House of the Dragon has a “different tone” than Game of Thrones

Miguel Sapochnik, the director behind some of the top Game of Thrones episodes, describes how working on the prequel series is different…and the same.

HBO is revving up press for House of the Dragon, its upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series. Set some 200 years before the original show, it tells the story of a brutal Targaryen civil war that tore Westeros apart.

To manage it, HBO has tapped Colony creator Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, who directed great Game of Thrones episodes like “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winter.” They’ll serve as showrunners together, not unlike how David Benioff and Dan Weiss worked as a team on the original show.

But even though there will obviously be similarities, House of the Dragon isn’t Game of Thrones, as Sapochnik explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “I think we were very respectful of what the original show is,” he said. “It wasn’t broken, so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. House of the Dragon has its own tone that will evolve and emerge over the course of the show. But first, it’s very important to pay respects and homage to the original series, which was pretty groundbreaking. We’re standing on the shoulders of that show and we’re only here because of that show. So the most important thing for us to do is to respect that show as much as possible and try and complement it rather than reinvent it. And I was involved in making the original show, so I feel like that’s been useful. Like, I’m not arriving going, ‘Let’s change everything! Let’s do a different color palette!’ No, I quite like the color palette.”

"That said, we can’t say, ‘Well, when we did Thrones, we did it this way …’ If you start every sentence with that, you’ve lost. This is something else, and should be something else. It’s a different crew, different people, different tone. Hopefully, it will be seen as something else. But it will have to earn that — it won’t happen overnight. Hopefully, fans will enjoy it for the thing that it is. We’ll be lucky if we ever come close to what the original show was, so we’re just putting our heads down and getting on with it and hoping what we come up with is worthy of having a Game of Thrones title."

I think that’s the right attitude to take. Although maybe they could brighten the color palette just a little bit? Eh, the trailer still looks pretty great:

“It’s a lot of work,” Sapochnik continued. “It’s a pretty interesting shift. I’m producing other directors and getting involved in a lot of the minutiae. Directing feels really simple by comparison. I feel vaguely elated on my directing days because I don’t have to think about anything other than directing.”

"I’ve also learned, as I learned on [Sapochnik’s new movie] Finch, that it’s becoming more and more important to me as I’m getting older to work with people I like. The journey is the destination and if you can’t enjoy the journey, then the destination has so much less meaning. I’ve got a group of filmmakers on House of the Dragon I have a lot of fun working with. I’ve never had that level of repeat business of working with the same people again and again. The way I work with [GoT veterans] Fabian Wagner, my DP, and Tim Porter, my editor, we have fun and make jokes and we never used to have that. I can’t tell you how important that is. Because there’s not a lot of funny stuff going on in the world of Thrones, so it’s quite nice to spend time with people you enjoy spending time with."

Fabian Wagner was a cinematographer on Game of Thrones who worked on some of the show’s best episodes. The talent on this show is real; now they just have to pull it across the finish line.

House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max in 2022.

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