How the House of the Dragon finale brought the first dragon battle to life
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Warning: This article contains spoilers from House of the Dragon's season 1 finale.
Director Greg Yaitanes had one directive from House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal when it came time to film the show's very first dragon skirmish in the season finale. "Make this a Game of Thrones scene," Condal said, according to Yaitanes. "Lean into everything the show has to offer." He didn't need much more elaboration. Yaitanes, who has directed everything from Bones to Lost in his 30-plus years in the biz, already went through the gauntlet earlier this season. He was at the helm for episodes 2 and 3, which included the battles at the Stepstones.
Yaitanes was the one to bring Miguel Sapochnik, the now-fan favorite Game of Thrones director and House of the Dragon season 1 co-showrunner, into the TV space to work on episodes of Fox's House back in the day. So when they reunited on the new HBO blockbuster series, "he had great advice producorially in terms of approach and ways to do a Game of Thrones battle successfully," Yaitanes tells EW. "Even though I had done a lot of action, I had not done a medieval battle. I'd done dragon fights. So what was great was, he left me alone to really choreograph that dragon fight."
The season finale picks up after the Greens, led by Hand of the King Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) and Dowager Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke), steal the Iron Throne out from under Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) for the queen's son Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney). Grieving the loss of her father and the stillborn daughter she miscarried, Rhaenyra is crowned queen of Westeros at Dragonstone and is forced to make her first play in response. She agrees to send envoys to multiple lords in Westeros to rally supporters for the Blacks. This brings her son Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault) to Storm's End, home of Lord Borros Baratheon (Roger Evans).
HBO Lucerys Velaryon arrives on Arrax to Storm's End in 'House of the Dragon.'
Borros is not as welcoming as Rhaenyra had hoped. Worse still, Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell), Alicent's younger son who lost an eye thanks to Luke when they were kids, beat him there, already shoring up Borros' support for the Greens. This leads to an aerial chase sequence through torrential rain and crackling lightning above the castle as Aemond mounts the monolith that is Vhagar and taunts Luke, on the back of his much smaller dragon, Arrax.
"In preparation, I watched the first How to Train Your Dragon because [Oscar-winning cinematographer] Roger Deakins was the visual consultant on that. So that, cinematically, was going to be really appealing," Yaitanes says. The filmmaker ended up changing a few edits of his dragon sequence after watching the movie and finding some similarities. "How to Train Your Dragon definitely covered a lot of action sequences that you didn't want to be in comparison to."
"And I went back to the original Jurassic Park," Yaitanes adds, "because there was a sense of scale to the dinosaurs that I don't think any of the subsequent films ever recaptured. [Director Steven Spielberg] knew he wanted to frame for height, and I took a lot of cues off what made the dinosaurs look so big and so interesting. So there's a lot of Jurassic Park in Storm's End and in the air."
Yaitanes started thinking about the sequence using toys — toy dragons, that is. The filmmaker and the episode's cinematographer Pepe Avila del Pino blocked the entire sequence with toy dragons, filming these figures first on an iPhone. Sapochnik also told Yaitanes tales of filming "The Battle of the Bastards," one of his most widely recognized action-heavy episodes from Game of Thrones, one Saturday afternoon at a crepe shop in England for pointers. "Miguel had some good strategies and broke down 'Battle of the Bastards' almost in a masterclass way," remembers Yaitanes, who once "flirted" with directing Game of Thrones, but schedules never lined up. Directing House of the Dragon's most action-heavy episodes "was a nice way to come to the show and to be able to be the one to close it out," he says.
The Third Floor, a pre-visualization studio that's worked on Disney+'s Ms. Marvel and Amazon's The Boys, were able to translate the toy videos into CG blocking. "Then we had what was called a V cam, where I could be on a camera dragon and go around and be able to shoot the shots and then we could cut those together," Yaitanes continues. "It's a really incredible process that began the day I got there and was finished the day I left. It was the sequence that took the most creative time to do."
Gary Moyes / HBO Elliot Grihault as Lucerys Velaryon in 'House of the Dragon'
Gary Moyes / HBO Ewan Mitchell as Aemond Targaryen in 'House of the Dragon'
Initially, Yaitanes was only going to direct episodes 3 ("Second of His Name") and 10 ("The Black Queen"), but ended up helming episode 2 ("The Rogue Prince") as well. Of those three, he had a personal connection to the finale. One of the reasons for that was Aemond.
Yaitanes is open about the fact that he was bullied as a child. "I think it was actually in high school when the kid that bullied me actually ended up winning Most Friendly in our school," he recalls. It's led to a personal draw to the concept of the bully. "I found Aemond fascinating," he adds. "Bullies are so often the most vulnerable. It's such a defense mechanism for them." In the context of House of the Dragon, he says, "I was really fascinated by the unintended consequences that come with how you treat people, and seeing his trauma."
"The bullying of Luke is trying to reclaim power," Yaitanes muses. "[Aemond] feels he's the more equipped one to be king, but he can't claim that power. He was teased mercilessly as a kid, humiliated as a kid, claimed Vhagar as a way to claim power, and with that I was just really curious about his psychology."
In a deviation from the source material, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin's book Fire and Blood, both Aemond and Luke lose control of their dragons in the fight. Arrax, fearing for his life, breathes fire at Vhagar, inciting the biggest dragon in all the world. As Yaitanes puts it, "The dragons start fighting with themselves, and now it has nothing to do with these kids." Aemond does not intend to kill Luke, but there's no restraining a dragon of Vhagar's size when she rises above the clouds to bite Arrax in half, plunging the bodies of both Luke and his steed into the ocean below.
The finale becomes a visual representation of something King Viserys (Paddy Considine) says in the first episode: "The idea that we control the dragons is an illusion."
"This was the example," Yaitanes notes of the Aemond-Luke flight. "You're putting nukes in kids' hands and, while [Aemond] maybe didn't intend to set out to kill [Luke], what do you expect? Then to see the complexity and the gravity of what he's done. I thought it did such a beautiful job making that character not just a one-dimensional black hat."
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