- Warning: This post contains spoilers for the “House of the Dragon” season one finale.
- Director Greg Yaitanes said he was inspired by “How To Train Your Dragon” for the dragon fight.
- He told Entertainment Weekly he made sure his sequence wasn’t too similar to the animated franchise.
“House of the Dragon” director Greg Yaitanes said that he watched “How To Train Your Dragon” to prepare for the first dragon fight of the series.
In the season finale, as tension is building to a civil war, Lucerys Targaryen (Elliot Grihault) and his uncle Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) get into a dragon fight during a storm. While Lucerys is trying to avoid conflict and follow his mother’s orders, Aemond chases his nephew with his much-larger dragon, Vhagar, to get revenge for Lucerys slicing one of his eyes in episode seven.
Aemond is initially toying with Lucerys but when the dragons take control and begin to fight for real, the battle ends with Vhagar biting Arrax and his rider in half.
Yaitanes told Entertainment Weekly that he watched multiple films to help choreograph the scene.
“In preparation, I watched the first ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ because [Oscar-winning cinematographer] Roger Deakins was the visual consultant on that. So that, cinematically, was going to be really appealing,” Yaitanes said. “And I went back to the original ‘Jurassic Park’ because there was a sense of scale to the dinosaurs that I don’t think any of the subsequent films ever recaptured.”
He added: “[Director Steven Spielberg] knew he wanted to frame for height, and I took a lot of cues off what made the dinosaurs look so big and so interesting. So there’s a lot of ‘Jurassic Park’ in Storm’s End and in the air.”
Yaitanes also said that he ended up changing the dragon fight sequence after noticing similarities to “How to Train Your Dragon.”
The director said the franchise “definitely covered a lot of action sequences that you didn’t want to be in comparison to.”
According to Insider correspondent Kim Renfro, the series adds the detail that the dragons acted of their own accord when it came to the actual battle. In the George R.R. Martin book “Fire and Blood,” the story is told through a third-person party and it is implied that the fighting was intentional.
