The climate was too wet. Then too sunny. The bottom was too muddy, then not muddy sufficient. Then got here the wasps as HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was filming its climactic debut season jousting sequence throughout two weeks in Belfast in 2024. Faux blood syrup smeared throughout actors and stunt performers preventing within the mud attracted a swarm of the testy bugs, stinging the actors’ faces whereas they had been already exhausted and battling the weather and each other.
“By the end of it, they’d all been stung a bunch of times, but they were like, ‘Let’s just get on with it,’ ” recollects director Owen Harris.
When the crew first approached adapting George R.R. Martin’s Sport of Thrones prequel novella, The Hedge Knight, one explicit problem stood out, particularly because the present’s finances was going to be fairly modest by the requirements of the franchise. The story follows an inexperienced knight named Dunk (Peter Claffey), who groups with a diminutive squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), to enter a jousting contest. However not solely would the six-episode season require a number of jousting scenes, the season concludes with the “Trial of Seven” — two groups of seven jousters competing on the identical time in a contest to resolve Dunk’s destiny.
“Your brain definitely explodes when you’re trying to put it together,” says Harris, whose credit embrace the Emmy-winning “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror. “Even when you’ve then established what the main fight is going to be, what it’s going to look like, you’ve still got six other fights taking place all around it that have to also work with whatever angle you’re shooting at. It’s levels of complexity. You go through it, bit by bit, chipping away and figuring it out.”
The manufacturing enlisted 20-year veteran second unit director and stunt coordinator Rob Inch, who not solely helped create a jousting sequence in Ridley Scott’s The Final Duel, however labored at medieval theme parks coordinating jousts. Showrunner Ira Parker had an early mandate for Inch, Harris and the remainder of the crew.
“We weren’t just trying to do the best, most spectacular jousting — because everybody always wants to have the best stunts in every show — it was important that we felt it through Dunk’s eyes,” Parker says. “It’s Dunk’s dream to enter the lists and become a knight. It’s like a 12-year-old who wants to play in the NBA, then walks into Madison Square Garden for the first time and realizes, ‘These guys play for real.’ We had to be along for the ride with him.”
Inch started testing methods to drag off Parker’s imaginative and prescient a yr earlier than filming started. He intentionally didn’t watch the jousting scenes within the unique Thrones or its different prequel, Home of the Dragon, preferring for Knight to “live and breathe as itself and have my tone to it,” he says.
“When you look at jousting, it’s very one-dimensional — it’s just horses crossing,” Inch explains. “We wanted to find a way to get inside that action with the camera. We came up with a new wire cam device we could hang from a pole — so if the camera accidentally touched the riders, it wasn’t going to be this fatal blow when they’re doing a combined speed of 60 miles per hour.”
The digicam rig allowed photographs that flew via the sphere into a personality’s standpoint. “We went around figuring out these kinds of cool shots that hadn’t been done before, and a lot of those shots stayed in the show,” Inch says.
One among Harris’ favorites is a second that resembles a scene the place a driver of a automobile is abruptly broadsided by one other automobile, besides on horseback.
“We wanted to create that moment where you’re in Dunk’s helmet and the other horse is upon you before you even had a chance to realize where you are,” Harris says.
Finn Bennett as Prince Aerion “Brightflame” Targaryen.
Steffan Hill/HBO
Praising the execution, Parker provides, “The stunt team fucking delivered for us — they did some things that I’ve never seen before.”
Including to the environment was a layer of fog — each machine-generated on set and digital, which helped compensate for the ever-shifting Belfast climate — that ramped up the claustrophobia. “Instead of having these big, open valleys, everything wraps into where [Dunk] is,” Harris explains.
Wasp stings apart, Inch proudly factors out that the sequence was captured with none severe accidents. Nonetheless, the menace hung over the manufacturing and resulted in Parker and Harris having to make some robust calls.
“I remember sitting on set, wanting to get another take, and [the stunt team] said, ‘Look, we can do it, but this stuff is really fucking dangerous,’ ” Parker recollects. “It becomes one of those points where you can’t just keep rolling until you have it just the way you want it. But that benefits us in a certain way because we’re the scrappy upstart, and the enemy of perfect, for us, is good.”
As such, unintended photographs turned a part of the manufacturing course of, with Inch filming seemingly mundane moments, like returning the horses to their beginning traces. “Because horses are unpredictable, every now and then, something cool and unusual would happen, and that’s when you get golden stuff — happy accidents, as I call them,” he says.
The animals, in fact, weren’t injured throughout filming, both. The truth is, a number of of essentially the most jaw-dropping moments use mechanical horses — which could come as a shock, as many viewers doubtless assumed a few of these photographs had been CG.
“Any time you see horses crash the railings, flip over or riders getting unhorsed, those were done with mechanical horses,” Inch explains.
Shaun Thomas’ Raymun Fossoway and Dunk in the course of the Trial of Seven.
Steffan Hill/HBO
The manufacturing is now engaged on season two after having to pause filming in Spain in late March due to flooding from Storm Therese.
“We’re trying again to focus on what we love most about this show, which is the relationship between [Egg and Dunk],” Parker says. “We still haven’t gone balls to the wall in terms of action set pieces like on the original Game of Thrones. If anything, season two will maybe feel smaller and even more intimate than season one.”
Trying again, Parker’s favourite shot within the joust sequence wasn’t one among lances clashing on the sphere however when Dunk will get off his horse, takes off his helm and at last features the higher hand on Prince Aeiron (Finn Bennett), beating him into submission.
“I was jumping up and down at how good it was,” Parker says. “I just couldn’t believe the ferocity with which Peter went for it. You could hear that sound of him crashing down on the shield of Aeiron’s stunt performer, Zach Roberts. That’s when I knew that this sequence was going to work very well for us.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone situation of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click here to subscribe.
