Nothing burns like betrayal. The long-awaited tangle of dragons and the strategic cunning of nobility ring through in House of the Dragon Season 2, Episode 4. Titled “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” director and executive producer Alan Taylor helms The Battle at Rook’s Rest, which finds Rhaenys (Eve Best) on the warpath to defend her family’s kingdom and claim to the Iron Throne. After Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) makes an ill-fated decision to ride Sunfyre into the throngs of war, alongside his brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), Rhaenys and her dragon Meleys end up sparing with the young, misguided ruler. That is until Aemond swoops in to save the day with Vhagar killing Rhaenys while also sneak attacking Sunfyre, leading Aegon to plummet from the sky to great injury. It was a brutal episode that set social media and fans on fire as the outcomes of the war forever changed the scheming underbelly of King’s Landing.
Here, Taylor speaks to Deadline about waging war between brothers, the growing death toll, and the challenge of creating the perfect dragon battle.
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DEADLINE: How long did this massive battle episode take to film?
ALAN TAYLOR: I sort of have a mental block about how long we spend on filming things. Each episode is different, and the schedule also reflects that. One of the interesting things about the way we film House of the Dragon is that we block-shoot the entire season. It’s not traditional in that one person shoots their episode and then the next person comes in and shoots their episode. We are all shooting our episodes all the time. That’s why it’s hard to keep track of how many days we get. Especially for the battle because you’re literally jumping in and out of sets, and other directors are coming in for the entire season. The first week all five directors worked on something.
DEADLINE: You’re no stranger to directing Game of Thrones, but I would argue that this episode of House of the Dragon is one of your biggest challenges yet. What was your initial reaction to receiving the script for the episode, and how did you delineate what you were going to do?
TAYLOR: It’s always a similar process. You get the script and have to figure out how you will do it and be aware of how it fits into the overall picture. This one was a bit discombobulated because we started off with 10 episodes. I was going to do a different battle sequence at the end, and then things got reshuffled. We were well into prep before I was assigned this one. Knowing that the battle was coming in Episode 4, in the middle of the season, and knowing that we had to build storylines that would continue to grow over the course of the season shaped how we approached that.
The biggest thing was that I was tracking the fact that this would be the first time dragons were deployed as a weapon, the first time they went to dragon war. For the course of the first season and the beginning of the second season the smartest people in Westeros are saying this is a bad idea. So, we had to deliver on what it means to deploy them. The metaphor I was carrying around was that this is the first time someone decides to drop a tactical nuclear weapon, and how will that change everybody involved? And everything grew out of that. That defined how we shaped the battle itself. It defined how we followed the battle through our characters, like Ser Criston Cole, who is responsible for this but is also the most devastated by it. He’s a warrior who can never see war the same again after this. So, what you do is figure out what the big ideas are and then try and shape everything around it.
DEADLINE: Speaking of a tactical weapon, that shot of Vhagar landing on the field is wild. She’s essentially stomping around while all this black smoke is behind her. It feels like D-Day.
TAYLOR: Right, like the opening to Saving Private Ryan. That sequence that [Steven] Spielberg did is inspirational for every filmmaker about how to capture the fog of war. I’m glad you picked up on that. When Vhagar slams into the ground, that’s the watershed moment, the nuclear blast for our episode. It knocks out our main character, our point of view character, Cole. From that point on, it’s a different world.
DEADLINE: What were the other inspirations for this episode?
TAYLOR: The thing I love about George R.R Martin’s writing is that it’s grounded in reality and grounded in history. So, it’s fantasy and the dragons, but it’s absolutely based on the reality of things. So, when my partner and I were designing the battle sequence and the dragon fighting, we spent a lot of time looking at a few things. One is the beautiful relationship between the characters and their dragons was something we wanted to portray. We also looked at the way horse owners interact with their horses. When Aegon is greeting Sunfyre, that was lifted from how I’ve seen horse owners interact with their horses.
More importantly, we looked at a lot of documentary footage of birds of prey and how they engage and fight. And so, we invented this moment that also makes Rhaenys seem very smart where … Because we noticed that birds of prey will do this thing where if they feel they’re being encroached upon, they turn upside down and they engage talon to talon. And so they’re fighting in the air, but their talons are engaged, and they become this death spiral down to the ground. So, it’s a game of chicken to see who’s going to release. And so, we stole that and used that for the big climactic moment in Rook’s Rest.
DEADLINE: Now, let’s talk about a real death spiral. I think we’re still spiraling from the loss of Rhaenys.
TAYLOR: It’s funny you bring that up because my career has weirdly turned into this thing where I frequently murder people’s favorite characters. In Game of Thrones, I killed Ned Stark. In The Sopranos, I killed Christopher Moltisanti. It goes on and on. Then, finally, I got to kill Rhaenys and the dragon in this one. It’s always the same audience response, which I love, that thing where people get angry at their TV or HBO or with me. Then, at the same time, they love it and it’s incredibly exciting for them. So, it’s a wonderful metaphor for how we deal with our own mortality, I think. Somebody we really care about is dying, but they’re fictional, so it sort of lets you off the hook—a trial run for coping with death in a fun way.
DEADLINE: I’ll never let you off the hook for that one. But now, let’s talk about your aesthetics in the scene leading up to her death. She’s flying up above the fighting on the ground, and it’s peaceful and nearly silent except for the sound of the wind and the dragon wings flapping. Then there’s the occasional swell of this beautiful music. Talk about this.
TAYLOR: I’m so glad you’re highlighting the quiet and the piece. So, we’re up above the fray and separate from it. There’s peace and beauty, and we all wish we could be flying on dragons – probably. There’s quiet there, and later in her death moment when she’s falling, releasing and letting go. That’s a beautiful thing that I’m glad we got to capture. But the challenge it raised was, how do you really integrate what’s going on with the dragons and what’s going on on the ground? That was one of the biggest challenges. It can’t just be an air show with visual effects. It has to feel like something we’re really experiencing. All kinds of thought went into how we ground the dragons and connect them to the ground. That’s part of the reason why they keep slamming into the ground.
Every camera angle on the dragon is a real point-of-view angle. There’s no magic cameras flying around. It’s either we’re watching them literally from a character’s point of view, or we’re watching them from where a camera might be mounted. For example, the cameras are mounted on the front of a dragon like a hood ornament. Again, going back to the original George R.R. Martin thing of trying to take this fantastical stuff and make it grounded in our real experience as much as possible.
DEADLINE: How many cameras are we talking about for a scale this massive? And how many extras?
TAYLOR: We always have two cameras on set, frequently three. And in a battle, you have maybe four. Then there’s also a second unit led by the brilliant Rowley [Irlam], the stunt coordinator on the show. He has two cameras going around the corner doing what he’s doing just to cut into our footage. There’s a lot of cameras. For extras, I think we had 400 for certain days, and then there’s replication that we do, so it feels like thousands. Even when I got to the battlefield, I was amazed by what the show was able to put out there in the field. Not just the numbers of soldiers but separate liberties from different houses. Perfect armor on the men but also on the horses. So, it’s a huge real-world footprint, but you have to expand it with technology.
DEADLINE: Back to Eve Best. Can you talk about working with her in those final days of shooting as Rhaenys?
TAYLOR: It was delightful. I was not part of season one. I had just came in for season two. And you’re meeting this array of actors who were so impressive and who already know their characters, so it can be sort of intimidating to come in and presume to direct them because they’ve already been doing it for a while. She was wonderful. She was very collaborative in the direction. And I think she could tell we were providing her a pretty good finish. I think she was happy with what she knew was going on. I’d heard she was not having fun on the dragons in season one, being on the dragon buck when you’re being bounced around like that. But she was just a great trooper for our thing. I think we’d improved her armor a little bit, and she just knew it would be a great sendoff for her. She was delightful. She spent hours on this dragon buck with a computerized camera following her around. She was only on the battlefield itself once lying in the mud looking dead. But other than that, most of her stuff was on our stage. I tried to ride the dragon buck at one point, but they wouldn’t let me because they said insurance wouldn’t cover it.
DEADLINE: How are you collaborating with showrunner Ryan Condal to get the episode’s vision across?
TAYLOR: He and his team write the episodes, and then you come in to shape it—especially something as big and complicated as the Episode 4 battle. There were things I wanted to talk about in terms of making sure it had that strong structure where it built up to impede our nuclear event. Once Rhaenys dies that’s the emotional sort of conclusion of the thing. We talked about making sure there wasn’t too much story to play on after that because I think our emotional thing crashes there.
Then there was the collaboration of physical things and how to stage it. I chose Bourne Wood in England. Ridley Scott uses it in almost all of his movies; I also shot Thor: The Dark World there. It’s a wonderful location because it gave us this tree line, a field, and then the castle that wound up shaping how we did all the drama. Because I like the idea that the soldiers are also hiding in the tree line. Once you step out of the tree line, your dragon fodder and it’s a killing field. That was stuff that was not so much in the script as it got created as we found the location and worked on it. He’s a good collaborator. There’s a dialogue between the story and actually staging the thing. They speak to each other.
DEADLINE: One of the other shocking things was Aemond setting Aegon and his dragon on fire. You see that for a split second, Aegon was happy to see his brother potentially aid him in battle, then it flashes to horror so quickly when he realizes his brother is ready to kill him. Aemond makes this sly smile. Talk about working with the actors on this.
TAYLOR: Because the characters are rich and layered, there’s some complexity and ambiguity. I wanted to not be entirely clear about how much Aemond intended to destroy his brother. Part of what’s going on here is if his brother goes away, he ascends to the throne. That’s partly driving him. It’s also a tactical move; he’s blasting Meleys, Rhaenys, and his brother, who’s an idiot for being there and should not be there. So, he’s sort of that collateral damage. When I read the scripts, I didn’t know how wonderful his character was going to be until I started working with Tom Glynn-Carney, who plays Aegon. I think he’s probably my favorite actor in the show because he brings so much innocence and humor to this dastardly guy and mixes the two sides of his personality so well. It’s so understandable that he would have to go to this battle because his mom said—in the worst parenting moment of all— “Just do nothing. I expect nothing of you.” And so, it’s a beautiful moment when he decides to go off and show his heroism.
And then, of course, by turning up, he just screws everything up just by being there. So, on his side, he’s terrified, in over his head, and trying to be a hero. He sees his brother coming and, for a moment, thinks oh, thank God. And then he starts to realize what’s really happening. So, all of that stuff is playing on Tom’s face as he goes from relief, inhalation to horror. Then, the ambiguity tracks all the way through. We see him crash into the woods, but only from a distance. When we find his body at the end—in more ambiguity—we have Aemond standing over him with the famous knife, maybe intending to finish him off. We’ll never know. We don’t reveal the state of his body much, we just know he’s smoldering there. For the audience and for the residents of King’s Landing, we don’t know if he’s dead or not for a while was the intention there.
DEADLINE: Even in that moment when we see Aemond with the knife, like you said, it’s so ambiguous. He’s playing with the knife, we wonder if he is going to finish the job by killing his incapacitated brother, but then Ser Criston Cole comes in and potentially stops Aemond from killing him. Even the point that Ewan Mitchell makes with the lazy flick of the wrist is interesting.
TAYLOR: We were trying to sustain ambiguity there. When Cole finds him he … I wanted him to be brandishing his sword in a way that could be threatening or could be him putting his sword away because we didn’t quite know how to read what was just happening. Cole enters the scene not knowing what was about to happen. Did I just stop regicide or am I being paranoid about this? How much can I trust this guy? So that he puts his sword away and then finds the dagger that tracks through all of Game of Thrones and is the dagger that kills a very famous character later. He’s just fiddling with it. I like the fact that he used that to point to his brother. But it’s all just meant to be true to Aemond’s conflicted character. He does probably love his brother, but he also would benefit by his death. And he also has contempt for him for not being the leader that he knows he could be.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]