Given its title, it should come as no surprise that HBO’s new Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, is going to have a lot of goddamn dragons. Seventeen, in fact. All owned, flown, and maintained by House Targaryen, and each with their own personality quirks, character design, and George R.R. Martin-created name.
In the 11 years since Thrones first hit HBO, CGI technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, and House of the Dragon was able to give life to its beasts like never before. WIRED talked to Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, the series’ showrunners, about what’s new this time around.
This conversation contains spoilers and has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: Miguel, you first started working on Game of Thrones in 2015, directing episodes like “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards.” How has technology changed, in terms of TV production, and what does that mean you can do on House of the Dragon that you couldn’t necessarily do before?
Miguel Sapochnik: It used to be that you had to pick everybody off the background. If you wanted to put them into a different environment, you’d have to put them in front of green screen or blue screen or some sort of chroma key color so that it was easier to take them off the background and put them back on after you’ve replaced the background with something else, which is something you often end up doing.
Now, as technology has advanced, the need for that has lessened because of the speed at which programs can automatically identify what the foreground is versus what the background is. That means we don’t have to bring in these huge pieces of green screen and set them up to be able to put the people in front of them and do multiple passes. The increased efficiency gives you more time to actually be creative and shoot.
There’s the classic, “We’ll fix it in post,” which is frustrating on the one hand because people get lazy and they don’t do it on set, which usually is better. But it’s also incredibly useful as a tool if you know when to use it, because it allows you to focus on things that absolutely must be done on set, like the performances.
There are a lot of dragons in the new show, and a poorly realized dragon can really take you out of a scene. How did you realize these very non-real creatures?
Sapochnik: Everything’s a work in progress because you keep working on it until they take it away from you. A lot of what makes it feel real is usually the last 5 percent of the work that you do, which is often the most time-consuming and most expensive.
With our dragons, you can get the animation, the things that they touch, and how they interact with the real objects, like the ground they stepped on and left footprints. Those kinds of things, you can get that right. You can hide problems with smoke and atmosphere and stuff like that. But what you want are details that you wouldn’t otherwise notice and would in any normal situation be considered a luxury that you don’t have time for.
For example, there are flies on the dragons. That’s what we’ve been focusing on because these are smelly, big creatures, and smelly, big creatures usually attract flies. By having flies, and seeing those little darting shapes that are going around the dragons, it gives you a sense that there’s something more real about this dragon than meets the eye. That’s really what we’ve been trying to do, like, how can we get details that will become more than the sum of their parts? How can we effectively find a way to make these things feel real?
Ryan, do these new dragons have more distinct characteristics? Are they more pet-like? How are they different?
Ryan Condal: I think we tried to imbue them all with a distinct sense of personality and place within the story, because dragons are a fact of life in this world. They’ve existed for centuries. They’re different ages and sizes and shapes and silhouettes and colors. It was really important to George [R.R. Martin] that we did that, because he envisioned his dragons being very colorful, like bearded dragons and the very colorful lizards that you can see in our biosphere.
The biggest dragon is so big that her horns have started to fall off. She looks old, and she has evidence of former saddles on her because people had to re-saddle her as she grew and grew. Some of the old saddles, they just put a new saddle on top of the old.
Other dragons are young and juvenile and still learning the world. They’re more curious, like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Daemon’s dragon is very cantankerous and twitchy and never stops moving, kind of like his rider.
So I think certainly with the dragons that we spend the most time with, we tried to imbue personalities into them that either match the riders or are set in opposition to their riders. In the end, hopefully, our dragons will be as recognizable as human characters in the show. You’ll be able to identify them from a distance based on their color or their silhouette. When you have a bunch of them in the same scene together, you want to very quickly be able to say, “That’s Caraxes, that’s Vhagar, and that’s Seasmoke.”
In the sneak peek for the season, there’s something that looks like a fighting pit for the dragons, along with some sense that we’ll be seeing them do things other than just being modes of transport and pyre-lighters. Are we going to see dragons with jobs? Not like this dragon works at the drugstore, but in terms of how they’re being used?
Condal: You bring up an interesting point, because in our world dragons are a fact of life. There’s an infrastructure built around them. They’re still rare. There’s only a handful of them. But if you live in King’s Landing near the dragon pit, you’ll see dragons all the time flying into and leaving the dragon pit.
Because you’ve got dragons, you need dragon keepers to take care of them, to feed them and train them. You need saddlery too, so that everybody can ride them, and you need a dragon pit to house them. So this huge structure was built because there’s a lot of consideration given to the dragons, who are really seen both by the Targaryens and by the people of King’s Landing as gods that exist on Earth. There’s a cult of worship around them where they’re revered and feared, but they also exist.
They’re a going concern in the world, whereas in the original show, by the time Daenerys hatched her dragons, they hadn’t existed in hundreds of years, so everybody that saw them had to revere them as this species that suddenly came back to life. That’s not the case here. In our show, dragons are more of an interesting but mundane part of day-to-day life in King’s Landing
Someone’s got to clean out that dragon pit.
Condal: [Our props team] actually did make dragon poop.
Sapochnik: And there was a lot of it.
