Director Alan Taylor has a very particular speciality: killing characters on HBO shows. Whether it's Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood, Julius Caesar on Rome, or Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, characters best beware when Taylor approaches set.
Last year, Taylor claimed another victim: Princess Rhaenys Targaryen of House of the Dragon, who fell to her death after battling her nephews in the sky astride her dragon in the best episode of the show's second season. "It is emotional because she'd been there as a big part of Season 1, and knew that her time was coming," Taylor told Gold Derby. "There's a sadness there that the actor is not going to be around anymore, because they become such a part of the intense family. For many actors, and I think it was true of her, there's a relief as well. She savored that she knew she was going to have a good death, and she got energized by that. But yeah, I saw a lot of crew crying, the people who'd been working very closely with her, like wardrobe and hair and the other cast members. There was lots of hugging and crying on her last day when we finally finish murdering her."
I didn't feel like I knew Rhaenys especially well, but her death hit hard. Taylor knows what he's doing.
"Every chance you get to kill a major character is a wonderful thing," Taylor continued. "It's something I got to experience again on House of the Dragon, and through my career I've murdered off many, many characters, and it's been a great way to make a living."
"I started to realize at a certain point that this seems to be what I'm hired to do. It made me think, why are we so drawn to these stories? In this modern age of television, contained and finished with long story arcs, it's a very powerful thing to build a character over seasons and then finish them. And audiences respond. They are gutted and angry and yell at the filmmakers, but also, it's thrilling. I think it's their way of dealing with mortality."
I don't know if that makes me more or less excited for House of the Dragon season 3.
Alan Taylor is the best dragon director in history
Taylor actually isn't part of the director lineup for the third season, which will start airing on HBO and Max something next year. But we expect the directors to learn from his example and bring the spectacle; a battle early in the season may be one of the most complicated sequences ever filmed for TV, if you believe showrunner Ryan Condal.
Still, it will have a challenge in matching what Taylor did with the Battle of Rook's Rest in season 2. "I was really grateful that people seemed to appreciate the work that went into it," he said. "I did that thing that directors should never do of reading comments online. But in this case, it was mostly non-painful, and they were showing respect for the cast, for the VFX people, for Rowley Irlam our stunt coordinator. Because for something like this, the team is so huge, and it seemed like fans knew how many departments were responsible."
"In the golden age of television that they refer to, one of the defining things is that television has gotten more and more cinematic, and partly because the audience has gotten more sophisticated and demanding in terms of what they want in visuals...The border between television and movies is always shifting, and it's gotten quite blurry right now, certainly more epic."
It doesn't get much more epic than dragons fighting in the sky, something we can expect more of in the final two seasons of the show. Maybe they'll bring Taylor back for the fourth and final season. The Battle of Rook's Rest may be the best dragon battle ever put onscreen, and this show is all about the dragons. his experience could be very useful.
"[W]hen I read this scene, it's called the Battle of Rook's Rest, but in fact, there never really is much of a battle," Taylor observed. "It's a bunch of soldiers who are going to take a small keep, but that never happens. What really happens is the release of the dragons, and you have to find ways to tie it into the ground action, to make it physically palpable and tangible. Otherwise, even if there are really good visual effects, it just turns into an air show, and you detach from it. There's many things that I tried to build into it, like making sure we always shot the dragon action as you would in the real world, so that you don't have magic cameras that can go anywhere. The cameras are highly constrained, as though you're shooting from another dragon watching the action, or shooting from a specific point of view."
You can stream the first two seasons of House of the Dragon now on HBO and Max. The third season won't be along until 2026, but HBO is premiring a new Game of Thrones prequel series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, later this year.
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