House Of The Dragon director Clare Kilner walks us through last night’s big dragon moment
The director of episode nine shares a behind-the-scenes look at that epic final reveal, and the best thing about working with House Of The Dragon's actors
TV Features Clare Kilner
There’ve been some great dragon moments in the first season of House Of The Dragon, but the one at the climax of episode nine, “The Green Council,” ranks among the best dragon entrances so far. It capped an eventful episode in which the Hightowers were scrambling to get Prince Aegon on the Iron Throne before Princess Rhaenyra even knows her father is dead.
The A.V. Club talked with Clare Kilner, the director of “The Green Council,” as well as episodes four and five. She walked us through how episode nine’s massive effect was achieved, and revealed that one of the episode’s most devastating lines was improvised by the actor during rehearsals. We also asked about how she brings her personal perspective to the franchise, which hasn’t historically had many women behind the camera.
The A.V. Club: Before we begin, I have to ask—what is your drink of choice?
Clare Kilner: [Laughs] Mine is the skinny margarita with a dash of dragon breath.
AVC: Okay, now that that’s out of the way, congratulations on this episode. It really kicked things into high gear.
CK: It’s so absolutely enormous. And beautifully written, I hasten to add, by Sara Hess. I was quite nervous. But in the end, I wasn’t because I had such a brilliant team of people around me, all supportive of my creative vision. And my creative vision obviously came from Sara’s script, which had so much depth to it.
AVC: Obviously there’s a lot going on in this episode, but could you walk us through that massive scene at the end, where Rhaenys crashes the coronation on dragonback?
CK: It took many, many people, a huge team of people to pull this off. I sort of start with, what’s at the heart of the scene? How do we illustrate what’s going in the hearts and minds of all of these people visually? And [D.P. Alejandro Martinez] and I, the way we work is that we go into the set and we actually play the scene out. We are, you know, terrible actors [laughs]. But we say the words, so we hear them out loud and we start thinking about, for example, “You know what? If we had to shoot the scene in one, what would it be?”
So we start just talking about it and drawing up a short list, then we start storyboarding it. Then we had this incredible opportunity to have a virtual reality scenario where we actually put on these sort of—I mean, I’m not a gamer, so forgive me if I use the wrong words—but these sort of like headsets and we navigate around the dragon as it would be in the CGI world. And we can put different lenses on so we can see where each shot would be. And literally we’re walking around the room looking completely weird with these headsets on. But it’s an incredible gift to be able to do that, to plan things beforehand.
So then this is when Nick Hextall Smith, the first A.D., becomes heavily involved. He is absolutely amazing. And he pushed me to really work out every single detail and to clarify every single detail because we have to work out how to shoot this in so many layers. So, for example, we shot, you know, Rhaenyra heading towards the dragon pit in Cáceres with Spanish supporting artists. Then we shot her on the stairs that Jim Clay had built in the studios in Leavesden with British supporting artists. And then we had the actual set, which was meant to be the size of a football pitch. But of course the studio is only a third of that size. So when we’re shooting crowd scenes, we have to shoot sort of 100 people, move those out, shoot it, and then put up a blue screen, shoot another 100 people against a blue screen, move those and shoot another hundred people. And then all of these people get composited together.
And then we have the people, like everyone coming in. We have to shoot that repeated times. And then they have to look at a blue screen, because obviously the royal dais is much further away than it actually was. So they all have to act against me. And, you know, I’m telling them what everyone else is doing on the other side as they’re coming in. Literally, my voice was hoarse, because when the dragon comes out, I’m like, “And the ground opens up! And something comes through! And there’s this huge roar!” So it’s quite amazing. It was fun and exhausting.
AVC: Did you have to make any compromises on the day of the shoot because it was so complicated?
CK: Aegon was meant to come in on horseback, but we realized there was no way we could add horses into this crazy situation already. So I started watching military processions and things and I saw, you know, these arches of swords. And I just love the sounds swords make as they go down. I’m really into it. And so we created this sort of L shape that Aegon had to walk through. And eventually I loved the image that he would see his mother through the swords and he had to walk up to Mummy as he’s, you know, heading up. Yeah.
AVC: This world can feel so expansive with the big set pieces and complicated effects, and yet it also has those small, emotional scenes between two characters in a room.
CK: There was an interesting thing that happened when Alicent and Aegon were in the wheelhouse, because there’s so much silence there. And I was like, “What is going on in this silence?” As they’re going to this coronation there’s so much underneath the words. And I love the fact that it was written sparsely. And so we did a little improvisation like, “What’s going on? What do you want to say to her? What do you want to say to him? What would you say if you could?” And we did a little improvisation and then Tom [Glynn-Carney] ended it with, “Do you love me?” And that wasn’t in the script. And of course, then we did the scene and he added it in the end. And that’s what that whole scene is about. And it was so powerful. And you just know those moments. It’s like, “Oh, this is gold.”
AVC: It’s nice to see women behind the scenes on this show, because there weren’t many women directors on Game Of Thrones. Do you feel like you bring a different perspective to directing that we might not otherwise get? I’m thinking in particular of the brothel scene in episode four, which might have played differently from a man’s point of view.
CK: I mean, a hundred percent. I do see the difference, and I was very aware of that responsibility. But also I have a desire in myself to shoot things in a different way. I had time to think about it and I had to think long and hard. I’ve been in an industry for a while now. You know, I’m not 20, but I’ve grown up watching films and TV my whole life. And, you know, I’m a huge fan of it all. But I hadn’t realized when I was younger that I was growing up watching sex from the male gaze. I just thought that was sex, you know? And so I had to think, “Oh gosh, what is the female gaze?” And I kept on thinking of things with a male gaze. So I had to really think about, “Okay, what is my gaze? Let’s stop thinking about female and male gaze. Gosh, what do I think about this story and how would I like to see it told?”
And everything about directing is that it starts complicated and it boils down to something simple. The answer is genuinely, usually simple, but it takes a while to get there. And so that’s what I did. And I talked to the actors and I’m like, “How do they feel?” And I love collaborating with the actors, because they are always so intelligent and really are the keeper of the point of view of their character. So, you know, I don’t want to tell them what to do. I want to work with them so they feel like happy and confident in the story that putting out there because there is such a responsibility. This goes out far and wide.
38 Comments
It’s not quite accurate to say Game of Thrones had no female directors. Men were certainly in the vast majority, but Michelle MacLaren did a few, including the GRR-scripted The Bear and the Maiden Fair.So, nothing about how there’s a zero percent chance a ton of people weren’t killed in that entrance? Or are we just not supposed to care because they’re random extras, even when the very same episode has Mysaria chew some upper class people out over that?
Oh, absolutely. Are we supposed to root for Rhaenys there? Because she just straight up killed a bunch of innocent peasants who were forced in there by the City Watch. My wife said “oh hell yeah,” because it is a cool-ass moment, but it doesn’t hold up on scrutiny.
I’ve seen this complaint in the other article as well, and I find it baffling. What would possibly give you the impression that any of these people in power care about the smallfolk? They don’t.
There were two separate moments in this episode with people advocating for the smallfolk: Mysaria and her “please stop using turning children into murder slaves” moment, and Alicent who says that a queen should want to prevent her people from suffering (when she’s talking to Rhaenys). Then the show goes “nah, we don’t actually believe that” and kills a bunch of innocent peasants for an “awesome” moment. (Which wasn’t particularly awesome, undermined in part because this show is so unremittingly fugly to look at.)They presumably want us to care about/root for at least some of the characters; Rhaenys was high on that list because she seemed to have her head more or less on straight, and by giving her the backstory of being unfairly passed over for the crown because sexism. The show even takes pains to have us sympathize with her earlier in the same episode by having her trapped in her room, making us legit concerned that they might come murder her in their coup/purge. (Because this is a society where casually murdering high-ranking nobles has basically no consequences. Nobody’s house ever takes up arms when you murder their leaders.) Having her then murder a bunch of civilians for no good reason tells me that the showrunners don’t care to tell a coherent story, and it makes me wonder why I would want to watch it.
The show makes it really hard to root for or care about anyone. I don’t think I’m likely to watch the second season, because this one has just given us a bunch of hateful, cruel characters. The only two characters I actually enjoy watching even a little are Daemon and Rhaenyra, and only because they’re kind of interestingly evil (instead of boringly evil, like most of the rest—e.g. Otto Hightower has to be the least interesting character in all of GoT-dom).
Mysaria doesn’t really count because she’s essentially one of the small people who’ managed to claw her way into some small semblance of power. She made her play to help in some small part and her reward was attempted assassination (I don’t believe the character is dead).
I wasn’t talking about characters who care about the smallfolk, but about the show’s perspective. Art conveys a message, and if it conveys conflicting messages then it weakens all of them. So it wants to feint in the direction of “hey what these people are doing is bad” but then put on sunglasses and go “lol deal with it” when it shows them doing monstrously evil things.
(The overall message of this show seems to be “these people are all horrible monsters and you should not care about any of them,” which is not a great way to convince people to get emotionally invested in it.)
But it’s working, no? The show is doing exceedingly well and plenty of people are invested, either in the characters, the story, taking a side, or just the entertainment of it. Many are already “sad” that there’s only one episode left and then they have to wait two years for the next season. It may not work on you, and that’s totally valid, but I think it’s hard to argue the results overall.For me, I don’t think anything you’re saying is wrong, but I also don’t care, if that makes sense. Not in a mean way, of course. I’m watching for the entertainment of it all knowing that none of these people are good people. They’re the nobility, the 1%, etc. They will do some noble things, but they’re also gonna do a bunch of terrible things. It’s like me watching The Sopranos, The Godfather, or any other show or film where the main characters are not good people. That doesn’t bother me, but I respect that it bothers you. To each their own.
Let me summarize your comment:“You’re wrong, because it’s popular. But I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s working for me.” What was the point of spending an entire paragraph saying “you’re wrong because it’s popular” if you were going to say “but to each his own I guess”?
Not sure, I guess. Sorry if I came off rude or anything. I was just bored here at work.
Well if you have time to waste at work, at least take the time to revise your posts 😉
Have I wronged you in some way or am I misinterpreting the unnecessary attitude?
It’s standard A.V. Club snark. Didn’t you read the handbook?
Pretty sure we were all emotionally invested in Joffrey or Ramsey Bolton and their eventual comeuppance.
Yeah, but that was because we had several seasons to get to know them, and GoT also provided us with characters we liked to serve as an emotional counterpoint. A show can work if you like all the characters; it can also work if you like only some of the characters. I hate all these characters and don’t want to spend time with them; they’re not even interestingly hateable, like Joffrey or Ramsay. They’re mainly just… boring.
Then the show goes “nah, we don’t actually believe that” and kills a bunch of innocent peasants for an “awesome” moment.She show didn’t say anything, a couple characters did. Mysaria, who is lowborn, advocates for the smallfolk but Otto’s smirk and dismissive, “yeah, I’ll get right on that” response displays quite clearly that he doesn’t give a crap about the smallfolk. When Alicent is talking with Rhaenys it’s obvious Alicent is talking in platitudes, not what she actually believes. In reality all she cares about is getting Aegon on the throne. That’s the point of that conversation. Rhaenys realizes Alicent has actually gotten quite good at playing the game. Then Rhaenys points out that, as good as she’s gotten, she’s still only using her skills to navigate a man’s world. Which prompts Alicent to decide Aegon is going to be coronated the next day and she forces a huge number of lowborn to attend the coronation against their will. When it comes to Rheanys, she’s never pretended to give a crap about the small folk.There aren’t really any sympathetic characters in this story. The only real sympathy comes from who is latest to have something abjectly horrifying happen to them once the war gets into full swing.
“The show didn’t say anything”Sure. Because it has nothing to say.
You literally thought a line of dialogue was suddenly a supposed theme of the show, despite the entirely contrary plot and character presentations. I don’t know how you watch anything if your expectation is that characters are just spouting dialogue truthful to their motivations.
I made the mistake of thinking the writers might have a coherent point of view. The point here is that despite characters espousing views, the show doesn’t seem to want to engage with any moral perspective at all; they just want “cool” moments that ultimately have no depth. Why bring up the mistreatment of the smallfolk at all if you’re not going to engage with it, but instead decide to kill off a bunch more just so you can #girlboss or whatever? Just to show once again how awful these people are, as if we haven’t gotten the message already?This show isn’t saying anything insightful or interesting. It’s going for shock value gussied up with production dollars. It’s like they took GoT and said, let’s make all the characters despicable monsters (instead of just, like, half of them), and let’s drain all the color out of it to boot so that it’s a visually hideous display of morally hideous people. That’s why I’m done after this season; I gave it a shot out of lasting fondness for the first three books and first five seasons of ASOIAF and GOT, but they’ve done nothing to make me want to spend time in this world or with these people.
Why bring up the mistreatment of the smallfolk at all if you’re not going to engage with it, but instead decide to kill off a bunch more just so you can #girlboss or whatever? Fucking #girlboss? Are you serious? I’ll skip over that misogyny for a moment. I’m not sure how to explain this to you. This is just basic storytelling. Mysaria might care about smallfolk. None of the other characters do. That’s the point. It was quite obviously engaged with that in that none of the other characters give a fuck about smallfolk.
Misogyny? Now I know you’re deliberately misinterpreting things. Bye.
Dirtside, you have been beating this horse ad nauseum.You have become the Herschel Walker of AV Club, so many scrambled words a salad of fatuous and puerile ingredients .Here, have a badge for your efforts.
Dirtside, you have been beating this horse ad nauseum.Appropriate, since the show is nauseating.
If the show is nauseating, Dirtside, you may wish to evaluate your life choices in finding yourself watching the 9th episode of the series and offering critique in a public forumReading through these comments, multiple people have agreed/disagreed with intelligent and thoughtful posts where yours do come across as very #HereForTheTrollLols
you may wish to evaluate your life choices in finding yourself watching the 9th episode of the series and offering critique in a public forumI gave the show a fair shot, and thought it was okay at first, but its weaknesses have become apparent over the course of the season, bringing me to the point where I’m no longer interested in watching it. I’ll finish out the season (because as much as I dislike it, I also dislike the idea of stopping one episode from the end) but they haven’t convinced me that it’s worth my time in the future.If you think I’m actually nauseated by this show (like, suffering physical symptoms of nausea), you need to learn the distinction between snark and rhetoric.
Reading through these comments, multiple people have agreed/disagreed
with intelligent and thoughtful postsYeah, no. Every single response has been, at best, a fig leaf for “nuh uh, it’s totally awesome to root for a character who casually murders civilians, because awesome dragon entrance!” Anyone who watched that scene and thinks the primary takeaway should be “it was awesome!” needs to evaluate their life choices. where yours do come across as very
#HereForTheTrollLols /rolleyes Yeah, I’m trolling because I don’t think we should root for characters who massacre civilians.
Ah, the “quote and reply” dump… always fun when someone misses every single point.While I will give anyone their right to opinion, as multiple people have stated above (im not going to quote, I’m a big boy and no my sources are there if you’re actually looking for reasoned argument), I disagree that the reading of that scene was for it to come across as, what was it dirtside… oh yeah, “#girlboss”
The death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocents was foreshadowed in this very episode (and in prior episodes) and if you think the show “accidentally” portrayed a scene with Rhaenys rebuffing Alicent’s comments on avoiding a bloody war with diplomacy, within the same episode as Rhaenys beginning the casualties of war, then I’m afraid I can’t agree.You seem to think the scene of the White Wyrm was the show saying “the common people should be cared for” and that narratively we should only see then the highborn going out of their way to protect the common people and I’m here to tell you, that isn’t why we saw that scene.Where I do agree is I do not think this show is excellent, I find it watchable with exceptional visual production and performances and that’s what keeps me invested but even in rhetoric, nauseating implies you are done with the show and if you read that episode the way you do… I’d suggest maybe it wasn’t for you anyway
as multiple people have stated above (im not going to quote, I’m a big
boy and no my sources are there if you’re actually looking for reasoned
argument)And multiple people are also on my side, including the OP. So what? Popularity has no relevance to whether an opinion is well-reasoned or useful. Do you actually believe that the number of people who agree with you has some bearing on whether you’re right?
and if you think the show “accidentally” portrayed a scene with Rhaenys rebuffing Alicent’s comments on avoiding a bloody war with diplomacy, within the same episode as Rhaenys beginning the casualties of war, then I’m afraid I can’t agree.See, that’s a reasonable position. You couldn’t have stated that without personal insults like accusations of trolling?
At any rate, I think that whatever comment the show might have been trying to make got lost under that “awesome” moment. For one thing, it makes Rhaenys look foolish. Massacring a bunch of unallied civilians for no reason is going to sway a lot of smallfolk (and nobles) toward the Greens. It’d be one thing if the surprise was the only way she could take out the Greens, and the deaths of the innocents was regrettable collateral damage, but then she doesn’t. It’s a slightly annoying development because Rhaenys has not generally been depicted as foolish, but someone clearly said “Eh, we’ll just ignore that bit, because it’s gonna look awesome.” I’m a big believer in the Rule of Cool, but I didn’t think this moment was nearly cool enough to justify itself. She did something that cost her*, and then got nothing in exchange for it. Violence instead of diplomacy, sure; but violence against… unrelated, unarmed civilians?*Or would, if this show depicted medieval-type societies or warfare in any way that was remotely accurate, which it doesn’t. I can forgive a lot of that if the characters and story are engaging me, but they aren’t.It’s one thing if Alicent provides her with the choice of “violence against us, or diplomacy with us,” and Rhaenys chooses one of those. But to choose “violence against other unrelated people” is, to put it mildly, an odd choice.
I’m not bothered by her snap decision not to roast the Greens, after she emerged from downstairs. She was clearly feeling sympathy toward Alicent in the moment, and made an emotive decision; potentially fatal in the long run from a strategic perspective (I don’t know what happens to her later; haven’t read the book), but at least it was properly set up by the narrative via her conversation with Alicent earlier.
The bigger problem is that the show itself seems to have no moral perspective. A single closeup shot of one of those massacred civilians suffering or dying because of what Rhaenys did would have gone a long way toward me believing that the show is aware that the human cost of “awesome moments” (especially ones that aren’t morally justified in either the Doylist or Watsonian perspective) is more important than just looking cool. But, no, all we get is extras getting flung around and smashed. A good point of comparison is the scene from earlier in the season where Daemon shows up on his dragon and crushes the guy who’s cheering for him. That at least made a point about how the royals do not care about the smallfolk even a little. (Although it was also somewhat self-defeating, because in what world are the smallfolk ever going to be cheering for nobles who casually murder them like that?)
You seem to think the scene of the White Wyrm was the show saying “the common
people should be cared for” and that narratively we should only see
then the highborn going out of their way to protect the common people
and I’m here to tell you, that isn’t why we saw that scene.That isn’t what I think. I’m not at all talking about the noble characters being nice to people. I’m talking about the show issuing contradictory messaging because they thought it was more important to have a cool moment than one that made sense thematically. I’ll put this as simply as I can: The problem isn’t that Rhaenys massacred civilians. The problem is that the show doesn’t seem to think we should dislike her for doing so. It ties into the show’s overall problem that there are no characters to root for; every single major character is at least a selfish jerk and on average a brutal monster, give or take a crazy Helaena.
Where I do agree is I do not think this show is excellent, I find it
watchable with exceptional visual production and performances and that’s
what keeps me invested but even in rhetoric, nauseating implies you are
done with the show and if you read that episode the way you do… I’d
suggest maybe it wasn’t for you anywayI think it’s kind of watchable, which is why I made it as far as I did before deciding the negatives outweighed the positives. The “nauseating” line was really obviously a play on the words of Alien Jesus’s comment and I don’t understand why that’s hard to understand (especially since I have already pointed out once that it was meant as mere snark—you could charitably take me on my word there). I think the performances are good (minus Rhys Ifans, who I think is a fine actor in general, but I don’t know what he’s going for as Otto because he’s coming off as exceptionally dull).
“exceptional visual production” Set design, costumes, visual effects are all (I think) doing a great job… but they’re all terribly hamstrung by the decision to desaturate everything and make it all look dull gray and brown. I find the show ugly to look at. We watched episodes of HotD and Rings of Power back-to-back one time, and it was like night and day in terms of color: bright golds, oranges, greens, blues all over the place in RoP. (Hell, I went back to look at Game of Thrones episodes; it was substantially more colorful than HotD, right from the start.)
“Maybe it wasn’t for you”? I’m exactly the target audience for this kind of thing, or what it at least someone thought it was trying to be: genre fantasy with complex grown-up themes and ambiguity. I thoroughly enjoyed Game of Thrones (until season 6, like a lot of people, when I progressively started liking it less, but was too invested to give up). This argument in general is circular; if you don’t like it, then it wasn’t meant for you. Okay, so any criticisms of a piece of art are invalid because it’s not “for you” if you have criticisms?
I don’t think we’re supposed to be uncritically rooting for Rhaenys in that scene – or any of the characters of this show. It’s a cool-looking character moment even if you think she was in the wrong.
Good catch! That should have read, “there weren’t many” instead of, “there weren’t any.” Thank you for the heads up.
Look, do you want me to say how that the smallfolk are not happy with all the things these people do with their dragons? Because that’s how you get spoilers.
Do you mind not putting spoilers in the headline?
Do you mind not putting spoilers in the headline?
No one suddenly clutching their pearls about the people killed when the dragon broke through, would be saying a word if that dragon was being ridden by a white dude.
No one suddenly clutching their pearls about the people killed when the dragon broke through, would be saying a word if that dragon was being ridden by a white dude.
I disagree with that. There were other ways to exit the pit but they wanted to make their exit a spectacle. Killing a few thousand people really doesn’t matter as long as you can make a spectacle of yourself. It sets the dragonrider up as kind of an assholish person that doesn’t care about anyone and I think majority of the people had sympathy for Rhaenys until then. The show writers wanted a badass moment but seems like they didn’t really think through the ramifications.
Just the other week people were complaining about the random servant who Daemon killed to do his fake Laenor scheme
You didn’t ask her about the creepy feet fetish masturbation scene!
This is maybe a huge spoilers: Rhaenys action and the war that will occurs will cause the common people hate dragon.There’s a reason the dragon pits in ruins during GOT.
How about getting HBO to make the subtitles larger, like Netflix. I gave up on the show within 2 episodes because the subs were too small to read. I tried using large closed captioning, but I wasn’t about to sit through an entire show with closed captioning for every work spoken.
I am honestly so confused by the interpretation that we have been “let down” by Rhaenys’ actions in killing hundreds of residents of Kings Landing.The show has made no attempt to paint Rhaenys as a saint, there have been no declarations of her love for the small folk and even in THIS episode she scoffs at Alicent’s plea of ending the war before it starts to avoid innocent bloodshed. The writers are guilty of many things, but this don’t be one of them.