Wow...
wow, wow, wow.
Look at this.
Look at this, guys.
The production design team have been able to create these worlds for real.
We had the Blight, we've had The Ways, which was just extraordinary environment.
The Ways is like the most talked about set ever.
We talked about The Ways for a year and a half.
I think the big challenge with The Ways was how to build it in such a way
that it wasn't a twelve minute CG scene.
When I got the script of episode
seven, the description of The Ways was “pitch black”
and only the lanterns can create a little bit of the light.
So we started thinking about using some natural caves.
We did a scout in Slovenia checking some of these big caves,
which of course, they are amazing,
but the problem is that they look like a natural cave,
and it's really important to have an element of something which was built.
So I was thinking, OK, maybe they create the path
from these basalt stones because if you see
the hexagonal shape of the basalt, you can kind of create pavement.
Some of the days we change
the configuration of The Ways, especially like a giant Lego set.
And after that, I have to be a little bit pragmatic.
So we said, OK, let's
do the platforms on the wheels so we can create different setups
we can make the wider platform, narrower platform, because we will use
the advantage of the hexagons being able to connect it together,
and they are really looking great.
We were all trying to figure out,
so how do we do The Blight and discussing with Rafe
and Andre was sort of like, we just don't want it to be kind
of this fantastical Huntsman or Snow White and the seven Dwarfs,
like you don't want to be a fantasy forest because this place, it’s a rotten place.
We were supposed to go to this island
in the Canaries called Gomera, which had this particular kind of forest.
It's a really interesting place, quite gnarly, but
it's not like kind of fantastical looking. It's a sort of very unique.
And then obviously the pandemic hit and we couldn't travel and things like that.
Quite quickly, we came to the conclusion
that we might have to build some kind of a forest.
Andre just landed this idea, which was just this sort of four or five legged thing
that really just looks like a tree that looked like a spider. I just saw that
and I went “That is most definitely a thing you could call The Blight.”
That was a challenging set
for us, time wise, and also nature is the trickiest thing to create
because it's very hard to manufacture all the details and the textures.
Each tree has to be touched by different professions.
Each leg is made from the metal tubes, which are creating the structure,
and after that, the sculpturists make the body of the tree from the foam.
So we had a shape of the tree, and after that, we need the texture of the tree
so another team did the molds from old trees with the molten foam
that you can bend it and you can play with that.
And that was another team who put the paint over,
and it was another team who put the moss and greenery over it.
Ones the tree was ready,
we put them together into the shape of the forest.
Once you're inside it and shooting, you feel lost, you feel overwhelmed.
You feel like everything's closing in and encroaching on you,
although it makes it harder to shoot in there, it does give you
that feeling that we were always hoping to get from The Blight.
It was the most incredible world to work in because,
you know, your fear as an actor is that you're going to have to conjure
the whole thing in your mind's eye in front of a blue screen.
I mean, the idea of having to create The Blight in front of a blue screen,
I was very nervous that that would be the case.
But in fact, you know, we had fronds and tendrils and stuff
that would brush on your clothes and limbs of people who died in The Blight
coming out of trees.
And it was really creepy and the lighting was fantastic
and a lot of our job’s done for us, you see, by this amazing world building.