spritz me with IPH,
so there was some fumes in there.
And I'm bending over, and they lit me,
and it just went, boom!
I thought, "God, that's hot.
I'm hot already, and we've not even started to countdown yet."
We're rolling, guys, rolling, rolling.
Have a good one, boys.
Three, two, one, action!
We had up to nine cameras covering that scene.
It was an extraordinary sensation, as well, filming it.
You know it's fiction, but to see that many men on fire,
I found quite distressing at times.
I remember the smell.
It's horrifying.
Go, go, go, go, go!
And then we put them all out.
So, for 22 people, we had 22 other people with fire extinguishers
plus another six people with fire extinguishers
backing all of that up. So, it's a big deal.
Three, two, one.
We have our initial destruction, which is
the dragon comes in, blows shit up,
says, very clearly, "This isn't going to end well for you."
In come the allied forces,
and they take out the Lannisters.
And the audience go, "Yeah!"
Once the Lannisters surrender and the gates have been blown open,
and the Golden Company has been dispersed,
the battle's over,
and Jon feels like that's quite clear.
They did it, they did the impossible. This is a bloodless coup.
It's out of Cersei's hands.
You cut to Cersei, see her.
You cut to Tyrion realizing this is an opportunity,
this is the moment where the bells could ring
and we could call all this off.
And then you go to Dany.
She feels empty. It wasn't what she thought it was. It's not enough.
Every single thing that's led her to this point,
and there she is, alone.
We've all got this part of us, that part that goes,
"I'm gonna put that chocolate cake down."
"I'm gonna walk away."
We can't be getting into these moral conundrums all the time.
I'm not saying chocolate cake is a moral conundrum,
eat as much fucking cake as you want...
but those things that you wrestle with in yourself.
She knows that she has won this war.
It's in that moment when she makes the decision to make this personal.
It's one of my favorite Emilia performance moments,
because it took place on the back
of, like, a giant green dragon buck
without a real thing anywhere in sight.
Emilia's really nice. And she cares.
She's a whole bunch of things that Dany isn't.
So reaching this part of Dany
is a... was a tough call for her.
Ultimately, she is who she is, and that's a Targaryen.
You know, she has said repeatedly throughout the show,
"I will take what is mine with fire and blood."
And in this episode, she does it.
For the audience...
Oh, you wanted a battle? Well, here you go.
Drogon's fire-blasting does a lot of damage.
I mean, he's not Godzilla, but we're heading in that direction.
Cameras on, all set, and...
Three, two, one, blast it.
Uh... We create a lot of, um, interactive light
for dragonfire. So that can either be
a series of large flamethrowers
or it can be a pyrotechnic charge that we'll light up.
And of course, then, what happens is, we take... we go back to the studio
and then we do it with the VFX mo-co cameras.
We had the big flamethrower on the Spidercam onstage
that was shooting, you know, 40 feet of fire.
And then we do, also, the impact scene on the ground.
We do that as a half-scale model shoot, pyrotechnic charge goes along.
Three. Two. One. Action!
And all these things get tied in together,
so you'll see the dragonfire chasing those flames,
and then where the dragonfire lands,
you'll see all the pyrotechnic charges going off.
The place, when she takes off...
and starts burning the city,
and when the Unsullied on the ground
and the Northmen on the ground take that as their cue that anything goes...
That should be enough, guys, but it's not.
Just up ahead, everyone looking up,
you can see the dragon coming down. It fires on the city.
And... go, Gray Worm.
There's a moment when we see Gray Worm
taking out his enemies when there's no need to do that.
The way we described it in the screenplay
was that he's become almost an angel of death.
He's just gone back to being like, this kind of traumatized robot.
There are a lot of people lurking in the background.
See if you can find Aaron Rodgers.
I was helping a woman who was injured,
uh, set her down, and then, the hell with her, I'm getting outta there.
So, struggle, struggle, and then, I struggle and die
- forcing me to the ground. - Yeah.
Uh... Guys, room, please.
The beheading came from the idea to take the audience
to a place where they felt that they shared the bloodlust of the Starks,
so they wanted to see these people get creamed,
and then to give them what they wanted,
and show them with no mercy the horrors of war.
At that face-off in that moment, you're with Jon more than anybody else.
Interestingly, when we were editing it,
there was a mistake made at the moment that it goes to slow motion.
Our sound cut, and I was like...
...and suddenly, I was riveted.
Nothing letting me off the hook
from seeing what he's seeing and experiencing what he's experiencing.
There's a great shot that Miguel got.
You just have the Lannister soldier,
who's guiding the civilians of King's Landing to safety,
and the good guy in this shot is a shot in bad guy armor,
and the bad guys in this shot
are the ones who are doing all these horrific things.
If three was the final battle between good and evil,
five is "What have we become?"
It's all got a bit bleak, hasn't it?
It's quite bleak. This season's really bleak.
If I win...
I'll bring your head to Cersei so you can kiss her.
One last time.
Finally, after 15 years of being colleagues,
I'm given two days to kick his ass.
The time for gentleman-like fights are over.
The idea was it was a slugfest.
It's gonna be very funny for Denmark,
because two of their actors are gonna fight it off.
The Dane Bowl.
It's a little bit disconcerting
when they start talking Danish to each other,
'cause I'm not sure whether they're changing a move,
or conspiring to do something that we don't want them to do.
Where we did it, it was a very unfriendly environment,
which was big rocks and stones and a tide... it was very...
you know, very small cove where the tide came in and out,
and it was wet and sandy.
Those guys being soaking wet, and having sand everywhere,
they're probably still finding sand in the bath now.
Three, two, one, action.
Euron is a psychopath.
A normal person would not swim to shore
just so he could murder one other person.
He wants to know what new things are like.
As he says with Cersei, "Life can be boring."
The ultimate new interesting experience he's never had before
is death, and I think he's strangely excited
about having that experience as well.
I mean, he dies with a smile on his face.
That was the first thing I asked Dan and David is,
"Am I dead?" They go like, "No! Maybe. A little."
And I go like, "No, I don't think so."
It struck us that it would be apocalyptically beautiful
to see them fighting on this stairway to nowhere
with the sky in the background and the dragon flying by,
and the flames everywhere, and it's just pretty epic
and that's what we wanted.
Hello, big brother.
One more and this time, guys...
We shot this thing for days and days and days,
and it was so hard to shoot, and it was a massive set.
There was a 72 steps.
The really important thing for me
in designing the staircase was that it felt grand.
We've always seen these computer generated illustrations
of King's Landing, and there is a big tower
down the side of the big keep.
The problem with the staircase is it will want to go up,
so I think the first time in our kind of history
of building things here, we've actually hit the grid of the stages.
There's a lot of crew,
and there's just the one staircase, so...
trying to get cameras into positions...
right up against the staircase, it's been quite difficult.
The same time, the building is being ruined
by the dragon fire, so there's crumbling walls everywhere.
Special effects will be dropping rocks and sand and debris,
and so there's all these kind of interesting challenges
as well as... running in and fighting, and falling down the stairs.
So, when you attack, it's better that you're slower,
but on target... ...and he gets out of the way,
rather than try to be really fast
and deliberately missing, 'cause we'll see a deliberate miss.
- Does that make sense? - Yeah.
Just slow and deliberate.
Everyone, ready? And... rehearse stage. And...
three, two, one, action.
Ooh! Help. Sorry.
The way we tackled it was we put one very big crane
on the inside of the circle, on the inside of the staircase,
which could reach any point on that staircase,
and then where the staircases had been destroyed at the back,
we've got another crane on a large rostrum, so we've could shoot both ways.
When we're on the staircase,
we shoot a whole combination of handheld,
and then we deploy our Artemis Maxima,
which is this handheld stabilized rig.
We learn the choreography.
We get trust of the actors and vice versa,
and if you learn it well enough, you can step inside that zone
with the swords going over the camera or under the camera.
Before you know it, it gets pretty exciting.
Cut!
You know, that fight was brutal.
It's brutal to watch, but it was brutal to shoot as well,
because... for Hafpór,
he's wearing so many prosthetics.
Hafpór had to wake up at midnight
to get ready for a 8:00 a.m. call.
Seven-and-a-half hours of makeup, um,
and then he had to do a ten hour day.
They were... They were hard. They were hard, hard work.
When we read the scripts,
we realized that there's this big reveal.
And another step. Ah, fuck it. Just pull it off.
So the last time we'd really seen the Mountain
from the hands of our work was season four.
He was like on the slab, and he had this whole rotted,
kind of ulcerated area on the side of his torso.
So, that was really
the only springboard we had to the design.
They kept referring to him as Franken-Mountain.
And we just came up with this kind of putrid,
almost porcelain looking...
It was this Frankensteinian looking figure.
Cut.
Hafpór won World's Strongest Man this year.
We got him really late because of that as well,
so we basically used his strength
to throw Rory's character around and he had a really big day
where literally, he spent the whole day being thrown into walls.
This isn't a trained stuntman.
This is the guy that smashes stuff up.
And three, two, one, smack him against the wall.
Cut.
Rory was like... I mean...
sometimes, we thought he was dying on the stairs
in between takes, literally.
Everyone okay?
For a big man, you're very gentle.
Thank you.
I, after a couple days, decided to have a... I brought Hafpór in,
and I gave him this... a box with a sandbag on top of it,
and I put the camera underneath and we didn't...
there's no reason to shoot it, and I was like,
"I just want you to just... When I saw action,
just fucking smash that as hard as you possibly can.
Pretend it's Rory's head.
And looking right at the camera...
- And he was just like going... - ...like that,
and we're shooting it in slow motion.
Three, two, one, and action.
And one more time. And three, two one, and action.
Great, and now this time, just...
And I just wanted to get all his anger out,
so that it was all done
and then we went off and did the scene.
Set!
We're gonna do a 30 foot fall where Gyula takes off Mike,
the stunt double for the Mountain,
into a box rig. For two really big guys,
and one of them going off backwards in full prosthetics,
it's getting the wall right that's the difficult bit
because, you know, it's meant to be like four-foot thick.
It will be a couple of feet thick,
but it's trying to get that to look right.
There are many times when we're planning a season,
and you know, you kind of have to avoid
giving the audience exactly what they want
because then things start to become predictable.
This is the case where we wanted the same thing.
We've always wanted to see these two face off, and they finally did.
Ready, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go.
Yep. Here we go.
You needed a perspective
to carry you through this horror,
and we thought Arya was the best person to use for that purpose.
I got a call from Miguel, basically was like,
"I can't tell anything, but you know what we did in BOB?"
I was like, "Yeah." He was like,
"We're gonna do that but with you,"
and I was like, "Okay."
It was meant to be, ultimately, come across
as a seven-and-a-half minute, non-stop shot,
where you follow her on the run.
We practiced this many, many times.
We've spent a whole day, two days, practicing the shot already
with Arya and with all the stunt team and all the extras we require.
Little boy, back down the stairs, round...
Gonna really throw away the girl coming out the window.
- Cam speed. - 69 apple, take six. 38 frames.
Three, two, one, action.
From a camera perspective, it took us an hour...
to figure out how we're gonna move the camera.
It's all the other stuff that goes on in the background,
you know, and you've got a great special effects crew,
who, you know, put in smoke and flame bars, and lots of extras.
Every single extra you look at will have each of their stories,
so... you know, I think that's what makes those one-ers so intense.
So, I think definitely, when you came in here,
that thing that first time you're on the ground,
it's like, "Fuck! I'm fucked.
I'm fucked unless I get out of here.
How do I get out of here? Go this way."
We've got all sorts of air mortars going off.
And she gets picked up by the crowd.
And she is just cannon fodder, because Dany is bombing the city.
I've decided on this journey to a new life,
and I might not even make it out of the gates.
I think we want the audience to think that's she's dead,
for like a second, but audiences are too smart for that.
There's an element of luck in these things as well,
you know, we need everybody
to get a little bit lucky at the same time.
We're setting people on fire during it,
and putting them out during it.
If I miscue it or not cue it quick enough, it doesn't work.
There's any number of things that can just make the take
not as good as you would hope it to be,
and they typically take ten takes to get.
Delta mark, 48 frames. Bravo, 69.
Delta take one on the end.
Um...
The journey that Arya's taking,
heavily inspired by the firebombing of Dresden
because what it needs to look like
is the firebombing of King's Landing.
It was interesting to us that we could...
we could take a modern reference
and map it onto a pre-modern situation,
because we have air firepower in the form of the dragons.
If you see some of the photographs,
they're terrifying photographs of not just the level of destruction,
but you know, there's people walking to work the next day
with decapitated heads lying on the ground.
It's like... it's a terrifying, terrifying thing.
She's seen some awful things,
but this is like mass destruction and...
it's pretty sickening, even for the strongest of people.
We'd been doing many full body burns,
some with negative space, some crushed,
sort of mutilated bodies.
Extras, which are amputees, and we've created severed limbs,
so we've had team of about five, six people on a day to day basis
and on some days, Miguel would say,
"Right, I need these guys to have some head injuries.
This guy's got his throat slashed.
This guy's gonna be really badly burned.
So, suddenly, our guys just pile in,
and we've got this big jigsaw puzzle of pieces
that we've got in our arsenal, and fortunately,
it seems to have worked out.
Now, I've got one of my girls walking along,
and she's got handful of intestines,
and we've got amputees. Bless 'em. And then you make
the ends of the limbs that they have look horrible,
and you make trails of blood where they've been.
And then, they're screaming horribly.
Cut, cut, cut.
But when they cut,
someone's walking around with a box of ice-lollies
and going, "You want an ice lolly?"
"No, I'm all right."
What we do for a living is a bit surreal at times, you know.
It was originally shot to be this really long one-er,
and it was actually a decision that Miguel and his editor,
Tim Porter, made as they were cutting it
that intercutting the Clegane Bowl
and Arya's escape was actually much more emotional
and effective than having this 12 minute long one-er
and then the fight as two separate pieces.
All she's left with is the sound of burning people
and the smell of burning flesh.
And she sees a white horse 'cause it's symbolic...
and beautiful. And then, she hops on and gallops off
and makes it out of the city.
68 echo, take one.
A, B, and C, come on boards,
D marker.
It's a kind of genuine discovery as she goes along,
each step she takes, something crumbles, something falls.
The destruction is unavoidable.
She loses people and finds herself totally alone.
Dragon. Track.
The thing that he has with his sister, which is absolutely unconditional love.
- You came back for me. - Of course, I did.
He goes back to her, even though he knows that she's gonna die.
He goes back to her even though he knows that she'll never surrender.
He goes back to her just to be there for her.
He almost goes back to her, I would say,
to prove that he was never going to leave.
The skull room, unfortunately, had to be recreated
because in order to destroy the space, we had to build it.
And then, a lot of bricks were brought in for it,
and we had some big architectural pieces made as well.
The great thing was I had all of the information
about the space. We had already, um, measured it and drawn it.
I had all of the photographs of it.
One of the lessons that I learned very quickly
was a pile of rubble isn't very interesting...
unless you have identifiable architectural pieces
that... that can sit in it, and an audience can identify
with having fallen from that building.
The escape route is blocked,
and there is no way out.
And now we're talking seconds, and... and she's panicking.
Action.
Please don't let me die.
I don't want to die.
Jaime, please.
Look... Look me in the eyes. Don't look away.
Please don't let me die, not like this.
Look at me!
There's a helplessness from both of them and a sense of loss that...
is the strangest feeling to experience with them, because...
you know, Cersei is one of the most horrendous characters
committed to film, and yet, somehow, at the end,
she's just a girl, and she's just scared.
And... and he's there to comfort her.
Just look at me.
- I don't want to die... - Shh...
Nothing else matters. Just us.
Only us.