Game of Thrones production designer Deborah Riley: “The final season nearly killed me”

The 70th Annual Emmy Awards are approaching, and thanks to her work on season 7, Game of Thrones production designer Deborah Riley is up for the top award in her field: Outstanding Production Design For A Narrative Period Or Fantasy Program. Ahead of the awards ceremony on September 17, Riley talked about her craft with Deadline, including what we can expect from her and her team in season 8:

"The final season nearly killed me. I realized at a certain point that all of the work in previous seasons was just a warm-up for Season 8. By the end, I had nothing left to give and finished knowing I had done everything I could. Season 8 does not pull any punches and is raw and honest and important. I can’t wait to see it."

Riley, just to remind you, is the woman who designed Dragonstone, the House of Black and White, the pyramids of Meereen, and many other sets since she joined the show in season 4. (“I did exactly what they tell you you should never do in an interview: I begged,” she remembered.) Before that, she was in the art departments for visually pioneering movies like The Matrix and Moulin Rogue. If she can’t wait to see season 8, I expect it will look pretty spectacular.

Of all the sets Riley has worked on, it sounds like Dragonstone is her favorite, or at least, her favorite among the ones she can talk about. “The power of the sets and locations to help tell the story is something that we always took very seriously and the homecoming of Daenerys Targaryen into her ancestral home of Dragonstone was something that [showrunners] Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff] gave specific instructions about,” she said. “With reference to the Dragonstone Audience Chamber, the power of totalitarian architecture as well as the device of forced perspective to help strengthen the focus to the throne, were statements they were very interested in making. I looked first to Louis Kahn and his Salk Institute and later the Église Notre-Dame de Royan, for brutalist inspiration.”

"Dragonstone was the piece of the puzzle that I was most excited about. The outline described so many elements that were going to need to fit together, both locations and set builds. I also felt a great responsibility in helping to tell the story of the character through the presentation of the space. I knew from the start that it was going to take careful planning to make it work as a believable whole."

Naturally, “Dragonstone” is the episode Riley and her team submitted for Emmy consideration. Considering that the last five minutes are a silent walk through the Dragonstone set, there was really no other option. “With other design-rich sequences like the Citadel montage, which included extending the Citadel Library and the Restricted Area, introducing the Privy, Mess Hall, Isolation Ward, Infirmary and Autopsy Chamber, the extension of Winterfell and Cersei’s massive Map of Westeros, 701 is a wonderful cross-section of the work of the Game of Thrones art department and all of us are very proud to be able to offer this episode for consideration.”

It’s easy to forget how many new sets the show created for season 7; despite the smaller number of episodes, Riley and her team had more work than ever before, although that ambition is “now eclipsed by Season 8.”

"We had so many massive builds that all seemed to be happening at the same time. As there were less characters, it meant that there were less alternatives to shoot on the schedule. This had bought us time in the past, as it gave the shooting crew more options. We had to work faster—there was no other way around it. We were building the Dragonstone Audience Chamber at the same time as we were building Euron’s ship, The Silence. For the size [of this] show, we were a relatively small team in Belfast and this stretched us beyond what we were expecting. The good thing is that we were all used to working with one another and beyond the basic set-up, it was the loyalty of the crew and our pride in the show that enabled the sets to be finished on time."

The art department does more than just conceive and build sets; they design props, scout for locations, budget like crazy, and thoroughly go over everything they dream up to make sure it’s consistent with everything else they dream up. “Nothing would ever appear on set that has not gone through the rigorous approval process. We were all very aware of keeping true to the look of the show and the vision of David and Dan, no matter how busy we were.”

And Riley is in charge of it all, and the only person in the art department  to travel back and forth between the show’s sound stages in Belfast and all the on-location shoots in Spain, Iceland and wherever else. “It sounds exhausting and it was, but it was also incredibly inspiring and exciting because the locations chosen were always spectacular and seeing the whole show emerge was a great privilege.”

Speaking of those location shoots, what’s the role of Riley’s team in, say, a giant battle scene like the Loot Train Attack, which was shot not on a set but in los Barruecos in Spain. “In massive battle sequences, the work of the art department—particularly set dressing—can be underestimated,” Riley assured Deadline.

"Beyond the selection of the location and the massive scorpion that Bronn uses, “The Spoils of War” was all about set decoration and keeping the continuity throughout the sequence. The wagons, the horse tack, elements to be burnt, the devastation and the destruction all need to be followed throughout the sequence. The props people, the greensmen, on-set painters and set dressers all did a phenomenal job to make the battle and the aftermath as convincing as possible, all the while working closely with SFX and VFX to be sure we were all telling the same story."

The same goes for the ship-to-ship battle in “Stormborn,” where Euron Greyjoy takes on his nephew and niece on the high seas. When designing the Silence, they had to make it big enough for it to be able to ram another ship and tear it apart, no small task. “We looked at various ships throughout history, from Japanese medieval warships through to those of the Roman navy. The Silence took shape with a massive kraken on the Naval Ram, an extrapolation of the Ironborn sigil.”

You can read even more about Riley’s experiences here. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to go back to wondering what spectacular stuff she has up her sleeve for the final episodes.

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