Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  AIDAN GILLEN (Littlefinger): One of my first scenes was an obvious Littlefinger character establisher—“distrusting me was the wisest thing you’ve done since you climbed off your horse”—and I was very happy that it dropped into place so easily, that we could inhabit this fantastical world but for it all to seem rooted in truth. I’d admired Sean as an actor from way back—the 1988 film Stormy Monday, to be precise—and he was as I’d expected him to be: magnetic and solid, but still vulnerable and fairly quiet. Sean’s not the kind of guy who feels he has to talk all the time between takes, and neither am I. I wouldn’t say I got to know him terribly well, but I got to know Ned Stark terribly well.

  GETHIN ANTHONY: I was once walking along the parking lot in the rain and wearing this amazing leather outfit that I was trying not to get wet while carrying an umbrella. Sean had his driver swerve to go through a puddle to spray me. I look up, and Sean got out of the car giggling, “Yeah, yeah, I told him to do that!”

  ESMÉ BIANCO (Ros): It was fun at that stage because nobody knew what was going to happen and how big the show was going to be. No one was carrying on their backs this burden of the fandom and everybody’s expectations. It was a time of great freedom. Everybody was having so much fun and, you know, drinking a lot. It was quite the party that season.

  The first season wasn’t quite as enjoyable for the producers and directors. The team was scrambling to pull off ten hugely ambitious episodes on a relatively limited budget despite having a lack of collective experience, particularly with creating epic fantasy. Thrones was also filming its episodes out of order, which was highly unusual for a television drama and more like the production of a feature film.

  It was decided that Irish director Brian Kirk would tackle episodes three, four, and five—which would be the first ones shot—and then a trio of top HBO veterans would film the rest of the season: Tim Van Patten helmed episode two and the reshot episode one; Daniel Minahan was assigned six, seven, and eight; and Alan Taylor took on nine and ten. The production was divided into two filming units that would often shoot scenes at the same time in different locations. One was called Dragon, and the other was Wolf.

  Hanging over everything was the painful knowledge that the production had already failed once and was being trusted not to screw up again. The creatives were determined to avoid their past mistakes, yet there was only so much they could plan in advance when each day presented unexpected problems—everything from torrential storms to discovering, for instance, that you cannot have ravens and food on set at the same time or else the birds will dart off camera and eat it.

  BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): It was the Wild West. We didn’t know what we were doing, and because it was being all shot out of order, it was hard to tell while shooting it if it was working. It was new territory for HBO, given the genre. It was new territory for David and Dan, as they’d never done a TV show. I’d only done five months in a writers’ room on a failed NBC series. Even the directors and the designers and everybody who had amazing credits behind them had never done a show like this. Northern Ireland had some previous film production, but this was far and away the biggest operation they ever had. We were all learning how to make a TV show. HBO gave us the freedom to fall flat on our face and try things. I also think they were also concentrating, candidly, on making Boardwalk Empire and Luck while we were far away in Belfast, so there was some degree of being left alone.

  TIM VAN PATTEN: I was, foolishly, very initially reluctant to do this. I was coming off Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. I don’t much get into fantasy, and I was so exhausted from [Boardwalk] and on my hiatus. HBO sent me the book, and it was so dense, I couldn’t digest it. They were saying, “What do we do with this thing?” I was like, “I don’t get it, I don’t know why you’re doing this.” I kept saying no. It took them a month to wear me down. I [joined the production] out of complete loyalty to the company because they had been so great to me. The one thing going for it was that the script was so tight that I “saw” it, you know? But I went into it having no idea what the result would be. And it was grueling because they’d already done a pilot and they needed this to work, so the pressure was on.

  DANIEL MINAHAN (director): I got to Belfast, and I was cross-boarding three episodes at once. I went into the throne room, and I was like, “Holy shit.” The throne room was just this huge empty room! How do you block something in here? I’m thinking, “These people are trying to kill me. If we leave for the airport now, by the time they discover we are gone it will be too late.” So we just used people as foreground and background. They became like a wall. We used every character as set dressing.

  BRYAN COGMAN: We were even figuring out what the look of the show was. Like: How is the show lit? There was a lot of emphasis in those days on making all environments lit very specifically to make each distinct, so the viewer would know when they were in King’s Landing as opposed to Winterfell. We were really trying to orient the viewer and learn from all the mistakes of the pilot.

  One inspiration was the films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, whose titles, including Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and the aptly titled Throne of Blood, defined epic cinema and inspired a generation of modern filmmakers. Benioff and Weiss devoured Kurosawa’s movies before starting production and encouraged their directors and director of photography, Alik Sakharov, to attempt to capture Kurosawa’s classical style. It’s an influence that’s particularly noticeable when the three Night’s Watch rangers ride out beyond the Wall in the first episode. Even during the reshoot, however, there wasn’t any sense that the show’s opening scene would look particularly impressive once it was finished.

  TIM VAN PATTEN: There was a studio executive visiting when we were shooting the first scene out in a quarry outside Belfast. You could see a preexisting quarry wall, and nothing you were looking at told you there was going to be [a seven-hundred-foot ice wall in the shot]. All day long, it was just three guys on horses. I remember feeling these seeds of doubt around the monitors. Like, “What are we doing here? What is this, exactly?” I could understand their nervousness because even I was thinking, “Oh God, I hope this works.” But you got to have confidence. Even if you’re not confident, act like it, because people feed off your confidence.

  Naturally, the fledgling production had some growing pains.

  DANIEL MINAHAN: It was so cold in Paint Hall, but it’s supposed to be like [King’s Landing’s Mediterranean climate]. We were shooting this sequence with Cersei. The handmaidens behind her were only wearing these gauzy togas. And one of them just fell flat, fainted, because she was so overcome with cold. At first I thought it was a joke, then we ran up there.

  KRISTIAN NAIRN: I got a back injury that season I’m probably going to have for the rest of my life. My first day was the scene where Tyrion gives Bran the plans for the saddle. They had me carry Isaac up and down that hall seventy-four times. Probably halfway through that my back had given up. I was afraid to say no. It was my first day on set, so I couldn’t not do this. It’s my own fault for not being honest. You wanted to appear bulletproof.

  ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT: Kristian Nairn still sends me bills from his chiropractor.

  PETER DINKLAGE: We shot one scene on horseback on the side of a cliff during a serious windstorm. The horses were very nervous. One guy was thrown from the horse just literally a couple feet away from the edge of a cliff.

  Michelle Fairley recalled that incident as well. “Peter, whose legs just reach the height of the saddle . . . hadn’t a lot of horse-riding experience,” the Catelyn Stark actress told the Popcorn Taxi film festival in Australia. “The horse goes ballistic. This [other] actor in a complete suit of armor was being thrown all over the place; everybody is jaw on the ground. The horse does one final buck and this actor goes flying through the air. Literally, he’s in slow motion and you just see this suit of armor go flat on his back. We’re like, ‘Oh my God, he’s dead! He’s dead!’ And he doesn’t move. The horses
are in shock as well. You could hear a pin drop. Even the wind stopped. And the next thing was he moved two fingers and everybody went over. And Peter’s like, ‘Are these horses trained? Are these horses trained?’”

  PETER DINKLAGE: So that was a bit difficult in terms of, like, life and death.

  DANIEL MINAHAN: There was a scene where they opened up the stomach of a stag [when the Starks find the direwolves in the reshot version of the first episode]. They did it for real, and it releases this horrible smell. All the actors—the boys—threw up.

  TIM VAN PATTEN: That is a fact. Instead of using a taxidermy stag and then cutting to show some organ meats, we had an actual dead stag. It was bloated and filled with gas. We did everything in the scene up to opening up the stag’s belly. Then we got to that moment when we drive the knife into it. Nobody was expecting this: The entrails fell out, and the odor sent the crew scrambling and vomiting.

  BRYAN COGMAN: I’ve still never smelled anything so terrible, and I wasn’t even anywhere near it. I was across the meadow in a producer’s tent. Just thinking about it, I can smell it right now.

  TIM VAN PATTEN: I was sick and gagging and crying laughing.

  DAVID BENIOFF: We didn’t even have security in season one. We did a scene where Ned is looking for the armory where he’s going to find Gendry. He’s walking by racks of swords and daggers. These German tourists were coming by and just picking stuff up. I ran over, “No, no, put that down!” They were just kind of staring at me like, “Who is this dumb American yelling and telling me I can’t pick up this sword?”

  Reshooting the pilot also meant actors had to redo scenes they thought were finished, which in some cases was awkward. The scene of Jaime having sex with Cersei had to be, well, repositioned.

  TIM VAN PATTEN: It was a lot to ask of the actors, to come back and redo something. For Lena, having to go back to that scene had to be incredibly difficult. In fact, I know it was, because we had conversations about it. And I totally get it. The scene wasn’t working in the [original] pilot. I can’t be specific about it. It was a matter of taste. The scripted stuff was the same, but it needed to be shot from another perspective, and she needed to be protected in that scene.

  Then there was the matter of pulling off the season on the show’s budget. HBO was generous, but the production couldn’t come close to covering the scale of Martin’s novel.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): We were told we would have a good budget but not as high as Rome. “We don’t want you to cost as much as Rome.” So there were a number of points we had to cut back. The jousting tournament was one of them. A tournament in the Middle Ages sponsored by the king in the capital [was] a huge thing. And Bryan wrote a faithful version. There were dozens of knights, you saw eight different jousts, you got this sense of pageantry and competitors rising and falling and the commoners betting. We should have at least been as big as A Knight’s Tale, but we couldn’t even achieve that. The only jousts we saw were essential to the plot. Still, I thought it worked pretty well.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): The bulk of the joust sequence worked very, very well. We maybe could have put some more people in there. You’re making thousands and thousands of decisions over the course of a show, and some of them are not going to be the best. It’s really more about batting average.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Where we really fell down in terms of budget was my least favorite scene in the entire show, in all eight seasons: King Robert goes hunting. Four guys walking on foot through the woods carrying spears and Robert is giving Renly shit. In the books, Robert goes off hunting, we get word he was gored by a boar, and they bring him back and he dies. So I never did [a hunting scene]. But I knew what a royal hunting party was like. There would have been a hundred guys. There would have been pavilions. There would have been huntsmen. There would have been dogs. There would have been horns blowing—that’s how a king goes hunting! He wouldn’t have just been walking through the woods with three of his friends holding spears hoping to meet a boar. But at that point, we couldn’t afford horses or dogs or pavilions.

  Or battles. In Martin’s first A Song of Ice and Fire book, there were two clashes between the Stark and Lannister armies. The first, the Battle on the Green Fork, described Tyrion and his Lannister army riding out to fight a host that they had been tricked into believing was Robb Stark’s entire army, when it was actually a relatively small force of just two thousand men that Robb sent as a diversion.

  DAVID BENIOFF: We did have plans to show Tyrion marching into battle behind the Mountain. We had a whole way we wanted to shoot it following Tyrion’s eye level as the Mountain is just [cutting soldiers down]. Ultimately we had to make some really tough decisions. We ran out of time to shoot it properly, and we’d much rather have a great scene with our characters than a crappy version of a battle.

  DAN WEISS: We didn’t want battles to look like a PlayStation 2 game. We wanted it to look at the same level [of quality] as the rest of the show.

  ALAN TAYLOR (director): We settled on the idea of knocking Tyrion out. I loved what that offered. My favorite dramatic structures are when you build up something and then pull the carpet out from underneath it. So the fact that Tyrion has this rousing speech and we’re building to what we think will be a huge battle and then we missed it was fun. I also really loved the imagery I got to play with to bring him back to consciousness. He’s floating over the terrain of the battlefield, a shot I unapologetically stole from Gladiator.

  The book’s other major clash was the Battle of the Whispering Wood, where the majority of Robb’s forces take Jaime Lannister’s army by surprise, thanks to the distraction provided by the Battle on the Green Fork and the Starks’ forging an alliance with House Frey. The producers always knew there wouldn’t be enough resources to stage the Whispering Wood clash (which isn’t shown in the books anyway) and instead had a tense scene where Catelyn anxiously waited to see which army would emerge victorious from the forest. Then Robb triumphantly rode out with Jaime as his hostage.

  ALAN TAYLOR: I remember reading: “40,000 horsemen ride out of the woods.” We ran forty horses out of the woods. But it worked fine. As long as you think there’s a lot more horses in those woods, you buy it. It’s all puny and adorable from the standpoint of what the show became later, but at the time you had to be inventive and let the audience fill in the gaps.

  The Thrones team was also introduced to what would become their greatest nemesis throughout the series: Northern Ireland’s temperamental weather systems. The production would eventually develop coping strategies to stay on schedule during even severe downpours, but in the first season their plans were knocked off course by freezing rain and wind.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Weather killed us those first few months. We were slashing script pages left and right to make the day. We had this five-page scene we had to cut to one because we didn’t have time and the rain was not letting up. It was this big sequence at a feast in the pavilion tournament where Robert gets drunk and hits Cersei by accident and there’s all this business. Then the Hound offers to escort Sansa back to the Red Keep. But because we had to cut the entire sequence that established the Hound escorting Sansa, we ended up not being able to use a scene we shot earlier from the book where the Hound gives Sansa his origin story. So at the last second we gave the Hound’s origin story to Littlefinger to tell it to Sansa. We gave the pages to [Littlefinger actor] Aidan Gillen that same day. That’s how it was in season one, and we never really did pages-on-the-day after that.

  For Gillen, the switch meant he suddenly had to introduce Littlefinger’s relationship with Sansa—a complex allegiance that extends through most of the series—on very short notice. While the monologue was entirely about the Hound, Gillen’s performance makes the viewer think about Petyr Baelish, whose conspiratorial demeanor hinted that his interest in the young Stark daughter was less than innocent.

  AIDAN GILLEN (Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish): I’ve always liked ge
tting handed things last minute. It smashes any other anxieties around other scenes that day into relief as you’ve now got to learn and perfect this new thing as best you can in twenty minutes or whatever. It’s also what excited me about screen acting from before I even did it. I knew François Truffaut and Woody Allen and Federico Fellini had a normal practice of handing dialogue out to actors on the day. It keeps you on your toes.

  That scene worked very well for Baelish in that oblique way, talking about one thing while thinking something else; charming and disarming and looking for clues. [His monologue] was really for the benefit of both Stark sisters, not just Sansa. A good time later, I was talking to [the Hound actor Rory McCann], who told me he’d been down to deliver those lines, but they went my way instead. I was mortified because if I’d known I’d have said something about it to him beforehand. As it worked out, it seemed right. It established an aspect of my character quite strongly and kindled that tricky Sansa-Baelish dynamic.

  While filming Daenerys’s wedding in Malta—which replaced Morocco as the season’s desert location—the production also ran into some bad luck with the weather.

  CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN (producer): The first day of shooting, a huge storm came in and took out our set. Within a three-hour period, the whole set was submerged and blown away. So we lost days of shooting, and you just try to recover the best that you can.