House of the Dragon takes cues from... Tom Cruise?

An episode of House of the Dragon drew inspiration from a pair of Tom Cruise franchises. Photo / @HouseofDragon

Season two finale director Geeta Vasant Patel says there’s more Top Gun and Mission: Impossible in the world of Westeros than you’d think.

Geeta Vasant Patel has a little secret about House of the Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones that’s concluding its second season on Sunday. One of the episodes she directed - the third one - drew inspiration from a pair of Tom Cruise franchises. In fact, one of the show’s characters is, according to Patel, the Westeros version of Maverick from Top Gun.

During the third episode, titled The Burning Mill, there’s a scene in which the character Baela chases a group of men into the forest while riding a dragon. The scene, though quick and attention-grabbing, took some heavy thinking to get right, Patel says. In fact, the crew, including showrunner Ryan Condal, asked questions such as: How fast is the dragon moving? How long can the dragon keep up with the men and how long can the men evade the dragon? What kind of dragon pilot is Baela? You know, logistical stuff.

One of the show’s characters is the Westeros version of Maverick from Top Gun.

Top Gun answered their questions.

“We were trying to explore what Baela’s personality was,” Patel says. “Ryan was experimenting with different angles. And one day he came in and he said, ‘She’s Maverick’.”

Makes sense: Baela, the dragon-rider, is speed demon pushing the limits of physics - dragon physics, anyway - with a charming grin.

The Cruise touchpoints didn’t end there. A later scene in the episode, in which the show’s heroine Rhaenyra sneaks through King’s Landing, was modeled after Mission: Impossible. Instead of Rhaenyra finding her way through the capital city with ease, Patel directed the scene into something Ethan Hunt-ish in which Rhaenyra has to evade guards, slip behind walls and even wear a disguise.

“And then we ran with it and expanded what was like three lines of a page into a day of shooting, because we just expanded into something very suspenseful,” Patel says.

Patel directed the eighth episode of the show’s first season. And for Season two, she also directed the finale - but she’d been thinking about how to film episodes in the Game of Thrones universe for years.

The director, who has helmed episodes for the Star Wars show Ahsoka and the Netflix cult classic Santa Clarita Diet, used to watch Game of Thrones and make notes to herself about what needed to happen and what she would have done differently. What she didn’t expect, she says, was how much a Westeros gig feels like directing theatre or an improv show: Actors are walking around, rehearsing lines and trying to find their inner motivations. How they film scenes and what appears on screen is always in flux. The stars will think through their lines and actions and then raise any questions or changes they’d suggest. Many times, according to Patel, directors will listen.

Case in point: There’s a scene in episode three in which Matt Smith’s character, Daemon, walks into a hallway at Harrenhal and attacks a guard. Originally, the scene was scripted to show the guard running away from Daemon. But Smith, after filming, suggested redoing the scene because Daemon is still, well, Daemon, and he wouldn’t hold back from hurting someone in the moment. They didn’t plan to shoot that extra scene, but they did it anyway.

“I think that’s one of the great things about these actors, this cast, most of them are theater actors,” Patel says. “They are very, very fine-tuned as far as thinking about the character lines, experimenting in the moment. They’re very privy to the rehearsal process onstage. And so they bring that to the show.”

One thing you won’t find in the theatre world is, well, dragons. So, when making a show about Westeros, directors have to work with their imagination, since the digitally concocted dragons will be added later. When filming, directors like Patel instruct actors to pretend there’s a dragon in the sky - something they’ve become very accustomed to doing.

Even so, the crew brought a model of a dragon head on set for the season finale to measure the scale of it, Patel says.

Directors instruct actors to pretend there’s a dragon in the sky. Photo / HBO

That’s about as much as she’d share about the finale, remaining tight-lipped about what happens in the season’s concluding episode. But she suggested the finale may require a rewatch of the show’s third episode, since they mirror each other in ways.

If you’ve been watching, you’ll remember the third episode depicted Alicent and Rhaenyra, the two leaders of the ongoing war for the throne, having a conversation about the motivations. Alicent revealed why she argued for her son to be king over Rhaenyra, who had been promised the throne. It came to light that Alicent had misunderstood a prophecy that her late husband, Rhaenyra’s father King Viserys, told her on his deathbed.

Those events pay off in episode eight, Patel says. That’s why she was picked to direct both. That’s why everything is connected.

“There are things that are echoes, things that are mirrors, many things that finally come to fruition,” she says.