‘House of the Dragon’ Director Clare Kilner On Bringing Personal Experiences To This Game of Thrones

HBO’s Game of Thrones was widely seen as primarily guided by male hands. Certainly, in its first few years, the gratuitous nudity and sex often put women in compromising and uncomfortable positions. That evolved over the course of the series as perspectives changed, in part thanks to the #MeToo movement. When House of the Dragon premiered in 2022, audiences understood that it could not be the same show as what we’d seen in early Game of Thrones days. Granted, Dragon boasts an entirely different vibe, focusing more on family and royal succession than lurid stories.

But over its eight year span, Game of Thrones only offered a single female behind the camera, Michelle MacLaren who received Emmy nominations for directing Breaking Bad and won Emmys twice as a producer. In contrast, the first season of House of the Dragon already saw two women directing nearly half the first season. One of those women was director Clare Kilner who, when asked about bringing the female perspective to House of the Dragon, revealed that its less about being a women and more about each director bringing their own lived experiences and influences to the story.

“It’s always difficult to say and pinpoint what it is you bring as a female director because every human being brings their own personal life experience to the show, but I had to really think a lot about it because I was given some big sex scenes,” Kilner admitted. “To be honest, produces quite like giving the episodes with sex to women now because I think people are a little bit scared of how to deal with it. It is a concern because you want to tell the story in the best way possible and make it entertaining, interesting, and personal. I just had to really start thinking about the character, the actors, and seeing it from their point of view and then also my own experiences.”

Kilner recalled directing a sequence in which Daemon and Rhaenyra Targaryen (Matt Smith and Milly Alcock, respectively) venture into a King’s Landing brothel. She equated the scene with a personal experience working in Berlin theater in her 20s. A coworker asked her to visit a local club, and Kilner’s recollections of the experience — its winding corridors, its naked bodies, and how the atmosphere felt “thick with sex” — directly influenced her staging of the Daemon and Rhaenyra sequence.

The final approach feels more authentic as it is largely seen through young Rhaenyra’s eyes, governed by Kilner so that she could ensure the actress felt safe at all times.

“What we evolved the scene to be was Rhaenyra, and Milly herself, coming into this room and not previously seeing it I told her that I didn’t want her to see what she’s walking into before she walks into it,” Kilner recalled. “It was interesting to reveal this hedonistic world through the eyes of a young girl who’s sort of looking at it fascinated, delighted, and horrified — all at the same time.”

Personal experiences also drove her Emmy-submitted episode, “The Green Council,” which sees the power elite of King’s Landing plotting to put the dead King Viserys’s son Prince Aegon on the throne, ignoring his previously communicated final wishes. Kilner equates the episode to a grand political coup, a country on the brink of descending into chaos. Kilner actually grew up in Argentina at the time of the Dirty War, the name commonly given to a period of state terrorism from 1974 to 1983.

She recalled the inescapable air of the chaotic world around her at the time and leveraged those sense memories when constructing the episode.

“It might not seem like it, but I drew on that. What the feeling was of the chaotic world around you as all the power is being challenged. No one knows who’s in power. Everyone’s vying for power. Everyone’s looking to each other to see who their allies and who their enemies will be. Can they play both sides? I thought that was incredibly interesting.”

The episode, of course, also provided Kilner the opportunity to work with CGI dragons for the first time in her career. The climactic moment of the episode happens during King Aegon’s coronation in King’s Landing. A previously imprisoned Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) escaped and made her way to the dragon pit below. After mounting her dragon Meleys, Rhaenys bursts through the floor of the coronation ceremony and threatens to burn the new king and his mother alive. But she doesn’t.

The moment, one of the biggest water cooler moments of season one, proved an extraordinary opportunity for the director to stage a sequence on a scale the likes of which she’d not previously worked. She focused her camera on the reactions of the people in the audience as the king is crowned, putting a human face on a legendary event. Logistically, Kilner needed to accurately represent the size of the space without actually having access to film in a space that large. She needed to convey the shock and terror that those in attendance, actually around 100 extras tiled for the finished product via CGI, felt when the dragon bursts through the floor. She also needed to work with stunt coordinators who staged people ricocheting, falling, and jumping all while on harnesses. And then there was the blue ball on a long stick that served as a stand-in for the massive dragon and the effort it took to work through the scene with actors reacting to it.

While the episode opens with a somber postlude to King Viserys’s death and a key political discussion between Rhaenys and Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), it’s the explosive finale that captured audience’s attention and set social media ablaze.

“I learned so much and enjoyed learning so much bringing that scene together in many, many ways. When it came out, I had a great fun with my friends hosting a viewing night for each episode. There was a video on YouTube or something like that where people in bars were watching [the episode]. I just so enjoyed watching people’s reactions to that dragon release. It tickled me pink.”

House of the Dragon season one streams exclusively on Max.