How Vanja Cernjul Shot That Wild Finale Sequence in This Week's 'House of the Dragon'

Summertime is for beaches, ice cream—and dragons, of course.

Handy, then, that we had a pretty epic Season 2 episode of House of the Dragon this week which features monstrous faceoffs, fires, and flights, balanced neatly with some quieter character moments as the tension continues to build toward the finale. Queen Rhaenyra's search for new dragonriders continues with varying results, Queen Alicent takes a spa day, and Prince Daemon is still hanging out with Simon Russell Beale.

That's not all that's going on, of course.

This is your spoiler warning!

We were stoked to be able to get on Zoom with cinematographer Vanja Cernjul, who worked on episodes six and seven and got to shoot some of the season's most compelling action, like the mob scene that left Alicent traumatized and the unscripted kiss between Rhaenyra and Mysari. This week, Cernjul helped craft the tense dragon pit sequence that gave us some of the most dramatic dragon imagery in the series so far. It was a masterful mix of special effects, tension and action. And let me say, I was terrified Ulf was going to get cooked the entire time.

We asked this DP (who was recently Emmy-nominated for Jim Henson Idea Man) about planning for these episodes, the challenges of that episode seven sequence, and what advice he has for cinematographers.

Enjoy!

House of the Dragon Season 2 | Episode 7 Preview | Maxwww.youtube.com

Editor's note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

No Film School: I could probably talk to you just about the final sequences on episode seven for two hours. But to start, what does your prep process look like?

Vanja Cernjul: We had five teams consisting of a director, a DP, and a first AD. I was the only DP who worked with two different directors. Working with different directors is always a unique experience because each director has their own approach. I was particularly excited because the director of episode 206, Andrij Parekh, brought me with him to House of the Dragon. We went to film school together at NYU in the ‘90s and we worked on each other's student films, but we haven't worked together since, until House of the Dragon. But we always stayed in touch. Andrij had an amazing career as a cinematographer, and then, a couple of years back, he started to direct and became a very successful director very quickly. So I was really looking forward to working with him.

I had never met Loni Peristere, the director of episode 207, before. I met him in London when I arrived there. It was really great to discover how similar our tastes were in classical cinema. We quickly developed our own vocabulary based on all the films we both loved. There were two different directors, but parts of the process were very similar.

This was because House of the Dragon is such a massive project and also very diverse. You go in one episode from a huge set with 150 extras and 30 horses to dialogue scenes in a small room or to faraway remote locations, and you have to adapt to each of these challenges. To get to some of the locations, we had to pare down our large crew to a skeleton crew of maybe 16 people, probably the size of a student film crew.

Sometimes, we were able to improvise, give the actors freedom to explore, and discover what the scene was going to be during the blocking rehearsal. But the scenes that involved visual effects or complex stunt work had to be planned carefully and precisely.

Such scenes were planned through a very interesting process. I haven't done it before in exactly that way before. The ambition was to help make this season’s visual effects the best that they can be and to make the dragons as real as possible.

Visual effects take time. It doesn't matter how much money you have; if you run out of time, you can't do justice to the work. For the visual effects team to have as much time as possible, they had to know what we were planning to do ahead of time. So that process would go like this: I would meet with the director, and we would make a shot list first.

Based on the shot list, we would work with the storyboard artists to storyboard the scene. At this stage, we talked about the exact angles that we wanted to achieve, camera height, and compositions, and we tried to be as precise as possible.

Once the storyboards were done and everybody was on the same page, the visual effects department would take the storyboards and create pre-vis animations based on them. This was another level of precision, where we would even commit to a certain lens.

Of course, things would change slightly on the day, but we tried to give everyone as much information as possible about how we wanted to shoot it.

The VFX team did an amazing job on the pre-vis animations. These were almost short films on their own. Even the characters looked exactly like the actors. It was amazing. We would go back and forth a couple of times, fine-tuning these animations before we would commit to the plan. Of course, you have to be mindful because this process is very expensive. We wanted to go through the whole process only when it was really necessary.

I think on each episode that I shot, we did this for at least two or three scenes per episode, basically anything that involved dragons or stunt work. Our amazing visual effects supervisor, Dadi [Einarsson], was with us all the time on location, even on location scouts. It was really a team effort, and I really enjoyed it.

It was a very well-produced project, so we were given enough time to go through this process. We needed that time to prep it, and the whole preproduction process was as intense as the shooting days.

To jumpstart the storyboarding process with both directors, we used some scenes from classical cinema as inspiration.

So, for example, for episode 206, when Addam is being chased by Seasmoke, his future dragon, we used the famous scene from North by Northwest, Hitchcock's masterpiece, where Cary Grant is being chased by the crop duster. We thought it was a similar scene to ours because the plane is like a dragon, and Cary Grant has no idea what's going on and why he’s being chased by this plane. He just knows that his life might be in danger. As we developed the scene on the location it became its own thing, of course, but some traces of the original inspiration are still there.

For the opening scene in 207, Loni wanted to use a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the classic western from Sergio Leone. There was an iconic duel scene between Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda—long, contemplative, where the two men are walking around each other, measuring each other up.

In our scene, Rhaenyra and Addam are both with dragons, and it's a very dangerous situation, and nobody's quite sure how this is going to go. It helped us find a way to approach this epic scene.

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NFS: You mentioned the need to adapt. Now, famously, we know that the kiss at the end of episode six was not scripted. What was that process like on set?

Cernjul: I just talked about how some scenes had to be so precisely planned and had to be shot exactly as we planned it for months. That scene developed on the day, and that was really amazing to watch. Andrij [Parekh] gave actors the freedom to explore.

When we started, the blocking rehearsal looked completely different from what the scene ended up being. We started with the wide shot, of course, and the scene evolved for hours. We were shooting the whole time as the scene was developing. It was quite amazing.

It would be interesting to watch the raw footage from that day and see the differences between what we shot in the morning and what the blocking looked like in the afternoon. It was a creative process that produced a surprising scene that couldn’t be planned in exactly that way.

NFS: The close of episode seven is just stunning visually, and I feel like you shot it in a way that is fresh to the series. There was at least one oner I noticed in there that I really loved. I would love to know about your choices in the sequence.

Cernjul: Loni had the vision of the oner for this sequence very early on, because he wanted it to be as subjective as possible. We wanted to be close to Hugh [Kieran Bew] and experience this hellscape through his eyes, as people engulfed in flames were literally falling from the ceiling.

All the action with the dragons developed around that shot. In that scene, we established what this part of the universe looked like because it was never seen before, an enormous cave where these huge creatures live. The space was supposed to be so large that it was really hard to maintain the sense of scale. We had a big stage, but it was maybe one-tenth of what the actual space was supposed to be. Only the plinth piece was built, and it was the only anchor to reality in an ocean of blue screen.

The challenge was to maintain the sense of space. If you look at the scene, you'll see that it was all lit through one opening in the cave. When the space is supposed to be so large, it was difficult to understand the sense of where this opening is in relation to where the characters were. The VFX team provided us with iPads with the Cyclops app that we could use as a viewfinder, as it was showing us how the virtual world was interacting with the reality in front of the camera, and this was our main tool to navigate the space.

Also, trying to imagine such a large creature as the dragon Vermithor in this space. When the dragon turns around, how quickly does it happen? Where is the dragon's tail when it turns around? So it was really an exercise in inner visualization. The visual effects department helped us with the dragons as well. They had a large blue head of a dragon that two puppeteers were operating the whole time to give us some sense of where the creature is in the space. But Loni also developed his own technique.

On the set, usually we have this audio system called “the voice of God” available that the first AD or the director uses. You know those iconic old photos of Fellini directing trough a megaphone? Now we use a large speaker with a microphone that ADs and directors sometimes use when they have to project directions into a large space for many people.

So Loni used this system to describe the action of the dragon and the space, in real-time as we were shooting it so that all the actors were hearing it. "The dragon is moving slowly, the dragon is now a little closer to you." He would sometimes turn into the dragon and breathe like a dragon, trying to describe to the actors what it feels like when this creature is so close to you. But it helped everyone on the crew to understand what was happening. That was fun.

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NFS: I am still thinking about it. It is just so impressive and tense.

Cernjul: I am glad to hear that. The people on fire, that was all practical. That's all our incredible stunt team. And I think in one shot, we had 16 people that were lit on fire in one shot. I am not sure if that was ever done before.

And even though these are some of the best stunt people in the world, and they really know what they're doing—still, when you see a person on fire, it's scary to watch. It's happening right in front of you. Try to imagine 16 real people being hit by the flame thrower. On the day, being present there, I was like, "Oh my God, how is this even possible?"

So, that was another type of scene where the planning needed to be as precise as possible because you don't want to keep doing it. Even though the stunt team was happy to repeat it if we needed an extra take, we didn't want to do it more than absolutely necessary.

NFS: Are there one or two things that you've learned so far as a DP that you would pass on to someone?

Cernjul: I may be a cliche, but it's “work as much and as often as possible.” I did, I think, something like 30 short films before I shot my first feature. Many of them were student films, and my first showreel was built from my student films from NYU. Take any opportunity to shoot, and keep doing it. It's not the first time this has been said.

Another cliche that's also true—it's a business of relationships and building relationships with people you can learn from, and they can learn from you. It's a lifelong process, and it's always an investment that somehow always pays off. With me and Andrij, it paid off 30 years later when we met in film school.

So invest in relationships. That's probably the most valuable thing, and it may be hard to understand when you're in the very beginning, but the people you are meeting now might be the people you work with 30 years from now.