‘House of the Dragon’ Finale Director: Rhaenyra and Alicent’s Relationship Is ‘Like First Love’
While some “House of the Dragon” fans live and die by the portmanteau known as Rhaenicent, Season 2 finale director Geeta Vasant Patel can’t think so obliquely. As the director responsible for Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent’s (Olivia Cooke) only two scenes together all season, Patel told IndieWire that she did see it as “a relationship about love,” but never skewing too explicitly romantic or platonic.
“I always thought about the metaphor for it as two lovers that have been divorced and still love each other,” Patel told IndieWire after the finale. “Part of it is that they both want to be with each other in a way they can’t understand and can’t explain — it’s like first love.”
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In Season 2, Episode 8, Alicent makes a final plea to Rhaenyra to stop the war — just as Rhaenyra asked her back in Episode 3. Patel said she and Director of Photography Catherine Goldschmidt were constantly connecting the two scenes to each other as “tentpoles” of the season, tracking the duo’s dynamic and relationship with just a few precious minutes of screen time. As much as “House of the Dragon” is about a sprawling ensemble (and their many, many dragons), it boils down to the two women on the poster and their catastrophic fallout. As the only director to work with both D’Arcy and Cooke simultaneously this season, Patel said she felt not territorial, but grateful.
“I felt a great sense of responsibility,” she said. “I felt quite honored to be able to those two scenes. I felt a responsibility to Emma and Olivia, Ryan (Condal) and Sara (Hess), who had entrusted me to shepherd the shooting of it, and took it very seriously.”
In the conversation below, Patel shared an obvious and palpable love for directing, including her first time working as pilot director and executive producer on Hulu’s “Under the Bridge.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you prep for that big Alicent/Rhaenyra scene — their second one this season — before actually going into production? I know this is a show that rehearses a lot.
I have to say the writing is beautiful and powerful. The two actors are top of their trade. So it’s one of those scenes where there’s very little to direct. I follow their lead. I watch the rehearsal, help shape it a little bit as far as blocking, to make sure we can make our day or insert a thought here and there. I make sure that we all know what we’re building the scene to, just so I can support the the vision for the scene. What is the turning point in the scene? We always look for that. The turning point in this scene is that Rhaenyra says “Make your sacrifice.” We always need to have somewhere to go until we get to that point, emotionally. So it’s very little that I have to do when everything is so well done. It’s just a really powerful script, and as you could see, it’s performed in such a nuanced way,
I think what was so beautiful about this scene is it’s relatable to all of us in that when you see someone that you have had a very long relationship with and a fraught relationship with, like a sister or brother or a lover, and that relationship started when you were younger — when you see them, you immediately revert to whatever age that was, and you’re allowed to be childish. Even if you’re President of the United States, you are immediately a 15-year-old. The way that the two of them portrayed that quality gave away the most emotionally. You saw Rhaenyra’s face contort in a way that we don’t normally see. The was making these faces and these gestures and saying things that were quite juvenile. Alicent was incredibly emotional, but also became the child she used to be. It was such a great choice that Olivia bit her nails. We all know that quality hadn’t come out in a long time, and I think it was a choice on her part not to bite her nails through many episodes of the season in order to make sure that when she did, it was a time when she absolutely had to go back and was feeling like a child.
It has a lot of parallels to the scene in the sept in Episode 3 — was there a deliberate thread between them, and connecting to Season 1?
Yes. We were constantly looking at the two of them. You know when you get your hair cut and they make sure both sides match ? It’s kind of like that. We kept weighing both of them and just making sure that the shift was strong and that there was a mirroring, there was a cause and effect. All the strengths of storytelling were there between the two scenes, and then Ryan and Sara were constantly tweaking little moments, either in letting me know what they were feeling for behavior or blocking, or having conversations with the actors. A lot of attention was put on those two scenes, knowing that they were tentpoles for the season in a way of that relationship. Those are the two times you see the two of them together. And to answer your other question — yes. Katie (Goldschmidt) and I sat down and blocked everything Episode 3 to match what Greg Yaitanes did in Season 1 when they were young women. We added some flourish for the scene itself in Episode 3 to make it distinct in other ways, with some of the wide shots. We of course leaned into the knife moment, which was something they didn’t have when they were kids, so there were a few things that were different, but yes, we wanted to make it almost like deja vu.
This is such a meticulous and yet massive production. How looped in are you to the rest of the scripts and the other units? You guys are heavily cross bordered as well, and that can be really challenging as a director coming in for a couple episodes.
This show is very special in that we received all the episodes before we started shooting. All the directors knew the span of the season. We all knew what the arcs were of the characters, we knew exactly what the dialogue was, and so it was quite nice to be able to understand where we were coming from, where we were going. We literally shoot all episodes with two units running all the time — and it’s I find it quite thrilling. I love it. I love the cross boarding. I love being there for so long. I think we might have been there for 10 months this season. I love everyone investing in this show together, deep diving, focusing. I also love the challenge of these two scenes with these two strong characters, because they are protagonists. It’s interesting to see the way Emma and Olivia perform the words differently every time. They both are very playful when they are shooting these kinds of scenes. I feel Emma particularly really loves to come at it in different ways, and it’s it’s beautiful to just see how they do that.
There’s obviously a large scale production with the big battle scenes and the VFX, but what’s an unexpected challenge?
Weather is unexpected on the show. We shot this year in Wales and the U.K. and Spain. And when you’re out in these big locations, sometimes it’s going to rain. Sometimes it’s crazy weather. Sometimes the waves are too crazy, and you have to come back again for a water scene. I remember in Episode 3, we had a scene with Rhaenys (Eve Best) and Corlys (Steve Touissaint), and it was supposed to be out in the docks. Katie and I had this plan that we had been working on for months, and then, of course, torrential rainfall happens the day of shooting. And we just, as a team, didn’t have the ability to move that scene or come back and get it again. It was quite expensive, and we’re at the end of our schedule, so we literally staged the scene very, very intimate underneath a walkway and very quickly did that. We had to bring rain machines in, we have a great special effects team, and that was that. And it was beautiful because you saw the scene and hopefully didn’t think it was strange. That’s what it becomes. It was a very intimate scene anyway, but I think those are the things that are exciting, because when we don’t have control of things, it’s almost like Mother Nature for the show, that it becomes what it’s supposed to be and and it’s beautiful.
I actually do remember that scene standing out, not in a in a bad way, but just because it is so interestingly blocked and filmed. It looks like nothing else in the show — I did wonder if it was actually raining!
It’s hard to do a rain scene, so when you have natural rain, that’s what’s interesting about it, is if you embrace it, you embrace it. We were trying to do the finale shot of Corlys, and he was on the boat going out to the ship, and the waves were just so rough so we actually had to change locations to shoot that shot, so that we could safely shoot this. There was a drone shot that was up above and then came down below.
You see stuff like that and know that no one’s choosing to do this and make their life harder. No one’s choosing to do a rain scene for fun.
One of the coolest things about this show is, as a director — if I could just bring you into my world — I read a scene, and I love designing shots, and I’ll come up with something. “The camera goes up like this, it goes like this, it turns like this, it goes down like this….” and then the entire show, every department comes together to somehow make it work. They’re rigging things and building things and having meetings of the minds to figure out how to make it — but never, rarely, do they come to me and say, “We can’t do that.” There was for the finale… I had this thought that when you see the winter wolves walking on the bridge, the camera swoops down, goes against them, goes through the wolves, turns around, and then goes down backwards at their feet, and they leave the shot. Katie called it the impossible shot. But then Katie takes it to the team, and the gaffers figure out a way to build this rig — it’s like, Inspector Gadget meets some mad scientist and they’re trying to figure out how to rig everything, and next thing you know they built something, and we pulled off the shot.
It’s not lost on me how amazing that is. It’s like playing Legos when you’re little and playing Legos when you’re an adult. You get to live in this world where you can build things and make things happen that are in your head. Same with the vision; Ryan and Sara had a very strong idea of how that vision was supposed to go, as far as the message. Daemon (Matt Smith) had to change, and yet there were no words in it. I had this list of images that they had given me, and then I had to figure out how to make it into something with shape and with transitions, and that built to that message in a visual way. What a great opportunity for a director. It’s almost like a blank slate. I sat down with the storyboard artists and remembered everything Ryan and Sara were looking for, and just started piecing together these images, adding a few in, trying to just make it say what they wanted it to say, and have the transitions. I showed it to Ryan, we gave it to our team — and these storyboards are bonkers. They are bonkers. They had this root for a tree, and my note was, “make this look like an umbilical chord.” Next thing you know, special effects, visual effects, our art department, everybody’s working together to say I’m going to give you this much, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this — and by the end, it’s going to look like an umbilical chord. How many times do you get to do that? That’s the best thing. One of the best things about this show is it’s it really is artful.
What’s maybe something people don’t realize or should know about being specifically an episodic TV director?
How much input we have as directors depends on the showrunner, and the show. I’ve been on shows where I get a script and they want everything exactly as it’s scripted. I’ve even had showrunners stand behind me and pretty much direct through me, when I first started. I’m at a place now where I’m working on shows that really allow the directors to use their voice and to incorporate their voice and collaborate is the most important word. I worked “The Great” and this show, “Under the Bridge” is another show I just did — those were incredibly collaborative experiences, where I send notes back to the showrunners, we have meetings where we talk about all the scenes, and I make sure I understand, “Okay, where’s the shift in this scene?”
Also, in the words of Aristotle, the three act storytelling, the basic storytelling. When you go to India and you sit down in a village, the village storyteller comes, and he sits down, and he’s like, beginning, middle, end, and it’s brilliant. You think, “Oh, that’s so easy.” It’s not, it’s very hard. I do this workshopping of the scripts, and then someone like Ryan or Quinn (Shephard) and Samir (Mehta) in “Under the Bridge,” they take the script and at this point, we’re collaborating. We’re adjusting things. Or they might say, “Can you create a visual for this? Because it’s not on the page, but we went in between the words,” which always happens with “House of the Dragon,” because they’re not literal. They’re so wonderful in the way they don’t dumb it down. For example, first season, I was told that the entire Episode 8 was about Rhaenyra and Alicent’s relationship and how they miss each other. Okay, is that on the page anywhere? No, not once is it on the page. In fact, it’s almost the opposite the whole way through, they constantly bicker. So I had to figure out, with Katie, how to make it palpable that they miss each other. There’s certain ways, through cinematic devices, framing, structure, transitions, we moved scenes.
I remember Rhaenyra and Alicent and Daemon were supposed to get in this argument, in the throne room over Viserys (Paddy Considine) and what to do. My suggestion was let’s move it up to Viserys room, because Katie and I thought, if we could actually put Viserys’ bed in between them while they’re talking, you at least understand this emotion. It’s there in the room. He can cough in the middle of it, things like that. So there is that part of being a director that is such a dream when you get to certain projects where a showrunner as extraordinary as Ryan Condal allows you to take his baby and start shaping pieces of it to hopefully make it just as strong as he envisioned.
I know that he’s like a very protective of the story and of his knowledge of “Fire & Blood,” so it’s great to hear that there is that level of freedom.
There’s a great deal of freedom as long as we’re telling the story that he would like us to tell, and that’s a mutual desire. Daemon bends the knee, right? And when we read the script, I think it was Katie who had this idea that when Rhaenyra goes into the throne room, what if Rhaenyra’s dragon floats up to the top of the throne room and is there as a threat. You think, “Oh my gosh, there’s going to be a war here.” That was not on the page. That was Katie thinking visually, how do we make this? I kept saying we need this to be suspenseful. We can’t just assume that they’re going to make up and everyone knows, so we do things like that. When Ryan says, “I want this to be suspenseful,” we immediately think how can we visually do that?
In Episode 3, Rhaenyra sneaks into King’s Landing to talk to Alicent. On the page it was about three lines. Ryan came to me and said, “Hey, I really want this to be suspenseful. I don’t want it to just be walking in, having a conversation.” I had to sit down with Katie and the production team to figure out how, in the small time we had, we could make it more like in mission:impossible, where she’s trying to sneak in, there’s a near miss — all of the things that Ryan wanted, we just had to figure out visually how to pump it all up and give him choices in edit. So what was three lines on the page Was an entire day of shooting, where you had Emma and Olivia near missing each other. One’s up on the stairs, one’s behind. It was this grand structure.
A film that really inspired me for that moment, was “The Conversation,” where there’s a big, wide overhead shot of the courtyard and you see this whole thing playing out, and it just gives it scope. So these are all things that Ryan intends and wants, but he doesn’t sit there and micromanage the visuals of it. He asks us to come to him and show him what we would do. That’s pretty normal for episodic directing, it’s just that sometimes the showrunner may be more prescriptive, and sometimes there they allow us to take something and run.
You mentioned “Under the Bridge,” which we adored here at IndieWire — such an amazing and powerful show, and you were executive producer on this one.
For many years, I’ve been wanting to direct a pilot, be the lead director of a show, but I just didn’t want to do just to do it. I have had the honor of working on such amazing episodes like “House of the Dragon” that to go do something just to do a pilot didn’t makes sense. So I’ve been reading scripts for a few years, waiting and waiting for something that I felt I could really give myself to, because it’s a lot more work. You’re part of the casting. You create the look of the show, you create the feel of the show, you collaborate with the showrunners, and you’re all a team of executive producers. I read “Under the Bridge” and just couldn’t stop crying. I could cry right now, I’m so sad that it happened. I was bullied when I was 14 because I was Indian, and I was the only Indian at my school. I told my agents. I said, “Look, I don’t who these people are making this. I know it’s a small script. I know it’s low budget. I don’t care. I want this.” And that was it. It was all these other script coming in with movie stars attached and all this stuff. And at the time, there was no Lily (Gladstone), there was no Riley (Keough) — it was just this script that I knew was it for me.
Then we had to quickly cast, because we everything was falling into place. There were four young girls that I would be working with — very, very talented actors, very young actors who hadn’t had the opportunity to go out and play this particular role before, or even as human beings experience some of the things that their characters had experienced. The tone of the show is like, “Fish tank,” like, “8 Mile.” It’s a very rough part of town. Vritika who plays Reena, she’d never been bullied, and thank God for her, but tough for me! Same with some of the other young actors, they had never experienced the things that they were actually performing. So I spoke with the showrunners and Hulu and said, “Look, if we really want this to feel real and grounded and groundbreaking in a way that it’s not some teenybop thing, then we need to actually put in the work to give these actors the opportunity to be set up for success.”
They gave me the time, maybe a month, month and a half, of just nonstop rehearsal. For me, what that was is improvisation exercises. I took all four of these young actors, and we started improvising their backgrounds and improvising their pain. Vritika got bullied by the other three young actors. It was very hard that day. She had never felt that before. It felt very real the way that they came at her, and they also felt really affected by it. They had never bullied someone before. There were other moments of relationships with parents. In “Under the Bridge” some of the characters have been raped, some of them have been abused — all that stuff we had to give them the background. After we came out of this “Fight Club”-private rehearsal process, they they brought it to the screen, and I’m so proud of them. They’re so talented, and if you meet them off screen, you’ll notice how different they are than the characters they play. Vritika, brought down her voice. She became Reena. Chloe (Guidry), who plays Josephine, she is the opposite of a bully. She’s the most gentle, kind, soft spoken person. That was a career high for me. That was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had so far as a director.
They are really immense. While we’re talking about molding young minds and such do you have any advice for aspiring directors or even your younger peers?
My advice would be don’t give up. It’s that simple. This is a pretty tough business, and there will always be people who make you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t deserve to be there — I would say keep going. Keep rewriting, keep re-blocking, keep going. I think it’s a war of attrition.
“House of the Dragon” is now streaming on Max and “Under the Bridge” on Hulu.
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