Game of Thrones art director on location shooting, “amazing scenes” in season 7
By Dan Selcke
(Image Credit:multisanti (Santiago Díaz). License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)
Christina Moore has worked in the art department of Game of Thrones since season 3. She recently gave a lecture at the University of the Basque Country, where she discussed creating the world of Game of Thrones.
Moore, who was trained as an architect, manages several different filming teams in multiple countries. In her spare time, she looks for inspiration in museums of countries where she’s visiting. It sounds like an intense gig, although her dedication earned her an Emmy Award for Outstanding Art Direction for a Miniseries or Movie in 2008, for her work on John Adams. She’s the kind of person you want working on Game of Thrones.
For season 7, the production spent a lot of time in the Basque Country — that’s San Juan de Gaztelugatxe in the image above, where some hugely important moments were shot. An image of that scenic locale was what attracted the art department to the area in the first place, and it’s not hard to see why.
Beyond that, Moore was entirely unwilling to spill any secrets about Game of Thrones season 7, implying (jokingly, of course) that HBO would kill her if she blabbed. “My contract is written in blood,” she laughed. This was as close as she got:
"All I can say is this was the longest time we’ve been filming in Spain this year, and we’ve done some really amazing, amazing scenes, so it’s going to be really exciting."
Moore also talked more generally about her work. It’s her job to adapt the foreign locations so that they look like they belong in the world of the show, which can be a tall order.
"We have a lot of different worlds in Game of Thrones, which are all supposed to be very distinctive in the way that they look. And quite often we are filming those in the same country, so for example we filmed some of the slave cities…in Morocco, Croatia and Spain. And we try and get something coherent across those three countries that will be distinct for that world. So we don’t want it to look like Spain or Croatia or Morocco. We want it to look like the world of Game of Thrones…That’s part of our job in the art department, to have a visual language that works for each distinct world. It could be to do with color, it could be to do with architecture."
She says that lighting and costumes come into it, too.
Moore also recalled designing some of the show’s iconic scenes, such as the fight between the Mountain and the Viper, which happened “an abandoned hotel in Dubrovnik. It had been bombed during the war and was full of graffiti…We had to change it completely.”
"One of our challenges was to remove the Croatian shield that is located in the center of that courtyard and replace it with a mosaic with the shield of the Lannister . We did a great job but the day before the shoot we fell a storm and it was filled with mud. Maybe it was good, because it got an older look. I am very proud of that mosaic, the problem is that it only looks good when the prince’s head is crushed to the ground. And I think at that moment the viewers do not look at the mosaic."
No, probably not.
Moore also discussed filming the scene in Daznak’s Pit in “The Dance of Dragons,” where Drogon rescues Dany from the Sons of the Harpy. “I remember the heat and that 19 people were burned by flamethrowers,” she recalled. It was a difficult shoot, but the Spanish extras smiled through it all.
"In the rest of Europe it is very noticeable that they do it for the money, but in Spain they are followers of the series that come with enthusiasm. That day we had to use 600 extras, who were singing and in excellent humor even though it was a scorching sun"
Finally, she discussed turning the city of Girona into the seaside free city of Braavos. “We had to eliminate everything modern from its streets and, when we recorded in the cathedral, camouflage any religious symbol, because in Braavos there is no religion.”
And what was the key to getting that Game of Thrones feel in Braavos? “Fishing nets and filth.”
We’ll see the fruits of Moore’s most recent labors when season 7 premieres on July 17.