Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon Read online

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): From your training in seeing so many movies and reading books, you know your hero is going to be saved. Is Arya going to pull this off? Does the queen have some trick up her sleeve? Someone has something planned, because they’re not really going to chop off his head—right up until the moment when they chop off his head.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): The bluntness of George’s prose made it even more brutal; there was nothing sentimental and saccharine about it. It was just: There he is up there, and [the sword] Ice is coming down on his neck, and that’s it. It’s faithful in the way it’s translated to the screen, but it’s still a very different thing because you have real live actors and little Maisie Williams watching and Ramin Djawadi’s beautiful score. There were lots of things that made us nervous that season, but we knew with episodes nine and ten we were ending on a strong note.

  SEAN BEAN (Ned Stark): I thought it was a very courageous move for a television company. I knew HBO had a track record of bold moves, but I thought, “This is pretty incredible if they can pull this off.”

  While fans of Martin’s book knew Ned’s death was coming, and the spoiler was readily available to anybody who looked at the book’s Wikipedia page, the twist took the vast majority of the show’s audience completely by surprise. The episode, “Baelor,” managed to keep viewers guessing about Ned Stark’s fate until the very last second.

  In the episode’s opening scene in the black cells, Varys assured Ned that if he falsely confessed to treason, his life and the lives of his family would be spared. Taylor uniquely lit the scene with a few flaming torches tied together to provide just enough illumination to shoot by.

  “You think my life is some precious thing to me?” Ned asked Varys. “That I would trade my honor for a few more years of . . . of what? You grew up with actors. You learned their craft, and you learnt it well. But I grew up with soldiers. I learned how to die a long time ago.” To which Varys replied: “Pity. Such a pity. What of your daughter’s life, my lord? Is that a precious thing to you?”

  Ned trusted the Lannisters would hold up their end of the bargain because his execution would likely lead to an uprising in the North—their deal would help both sides. Except nobody counted on Joffrey, crowned king in the wake of his father’s death, flipping the script.

  Ned was brought onto the platform at the Sept of Baelor for judgment and gave his halting confession, just as promised. A gleeful Joffrey then made a speech: “My mother wishes me to let Lord Eddard join the Night’s Watch. Stripped of all titles and powers, he would serve the realm in permanent exile. And my lady Sansa has begged mercy for her father. But they have the soft hearts of women. So long as I am your king, treason shall never go unpunished. Ser Ilyn, bring me his head!”

  Waves of shock and horror washed over Sansa, watching from the platform, and Arya, secretly watching from the crowd—and over the viewers as well.

  ALAN TAYLOR: Our guiding principle was to tie ourselves very tightly to points of view and try and avoid generic coverage. In this case, to see the event through Arya’s eyes, through Sansa’s eyes, and through Ned Stark’s eyes—the three characters who our hearts go out to the most. This is the scene about a father and two daughters.

  In Martin’s version, the Night’s Watch brother Yoren coincidentally noticed Arya and took her away after the execution. The producers decided to have Ned spot Arya perched on the statue of Baelor and then tell Yoren her location as he passed him by. The importance of the moment is heightened by the rare use of a zoom shot as the camera dramatically pushed into a stunned Arya.

  ALAN TAYLOR: It’s unlike me to do something that zingy. But having decided it was about these two daughters, there’s a matching shot like that off Sansa. It felt good to say, “This is about these two.”

  As pointed out in Kim Renfro’s book The Unofficial Guide to Game of Thrones, throughout his life, Ned focused on protecting children—infant Jon Snow with his perilous birthright; young Daenerys, whom King Robert wanted to assassinate; even Cersei’s children when he foolishly warned her to take them and leave the capital.

  Ned managed to successfully protect one child, Arya, as his final act in the world.

  DAVID BENIOFF: For us, it was more important that Ned be the one to see her and say that one word to him, “Baelor.” We had the statue of Baelor [in the middle of the set] and had the name “Baelor” carved into it and thought we were being all smart. We failed to realize the crowd would be right in front of the word when we shot it. Luckily people seemed to figure it out anyway. It’s the one last thing Ned can do to protect this girl he loves so much. He looks out there and sees she’s gone, hopefully now she’s safe. But it’s also now just a sea of angry faces, and that’s all he’s left with. Sean Bean conveyed so much with no dialogue whatsoever.

  ALAN TAYLOR: I was directing [Maisie and Sophie] as kids. It was pretty straightforward—“There’s your dad, and this is bad.” For Arya, the warrior in her comes out. For Sansa, she starts out all smiles, thinking this is all for the good and her dad is doing the right thing, then she absolutely crashes when the horror gets unleashed. They have very different hearts.

  MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): A lot of actors and actresses pull from past experiences. I’m really good at convincing myself somebody’s killed my dad. That’s the great fun about acting, is you can pretend to be somebody else all day.

  JACK GLEESON (Joffrey Baratheon): I’m not gonna lie, it was a long shoot. That scene took three days. So it was hard sometimes to kind of feel the passion when there’s two hundred actors in front of you, you’re onstage, you have the lines, with these great actors behind you. But I was enjoying myself, and so I’m glad I looked like I was.

  Executioner Ser Ilyn Payne beheaded Ned with the Stark patriarch’s own broadsword, Ice. It’s the same blade Ned used to execute the deserter in the first episode. (The executioner would later earn a spot on Arya’s kill list, but Payne actor Wilko Johnson exited the series after season two due to receiving treatment for cancer.)

  ALAN TAYLOR: Sean was whispering to himself [when the sword came down]. He asked somebody what an appropriate prayer would be for somebody of his belief. People have tried to guess what he said, but it’s something private Sean created based on that.

  SEAN BEAN: You just play what’s on the page—he’s a good man trying to do his best in the middle of this corruption. He’s a fish out of water, he’s used to being up north in Winterfell where people are pretty straight and pragmatic, and he comes down to a place where people are playing games and backstabbing. I love the character, that he’s a principled man who tries to hold things together. This is a journey that he makes where ultimately his loyalty causes his downfall. But I just thought it was a wonderful piece of work.

  DAVID BENIOFF: There’s a parallel to the first episode, where Ned beheads a deserter and we’re seeing it from Bran’s perspective. Bran’s told very specifically, “Don’t look away,” and we see the whole thing. In episode nine, we shift from Ned to Arya, and she’s told, “Don’t look, don’t look,” and Yoren restrains her from seeing. She’ll be scarred anyway, but he doesn’t want her to have this image in her mind. So we don’t see what Arya doesn’t see.

  ALAN TAYLOR: I tried to heighten Ned’s subjectivity. You hear his breathing; we dropped all the sound out and went to his point of view. Then I traded his view with Arya’s, so you see her perspective as she watches the birds fly over and you hear her breathing—because she has inherited the Stark mantle.

  DAN WEISS: We didn’t want a gory Monty Python geyser, but we needed to see the blade enter his neck and cut on the frame where the blade was midneck. We needed it to be totally unambiguous. It was the longest discussion ever of where to cut a frame. We had very high-pitched arguments about whether to add another twelfth of a second. Two hours of discussion [about] whether [it should be] frame six or frame seven or frame eight.

  ALAN TAYLOR: For the final shot, we designed this elabo
rate crane shot to reveal the architecture over the top of the Sept of Baelor. But there wasn’t any architecture because we couldn’t afford to put the VFX [visual effects] in later. The shot unfortunately is still in the show, where you do this grand crane up that for some reason tilts toward the sky and then back down again. It was meant to have like an arch going over it and instead it looks like the camera lost its mind for a second and had a stroke and then returned to business. I’m a little embarrassed by that.

  Another minor oversight, likewise caused by the production running low on resources, ended up causing the team a much bigger headache. In the finale there’s a shot of Ned Stark’s severed head on a spike along with several others. In the first season’s DVD commentary, Taylor noted one of the mock heads was of former president George W. Bush.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I wanted to be a severed head on the wall where Joffrey makes Sansa look at Ned and the other severed heads. And I wanted to keep my severed head. David and Dan loved the idea, but they didn’t have the budget. Do you know what a severed head costs?

  BERNADETTE CAULFIELD (executive producer): It costs up to $5,000 for a good severed head, especially if you want eyes and human hair.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: It’s very expensive. As it turned out, they would have been better off to pay the money. Because instead they bought a box of used severed heads somewhere. They’re only seen for like three seconds. Nobody noticed anything until we did the Blu-ray and the director in his commentary said, “Notice two down from Ned, that’s George W. Bush on a spike!” We had Rush Limbaugh going, “Cancel the show! They cut off the president’s head! What disrespect!” It was like the whole world exploded.

  GINA BALIAN (former vice president of drama at HBO): Yes, including us. We called David and Dan in the middle of the night saying, “We’ve got a problem here.” They were really upset because it wasn’t intentional. They weren’t trying to make some statement.

  HBO released a statement of their own, however, publicly slamming the move as “unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste.”

  ALAN TAYLOR: I wasn’t going to mention that because I got in trouble the last time I mentioned it. We didn’t have enough heads. We had to use every head we had. [Bush’s head] had been made for some comedy. So we had to use it. I remember making some not-very-brilliant joke at the time, like, “You go to production with the heads you have, not with the heads you want”—paraphrasing [Bush’s secretary of defense] Donald Rumsfeld—because I was pretty angry at Bush and Rumsfeld at the time. I thought it was funny. Since then I’ve realized if someone made a joke like that about a president I believed in, I would have been offended too. I think I’ve probably mellowed a bit, though if you gave me the chance to use [Trump’s] head I’d probably jump at it.

  Otherwise, Ned Stark’s demise had the impact that the Game of Thrones team had hoped. Every other drama on television suddenly looked like they were playing things safe, abiding by unwritten rules only Thrones dared to violate. Narratively, the execution raised the stakes by putting all the other heroes into greater peril—particularly the Stark children, who were thrown into a sea of predators, each now forced to make life-and-death decisions in order to survive. “The execution of the execution was so flawless that it ultimately didn’t matter that I knew what was coming,” wrote Uproxx’s Alan Seppinwall. “That final scene was so gorgeously shot, and the weariness of Bean’s performance and the horror of Maisie Williams’s so perfectly conveyed the emotions of it, even as things seemed so chaotic.”

  AIDAN GILLEN (Littlefinger): What happened to Ned at the end of season one was what everything else that came after was built around, really, and the real hook that sold the show and novels on a human level. You really had to care, and with someone other than Sean playing that role, who knows how that would have worked out?

  GINA BALIAN: I was watching [Ned’s death] in editing and shedding a tear thinking, “We got here.” This didn’t feel like it was shot in Burbank. And I was so proud because there were so many points it could have gone awry.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I have an ego. Normally I like things done the way I did it. But David and Dan improved that scene. In the books, Ned doesn’t say anything or see Arya there and it’s purely coincidence that Yoren finds her. It’s a lovely moment, and I wish I had done it that way. The death of Ned Stark could not have been done any better.

  DAN WEISS: Ned dying is telling a hard truth about the price of honor and the price of morality in a world where not everybody has the same values as you do. It’s not a simplistic redemptive message, where you sacrifice yourself and it saves the day. A lot of times sacrifice ends up being futile.

  DAVID BENIOFF: We wanted a strong reaction, and we got one. I think apathy is the worst thing when making a show like this. If people are infuriated, it’s great that this fictional world has such an impact. It’s a tough thing to build up a character and make somebody as memorable and impressive as Ned and then get rid of him. But at the same time it leads to a story that is so much more suspenseful because you truly have no idea what is going to happen and who is going to survive. You cling to the characters when you know you can lose them at any moment.

  PETER DINKLAGE (Tyrion Lannister): It’s a testament to George. He loves the outsiders. Ned Stark’s great, he’s a hero, but George is not as interested in the heroes so much as the people who stand behind the heroes. It still amazes me how shocking [killing Ned] was to people, and it’s because it had never been done before. It still hasn’t been done again.

  Ned Stark’s death was followed by the loss of another major character, Khal Drogo. Just as Ned’s death propelled Arya and Sansa into greater jeopardy, Drogo’s demise gave way to Daenerys seizing her destiny.

  In the first-season finale, “Fire and Blood,” Daenerys burned Drogo’s body along with her three “petrified” dragon eggs and a sacrificial Mirri Maz Duur, the “witch” who betrayed Drogo after he led an attack on her people. Then Dany slowly entered the pyre’s flames in a seemingly suicidal act. “Daenerys has an understanding that she has to give herself over to something larger than herself without knowing exactly what’s going to happen,” Weiss explained on Making Game of Thrones, HBO’s behind-the-scenes production blog. “But she knows when she walks into that pyre that she’s not going to burn up.”

  At dawn, Ser Jorah discovered his khaleesi unscathed—along with three live baby dragons. In the most stunning shot of Thrones’ debut year, Daenerys rose from the ashes, Ser Jorah fell to his knees, and the Mother of Dragons was born.

  ALAN TAYLOR: A stuntwoman walked into the flames for Emilia. I didn’t think it was working because she was wearing a gossamer gown like Emilia was wearing and they had to put so much fire retardant on it that it looked like she just climbed out of a vat of Vaseline. I thought, “This is never going to work,” but it seems to work fine.

  Clarke’s real-life emotions about performing Daenerys’s rebirth nude were infused into her portrayal of the iconic moment, and she detailed her thoughts during each phase of the reveal.

  EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): On one side, that moment was incredibly powerful. And on the other side, I was butt naked in front of people I didn’t know. Alan saw the fear on my face and said, “Let’s lean into that then.” So there’s that close-up of me looking up at Ser Jorah, who’s looking down. And that’s exactly what I was going through: “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what I’m expected to feel. I don’t know what I’m expected to do. I’m fully aware that I couldn’t be more . . . open.”

  So the shot went from sitting down where there was fear and then as I stood up I was like, “It’s all out. So you just better own that shit.” Then as you stand up, you think, “Okay, you’ve done the worst bit. You’ve stood up. No one is behind you. No one saw up your ass, so you can stand all the way up now.” Suddenly that feels like a much more confident stance than just sitting cross-legged on the floor buck naked in front of people. Then I just n
aturally felt my shoulders go back.

  ALAN TAYLOR: Emilia was rightfully worried about gratuitous nudity, but she understood that it was important for the character to be reborn in the flame. There’s no way around it. [Not placing extras behind Clarke] was partly me being protective of her, and it was partly that we didn’t have enough extras. All the extras were standing in front of her, where they could be on camera. And we were cheating by using the few extras we had over and over again from shot to shot.

  EMILIA CLARKE: It was a glorious feeling of equal amounts adrenaline and equal amounts crippling fear. And those two things together described my whole journey on the show. There was one of those scenes every season where I’m like: “Beyoncé would be up here like, ‘And what?!’ and own this, but Emilia would not.”

  IAIN GLEN (Jorah Mormont): At the time, the dragons were just dots on Emilia’s naked body. But the way she looked and the way the pyre went up, it all felt pretty amazing, and there was that buzz around the cameras that something magical was being created.

  EMILIA CLARKE: They were like, “But what about the dragons?!” I decided I wasn’t going to stand there and think I have dragons all over me. This is a stupid example, but if I had my dog, I wouldn’t change my position because she was there. The dog would just exist, and just do whatever they’re going to do.

  ALAN TAYLOR: Her performance is so rich and layered in that scene. Also, Iain Glen’s performance. It’s one of those cinematic moments where you convey the wonder of what you’re seeing partly by seeing it but mostly through the old Spielberg trick of watching somebody else react to it. Jorah’s reaction when he sees Daenerys and the dragons and falls to his knee is so beautiful.