House of the Dragon showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal has described the opening Battle of the Gullet sequence of the third season as unprecedented in television production.
Speaking at Shoreditch Town Hall in East London during SXSW London, Condal told Empire’s Helen O’Hara, who moderated the session, that the new season expands both external warfare and internal fractures within rival factions.
“All of the pot that was set to boil at the end of Season 2 very much picks up in Season 3, and you have these divided factions on either side, but there’s now divisions within the divisions, and those things will continue to fracture, and we’ll continue to see self-interested people do awful things in the name of pride and power and ego and self and family,” Condal said.
He added that the opening battle sequence sets a new benchmark for television production. “Yes, this has been haunting Jim and I for the better part of four years now, and Kevin de la Noy, our physical producer, who had to logistically schedule and pay for this whole thing. But yeah, this sequence I will confidently say is unlike anything that’s ever been done in television before,” he said.
Condal said the sequence has been in development for years and required extensive logistical and physical production work across departments.
“I’m a huge ‘Lord of the Rings’ fan, and I always said it’s like if you’re making ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and we’re like, ‘Well, maybe we could just say, “Well, you know man, Helm’s Deep, that was a crazy battle, you should have been there, you should have seen it.”’ No, you have to show the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and I felt like, with this telling, however we got there, and however we did it, we had to dramatize this moment, that even within the bloody, awful history of the Dance of the Dragons, the Gullet stands out, even to those historians [of Westeros], as one of the worst things that happened in that history. We had to dramatize it, we had to show it, so it took a lot of blueprints, and …”
Production designer Jim Clay added that the scale of construction and coordination across departments was unusually large for a single episode, crediting producer Kevin de la Noy for overseeing complex logistics.
Clay said inspiration for the battle included films such as Master and Commander, with large-scale practical sets built for the sequence, including full ship constructions mounted on gimbals and staged across dry and wet tanks.
“It was a dangerous environment. The floor was slippery, with blood everywhere.”
Toussaint said the sequence involved extensive stunt preparation and rehearsal under director Loni Peristere, with weeks of choreography and physically demanding set conditions.
House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres on June 21 on HBO (JioHotstar in India).
