Spoilers for episode ten of House of the Dragon, “The Black Queen,†below.
Directing the season finale of one of the biggest shows in HBO history might seem like a high-pressure assignment, but Greg Yaitanes has enough experience to play it cool. Between his work on the medical drama House and his SYFY adaptation of Children of Dune, as well as episodes two and three of House of the Dragon, he’s dealt with huge hits and passionate fan bases before. Crafting the season-one denouement for the ascent of Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen required a long-awaited coronation, fan-favorite heel turn, and dazzling dragon chase, but for Yaitanes, the real stress was self-applied: “I wanted to create episodes that would not let me down when I’m at home, giving my Sunday night to the show.â€
Much of the finale’s storytelling is conveyed through largely silent close-ups of people’s faces, particularly Rhaenyra’s. What was the thought process behind that?
I think about the amount of craft and hard work that went into getting that set built and those costumes made and those wigs put on everybody’s heads, just to get to a space where I can have two people talking to each other at a table or by a fireplace. Those moments are a testament to everyone’s work.
I tell the actors to take their time and live in those moments of silence, to not feel they have to rush through those scenes. I call it “the mud†— those complex, human, partner-on-partner scenes. I cut my teeth in network television, and I think silence scares people; I appreciate a show where the silences are deliberate choices to make it more cinematic and emotional.
One of my favorite moments is when Rhaenyra comes in and she’s just been crowned queen. Emma and I talked about this: “Sit and wait until you feel you have something to ask or say. Think about your dad: What would he do? Look at all those faces looking back at you. Where do you start? What are your first words as queen? Just be there until the line wants to come out.â€
In another major Rhaenyra scene, her husband, Daemon, chokes her when she tries to discuss the prophecy from Viserys. It shows that he’s not just some charming badass — there are real elements of darkness to him.
I’m careful not to deconstruct Daemon too much. When you have someone who has narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies, they can be charming and seduce you and entice you — that’s exactly the feeling you should have. And when they turn and they’re dark and scary and reveal that side of their personality, the fans are having a visceral experience not dissimilar to what Rhaenyra is having. Matt’s performance has shame, embarrassment, pain … a lot to unpack. This is a character who has darkness in him, and he’s shown it impulsively.
In that episode, you see the beginnings of the complexity — the wait, this isn’t the Daemon I know — when you see them across the table from each other when she’s first crowned. You see not just a power struggle, but that they’re not in alignment and are going down separate paths.
You were also in charge of the season’s most spectacular sequence: Aemond’s aerial pursuit of Lucerys on dragon-back. The setting and the contrast of passing through storm clouds to the sunlight above, was, ironically, beautiful.
I always think about when I’ve been on planes in a storm and the pilot goes above the clouds to get out of it. That was the idea: Something horrible happening in the midst of somewhere beautiful.
Then there’s that shot from below: Luke and Arrax flying around, and Vhagar’s huge shadow suddenly looms above them.
That was my favorite shot. I worked it a lot. I had two dragon toys that I used to choreograph that sequence. The episode’s cinematographer, Pepe Avila del Pino, and I would get together in the mornings over an English sausage roll and shoot on my iPhone — me playing with my toys in pajamas, essentially. I was obsessed with getting the timing right, that lightning would silhouette Vhagar and you’d back out and see that, man, it just keeps going. It was an homage to the Star Destroyer in Star Wars.
It didn’t seem as if Aemond was trying to kill Luke during that sequence. What was he trying to do?
You have to go all the way back to the beginning of the story. Here is a kid who did not have a dragon, who was embarrassed by that — humiliated, bullied, and treated cruelly because kids can be cruel. Aemond could have become a great leader, but what happened in his past, his eye being taken away, traumatized him and left him feeling powerless.
He didn’t know Luke was going to come to Storm’s End. In his zeal to seize this found opportunity, he went out and played a very dangerous game. If this was Rebel Without a Cause, you’d be watching them play chicken with their cars; here, you’re putting weapons of mass destruction in the hands of children. So whatever he thought he was doing — which was to torment Luke, to scare him, to make him as powerless as Aemond felt in his life — the outcome, while tragic, cannot be surprising.
In terms of what he’s feeling in those final moments, there could be a lot of interpretations. Did he intend it? Was it premeditated? Probably not. But Otto Hightower says, “We play an ugly game.†Viserys, at the very beginning of the season, says, “The idea that we control the dragons is an illusion. They’re a power man never should have trifled with.†That was said to tie directly to this moment.
I was curious about the decision to not have Rhaenys bow to Rhaenyra during the coronation, even though she winds up taking her side.
Given the opportunity, I really ask people to watch episode two again, to see all the groundwork for that relationship. You see that Rhaenys is watching Rhaenyra and having these kind of reality checks with her. That is unchanged. So the same way you didn’t see Daemon stand up when Alicent entered the room during the wedding feast, Rhaenys doesn’t take the knee when Rhaenyra is crowned queen.
Rhaenys is still sussing it out: Now you’re queen, but I’m still going to watch how you’re operating. She doesn’t share what’s going on until her partner comes back into the picture. Corlys wakes up reborn and is going to go to the wholly opposite end, and Rhaenys brings him back, articulating exactly what she’s seen and how she’s really gotten behind Rhaenyra. I love seeing that camaraderie earned.
Can you talk about the scene in which Daemon sings to the huge dragon Vermithor in the caves of Dragonstone?
Matt and I approached it like a snake charmer. Daemon has already claimed a dragon, so what is his agenda? You have to imagine him thinking, It’s just a flirt. He’s already got a dragon, but he’s like, I’m going to check out this other dragon. Something’s up, and you really should be asking questions, because there’ll be answers for them, I’d imagine, down the road. At the watch party I attended, because Daemon’s moral compass is quite enigmatic, people wondered if the song and Luke’s death were somehow related, if he did something to summon it.
My first day of shooting was that scene through the tunnels. Every time you’ve seen a tunnel, whether it was Crabby’s cave or where the kids fought in episode six or where Daemon’s getting the dragon eggs in episode eight, we redressed it. The finale is a combination of green screen with a reactive firelight. And I thought the work on Vermithor was incredible; that scene came out exactly as storyboarded.
Another impressive effect, if less ambitious than the dragons, was the way they illuminated the Painted Table, that big map of Westeros the Blacks use to plan their strategy.
I’m so excited to talk about the Painted Table! When I watched the original series, I was frustrated that I could never get a good look at it. You rarely see the surface because it’s dark grooves on a dark table; you know it’s in the shape of Westeros, but you never really get an overhead shot of it. So I completely fanboy-directed the Table. I wanted to understand where things are; I wanted to take everybody through the original series and the places it had gone, then take us to our story now — to see Luke standing in the crevice between Driftmark, where his birthright lay, and Dragonstone, where he’s standing.
Our set decorator, Claire Nia Richards, brought the idea that it was obsidian, that it could light up, and that there was a furnace of sorts that these flames would go into. I wanted to ceremonialize it so that it was like a ritual and you’d see these markers of the different houses being taken out and put down, and then see it ignite and watch the beauty and poetry of that. Pepe and I had the idea to intercut a sequence of Rhaenyra slow-motion walking down as queen, blending the two together so the ignition of the Table meets up with her first moments as queen.
Was anything cut from the episode that you wish you could have kept?
There’s a great scene between Baela and Rhaenys: Rhaenys is talking about how war is coming and wanting to protect her granddaughter, then her granddaughter stands up and says, “I’m a dragonrider like my father and my mother, and I’m here to fight this war, and I’m not going to run away from it.†I thought the performances were terrific, and I would’ve loved to have seen that scene in there.
Anything else that wasn’t in didn’t necessarily need to be there. As things take on a life of their own and the show tells you what it wants to be, it becomes obvious what story wants to be there. You talked about moments of silence between the characters: That relationship between Daemon and Rhaenyra is the spine, and that’s where we want to put our full focus.