When it comes to a series like House of the Dragon, there’s a whole slate of elements you can anticipate seeing on the screen: Winged beasts, political intrigue, shocking deaths… Anyone’s top 10 would hardly feature “distinct dance moves,” though, and yet series director Clare Kilner had to dedicate quite a bit of time to that particular aspect of the Game of Thrones prequel series.
In an interview with Collider, Kilner broke down to our own Therese Lacson how the wedding party scene was filmed in Episode 5, titled “We Light the Way.” During the interview, the director revealed she was “terrified” when she read the script because she immediately realized how difficult it would be to put that scene together. There was so much is going on that the production crew took nine days to film it.
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Kilner revealed that just the table scene with King Viserys (Paddy Considine) was pretty hard to nail since they had to film from every character’s perspective and there are ten to twelve people at the table. They had to decide the layout of the seating and then had to factor in all the dancing that goes on in the scene. Kilner stresses that us viewers don’t think much about it, but they had to really delve into that artistic aspect:
“[T]he other thing that no one had really thought about is if they dance, and I’m like, ‘What is a dance from this world?’ We hadn’t really seen anything like that before, so, again, I worked with the choreographer, Francesa Jaynes. We went to Pineapple Studios and worked with some of her dancers and we thought, maybe we should think of weird birds, or something, prehistoric birds, like, what do they look like? How do they move? And so we evolved the dance from that, and I think when we first did it, it went a bit too far. It was a bit too contemporary dance, so we had to sort of bring it back a little bit. But it was really fun and exciting to evolve that, and then we had to teach it to Milly [Alcock], and – well, we had to teach it to everybody – and then we got dancers, and I had to sort of push to get the dancers because I wanted good dancers.”
Kilner also adds that once they had the dancing down, it was time to work on the cast’s shoes and costumes because they needed to withstand dance moves done across multiple takes and several hours. The director stated that, despite all the work, she “really loved the shots where they all put their hands up in the air,” and that she enjoyed filming that as well. But that was not all:
“So, then I decided that everything on the dance floor should be shot with steady cam. So, you know, that was complicated, as well, because we’re sort of doing 360-degree turns with a steady cam, and of course, the Royal Table is in view. So, all our principal performers had to be there, so they were very patient with us.”