Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1126636
54 DGA QUARTERLY W O S E A S O N S l a t e r, i n t h e 7 t h s e a s o n episode "The Spoils of War," for which Matt Shakman would direct a d i f f e r e n t c r i t i c a l l y acclaimed battle, the fan-named "Loot Train A t t a c k ," h e 'd j u g g l e m a n y o f t h e s a m e elements as Nutter, but this time, on a larger scale. Shakman wanted, in part, to pay homage to classic Westerns, begin- ning with a distant rumbling heard by the stoic lance-and-shield toting Lannister army, who are guarding a long string of grain-filled wagons when they suddenly find themselves outmatched by not one but two op- ponents. First come the ground troops: ululating, weapon-brandishing Dothraki warriors on horseback. Then in from the sky swoops Queen Daenerys mounted on a CG dragon, which has now essentially become a full-blown weapon of war: It's the size of a 747, able to soar 100 feet in the air and turn troops into piles of white ash with 30-foot columns of fire. To amp up the sense of fear and pandemonium from an on-the-ground perspective, Shakman borrowed visual language, editing and music cues from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. "You have this overwhelming monstrosity coming from the air killing indiscriminately," says Shakman, citing the Apoca- lypse Now aerial attack in which Robert Duvall's deranged Col. Kilgore levels a Vietnamese village while blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." "I watched that sequence a lot," says Shakman. "The way the dragon moves through the smoke is how the helicopters are moving through the smoke in the sky. When Duvall's helicopter lands on the ground and the smoke gathers around, it is exactly the way Drogon [the dragon] looks when he lands on the ground and all the plumes of smoke go up around him." Because CGI sequences can take so long to create, render and edit, a Game of Thrones director has frequently been in the position of discovering that a specific effect's technol- ogy has evolved and improved since it was last deployed. Take, for example, Nutter's 5th season groundbreaker of Daenerys mounting her dragon. "That was a great moment in a great episode—but when you look back on it now, it feels more like some- thing from [Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 fantasy film] The Neverending Story," says Shakman, of an episode that featured 11 shots of Clarke riding the dragon. In Shakman's "Loot Train," there were more than 80. Shakman compared the way his next generation CG dragon could now dip and soar to nature documentaries about birds. "There's motion and shaking in the camera, a feeling of clouds going between you and her. The brilliant Joe Bauer had figured out a better system for the thing we called 'The Buck,' the mechanical dragon apparatus that [Emilia Clarke] sits on in front of a green screen at a studio in Belfast, Ireland. "They'd added these amazing dragon spikes and things that flap in the wind to give a sense of movement. We all know that we're watching someone ride something that does not exist in the real world and never could. But all of David Nutter Scenes from Season V: "The Dance of Dragons" PHOTOS: HBO