‘Home of the Dragon’ Director Breaks Down That Emotionally (and Bodily) Violent Finale

The Sport of Thrones franchise isn’t any stranger to breaking your favourite toys. For the Home of the Dragon season finale, director Greg Yaitanes took that technique a bit actually.

After a season full of threats about dragons warring with each other, Yaitanes is the filmmaker who ended up turning the menace right into a tv actuality. His season-ending episode, “The Black Queen,” culminates in a brutal battle excessive above Westeros, because the princes Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) and Luke Velaryon (Elliot Grihault) confront one another on dragon again. The battle spirals uncontrolled, ending with Aemond’s dragon Vhagar killing Luke and obliterating any likelihood at a nonviolent decision to Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent Hightower’s (Olivia Cooke) feud.

What does any of this should do with toys, other than Aemond and Luke successfully enjoying with fire-breathing nightmare variations of Buzz and Woody? Talking with Vainness Honest, Yaitanes explains how the vivid dragon sequence got here to life, starting with him taking pictures a whole model of the sequence utilizing two dragon motion figures and an iPhone. “Conventional storyboarding was not going to provide me the motion,” the director tells VF. “So I received these two dragon toys, and I shot the sequence on my iPhone.”

In line with Yaitanes, creating the climactic showdown was an prolonged course of that lasted his total time taking pictures on Home of the Dragon, a interval spanning his three directorial efforts within the freshman season: “The Rogue Prince” and “Second of His Title” earlier within the season, all through the season finale, “The Black Queen.” Working alongside a number of collaborators together with cinematographer Pepe Ávila del Pino and visualization studio The Third Ground, Yaitanes went all the best way from the low-fi motion determine footage to filming on The Quantity, the identical game-changing stage know-how present in exhibits like The Mandalorian. Protecting the digital set’s LED screens with bathe curtains to stop harm from sensible wind and rain results, Yaitanes and firm set about capturing the truth of the scenario: Aemond and Luke, settling an outdated debt years within the making.

“It comes full circle from enjoying with my toys to being most excited by ensuring the emotional part—the fear, the remorse, the shock, the grief, *every little thing—*is going on in that scene,” Yaitanes says. “It has form of a three-act construction, particularly the taunting and horror film facet within the shot that I’m essentially the most happy with, that I watched and fussed about essentially the most: Vhagar, and the way massive she was, flying over within the clouds because the lightning illuminates her silhouette.”

Though Luke’s loss of life at Vhagar’s maw closes out the episode, he’s removed from the finale’s solely casualty. Nicely earlier than shedding her second-born son, Rhaenyra spends “The Black Queen” preventing by loss after loss after loss, between the loss of life of her father, Viserys (Paddy Considine), the theft of her throne, and the supply of her stillborn daughter.

“It’s overload, and it’s an excessive amount of grief to course of,” Yaitanes says. “Visenya being stillborn, as a dad or mum, it’s a trauma past something.” In George R.R. Martin’s Fireplace and Blood, the creator describes Visenya as “twisted and malformed.” The present tried to replicate the outline as tastefully as potential, based on Yaitanes, by specializing in Rhaenyra processing the “grief and loss and care with which she’s wrapping Visenya and doing the work that the Silent Sisters would usually do, and doing it herself.”

Rhaenyra’s uncle and husband and former inheritor to the Iron Throne, Daemon (Matt Smith), is absent from Rhaenyra’s labor. He has simply realized of his brother’s loss of life and has to course of trauma all on his personal. “There’s rather a lot to unpack there,” Yaitanes says. “When he will get the information [about Viserys’s death], he’s like a misplaced little boy.” Daemon covers his ache by redirecting his ire towards the Hightowers, who must pay for his or her treason with hearth and blood. For her half, Rhaenyra needs to channel her late father, exhausting all of her diplomatic choices earlier than resorting to violence. Rhaenyra and Daemon’s disagreement over techniques places them at odds with each other; quickly, their philosophical variations develop into bodily, and Daemon chokes Rhaenyra after studying concerning the Track of Ice and Fireplace prophecy for the very first time.