Summertime is for beaches, ice cream—and dragons, of course.
Handy, then, that we had a pretty epic Season 2 episode of House of the Dragon this week which features monstrous faceoffs, fires, and flights, balanced neatly with some quieter character moments as the tension continues to build toward the finale. Queen Rhaenyra’s search for new dragonriders continues with varying results, Queen Alicent takes a spa day, and Prince Daemon is still hanging out with Simon Russell Beale.
That’s not all that’s going on, of course.
This is your spoiler warning!
We were stoked to be able to get on Zoom with cinematographer Vanja Cernjul, who worked on episodes six and seven and got to shoot some of the season’s most compelling action, like the mob scene that left Alicent traumatized and the unscripted kiss between Rhaenyra and Mysari. This week, Cernjul helped craft the tense dragon pit sequence that gave us some of the most dramatic dragon imagery in the series so far. It was a masterful mix of special effects, tension and action. And let me say, I was terrified Ulf was going to get cooked the entire time.
We asked this DP (who was recently Emmy-nominated for Jim Henson: Idea Man) about planning for these episodes, the challenges of that episode seven sequence, and what advice he has for cinematographers.
Enjoy!
House of the Dragon Season 2 | Episode 7 Preview | Max
www.youtube.com
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
No Film School: I could probably talk to you just about the final sequences on episode seven for two hours. But to start, what does your prep process look like?
Vanja Cernjul: We had five teams of director, DP, and first AD, and I was the only DP who worked with two different directors. And with different directors, you work in a different way always, because different directors are different people. But I was really excited because the first director I worked with and who actually brought me with him to House of the Dragon, we went to film school together a long time ago in the ’90s.
We met in film school, we worked on each other’s student films, but haven’t worked together since. And we always stayed in touch, but he had also amazing career as a cinematographer. And then he started to direct a couple of years back, and was a very successful director very quickly. So I was really looking forward to working with him.
And then the director of [episode] 207, I never met before. I met him in London when I arrived there. And it was really great to discover how similar tastes we had in classical cinema. And we really quickly developed our own vocabulary based on all the same films that we loved. There were two different directors, but a couple of things were very similar.
And this was because House of the Dragon is such a massive, massive project and it’s also so diverse in terms of the locations. And you go in one episode from a huge set with 300 extras to dialogue scenes in a small room or to remote locations. So you have to adapt to each of these challenges and in a completely different way. So to get to some of the locations … we had to pare down this to really a skeleton crew. It was like a crew of 16 people, probably like a student film crew. And on the same project basically that maybe a couple of days before we would be shooting with a huge crew of more than a hundred people.
And also, sometimes we were able to improvise and give more freedom to the actors and discover what the scene was going to be during the blocking rehearsal. Scenes that involved visual effects and dragons had to be planned really carefully.
That part of the process was very interesting for me because I haven’t done it in exactly that way before, because the ambition was really to make the visual effects this season the best that they can be and to make the dragons as real as possible.
And with visual effects, they just take time. And it doesn’t matter how much money you have, if you run out of time, you can’t do justice to the work. And so in order for the visual effects to have as much time as possible, they had to know what we were planning to do ahead of time. So that process would go like I would meet with the director, and we would first shot list.
We would come up with a shot list, and then based on the shot list, we would work with the storyboard artists to storyboard the scene, but storyboard the scene really precisely. We talked about angles that we wanted to achieve, and we tried to be as precise as possible with storyboards.
Then once the storyboards were done and everybody was on the same page, then the visual effects department would take the storyboards and create pre-vis animations, based on storyboards. And here this was another level of precision, where we would even commit to a certain lens.
Of course, on the day, maybe sometimes it wouldn’t be exactly that length, but we tried to give them as much information as possible how we [would] attempt to shoot it, because we already had seen the location at that time. So we knew what we wanted to do, and then a couple of times we would all look at the pre-vis animation.
They did an amazing job. These were little almost short films on their own. Even the characters looked exactly like the actors. It was amazing. We would go back and forth a couple of times before we would say this animation, this is what we really want to achieve. And of course, you have to try to be mindful because this process is very, very expensive. We wanted to go through the whole process when it was really necessary.
But I think on each episode that I did, we did this for at least two or three scenes per episode and basically anything that involved dragons. And then, on the day, we really tried our best to respect what we all agreed on and shoot exactly what they planned. Of course, sometimes things change and you can’t do exactly the same thing, but we did our best.
And our amazing visual effects supervisor, Dadi [Einarsson] was with us all the time on location, even on location scouts, and it was really teamwork. So that was a process that I haven’t really done before, and I really enjoyed it.
It was a very well-produced project, so we were given enough time to go through this process. So I did these two episodes, but I was in London and Spain and Wales altogether for I think almost seven months. And this was because we needed that time to prep it. I had a decent amount of prep, but it was very busy every day.
To jumpstart the process of storyboarding with both directors, we used—just to get us going—we used some scenes from classical cinema as inspiration.
So, for example, for episode 206, when Addam is being chased by Seasmoke, the dragon, his future dragon, we use the famous scene from North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, where Cary Grant is being chased by the crop duster. We thought it was very similar because the plane is like a dragon and Cary Grant has no idea what’s going on and what’s happening with this plane. He just knows that his life might be in danger. So we thought, there’s some parallels between these two scenes, and that’s how we started.
For the opening scene in 207 with [director] Loni Peristere, Loni wanted to use a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the amazing western from Sergio Leone. There was a famous duel scene between Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda—long, contemplative, when the two men are walking around each other, measuring each other up.
Rhaenyra and Addam at that time, they are both with dragons. It’s a very dangerous situation, and nobody’s quite sure how this is going to go. So that was a fun way to start. And of course then once we saw the locations and once we talked about it, many times both scenes became something completely different. But that was a great way to approach this epic scene.
House of the DragonMax
NFS: You mentioned the need to adapt. Now, famously, we know that the kiss at the end of episode six was not scripted. What was that process like on set?
Cernjul: Well, I just talked about how some scenes had to be so precisely planned and had to be shot exactly as we planned it for months. That scene developed on the day, and that was really amazing to watch.
Andrij [Parekh] really gave actors the freedom to explore. And we started with blocking. Rehearsal looked completely different to what it ended up being. At the end of the day, I don’t even remember what the initial blocking rehearsal was like, but when we started shooting, we started shooting. A wide shot of course, and Andrij wanted them to explore, and they were willing to experiment, and the scene was evolving for hours.
And then only after a couple of hours we knew what the scene is going to be, and then we came up with a way to shoot it. But also we were shooting the whole time as the scene was developing. It was quite amazing. It would be interesting to watch the raw footage from that day and watch how it was developing.
NFS: The close of episode seven is just stunning visually, and I feel like you shot it in a way that is fresh to the series. There was at least one oner I noticed in there that I really loved. I would love to know about your choices in the sequence.
Cernjul: The idea of the oner came from Loni, because he really wanted this to be as subjective as possible. He wanted us to be with Hugh [Kieran Bew] … as close to the character as possible. To be experiencing this hellscape through his eyes. And we thought the best way to achieve that was to avoid any cutting and just stay with him the whole time. That was one of the first ideas for that whole sequence. That was the first thing we knew we wanted to do because Loni had a clear vision of what it’s supposed to be.
And then all the action with the dragons and everything developed around that shot, that whole dragon pit. The set was very interesting, because in many ways, first because this space was never seen before in the series. So we basically established what this part of the universe looked like, and it was supposed to be this enormous, massive cave where these huge creatures live. So just imagine where you fit one dragon, and then also there are many dragons living in this case.
The space was supposed to be so huge that it was really hard to maintain the sense of scale once on the set because we had a very large stage, but the stage was maybe one tenth of what the actual space was supposed to be, because only the docking piece was built. Everything else was on blue screen.
The challenge there was just to maintain the sense of space. And if you looked at the scene, you saw that it was all lit by one opening in the cave, but when the space is supposed to be so large, the sense of where this opening is if you’re different part of the stage was really difficult to know, where the light is coming from. If you move to this space, the light’s coming through the opening in the cave that’s so far away. How would it fall to a different part of our stage?
So Dadi came up with this 3D, basically a viewfinder. We had a finder on his iPad that showed us what the space is supposed to be like, which I really used because I was tracking where the light is, how the light is supposed to fall on different parts of the set. So that was one challenge because there was nothing there but this dock and the oceans of blue screen.
And then, also, trying to imagine you have such a large dragon there in this space. When the dragon turns around, how quickly does the dragon turn around? Because you don’t see the dragon. And the dragon’s tail, what happens with dragon’s tail when they turn around? So it was really an exercise of trying to visualize in your head something that wasn’t there.
And the visual effects department helped us a little bit. They had a large blue head of the dragon that two puppeteers were operating the whole time just to give us some sense of what’s going on with the dragon. But Loni also developed this really fun technique.
On the set, usually there’s this audio system available that the first AD or the director uses. You know how in the old days, you saw Fellini with a megaphone? So now they don’t have megaphones, but it’s basically a large speaker in the microphone that ADs and directors sometimes use when they have to project directions.
So Loni used the system to describe the whole time, in real-time throughout the scene, what the dragon was doing so that all the actors were hearing it. “The dragon is moving slowly, the dragon is now a little closer to you.” But then he was basically, he would turn into the dragon and he would even breathe like a dragon. Just trying to describe to the actors what it feels like when this creature is so close to you. So it worked really great, because the whole stage was hearing this voice from the speaker, and it worked out well. Yeah, that was fun to watch.
House of the DragonMax
NFS: I am still thinking about it. It is just so impressive and tense.
Cernjul: Thank you. The stunts, the people on fire, that’s all real. That’s all our incredible stunt team. And I think in one shot, we had 12 people that were lit on fire in one shot. So it’s the first time I saw that happen.
And even though these are some of the best stunt people in the world, and they know what they’re doing—still, when you see a person on fire, it’s not pleasant to watch. It’s happening right in front of you. Try to imagine 12 people on fire just being hit by the flame thrower. On the day, being present there, I was like, “Oh my God, how is this impossible that we’re doing it?”
They had to bring the extinguisher and put out the fire after, I think, eight seconds or so. So that was another thing that you wanted to be precise, really plan what you need to do, because you don’t want to keep doing it. You don’t want to keep lighting people on fire. Even though they were happy to repeat it if it needed to happen. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but being there when we were doing that was like, “Oh, I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
NFS: Is there maybe one or two things that you’ve learned so far as a DP that you would pass on to someone?
Cernjul: I think it’s a cliche, but it’s just work as much as possible. I did, I think, something like 30 short films before I shot my first feature. Many of them were student films, and my first showreel was built from my student films from NYU. So that’s really the best advice I could give. Take any opportunity, any opportunity to shoot, and keep doing it. It’s not the first time this has been said.
Another cliche that’s also true—it’s a business of relationships, and building relationships with people that you feel you can learn from and they can learn from you. It’s a lifelong process, and it’s always an investment that somehow, sometimes pays off. With me and Andrij, it paid off 25 years later. We met in film school, we developed these relationships.
So invest in relationships, and that’s probably the most valuable thing that maybe is hard to understand when you’re in the very beginning, but people who you are meeting now, you might be working with 30 years from now.
Author: Jo Light
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
