Game of Thrones A-Z (4 page)

‘We made all the costumes for the North from skins. For research, we looked at the Inuits and at Tibetan tribes – we try and look at peoples in different times in history to see how they would have dressed in that environment.

‘I also looked at Lascaux cave paintings in France; they have these wonderful animal paintings. We decided that every time they killed an animal, the hunters would have to paint an animal onto their costume. The better the hunter, the more covered in these drawings he would be, which I think visually is really strong. We’re always looking for ways to show who the leader is.’

Clapton is also allowed freedom to deviate from the book if needed, citing the example of King Renly, whose posse of rainbow warriors was excised from the screen as Clapton didn’t think it would translate from the book.

Instead, she is allowed to use her own and her team’s imagination. ‘From these discussions we will create mood boards for each new place, and I will start to draw for principals. We will also travel to Italy, Paris and Madrid to look at fabrics, as well as scout London – mainly Shepherds Bush, Chelsea Harbour and Berwick Street.’

After weeks of research, she locates to the workrooms, home to her cutters, markers and armourers. She prefers to make as much of the clothing and items in-house as possible because it is ‘practical and much more fulfilling’.

‘We have weavers, embroiderers and printers, so a lot of costumes are created from scratch,’ Clapton added.

‘Craster’s wives’ costumes, for instance, were woven from raffia, rabbit skin and feathers, which were then aged in our breakdown rooms. Likewise, Daenerys Dothraki’s costume was woven in-house. Each season we try to hire less costumes, although we sometimes have to commission some extras’ costumes to be made outside of the workroom due to time and numbers, but we still try to finish them on site.’

From there, it’s on to filming. Despite the hard work that’s gone into creating these costumes, many of them blend into the background, perversely hidden from your eyes, despite the blood and tears of craftwork that has gone into them. Filming also possesses a whole new host of challenges for Clapton. ‘One big thing is: the children keep growing! I mean, in all ways: outwards and upwards! But that aside, sometimes you don’t get to see the actor until quite close to shooting and, at that point, we are already quite a long way with the armour. With Brienne, for instance, she is a woman but we want to mistake her for a man; however, no matter what you do, women have hips. We just started making the lines on the armour go away from her waist and slowly she began to look more masculine; at the same time, the armour also had to be functional.’

As well as the costumes, the show’s hair designer, Kevin Alexander, inspired some of the other big visual talking points in the series.

Around 30 wigs are used in the show, with Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Carice van Houten and Natalie Dormer all wearing hairpieces that cost around $7,000 each, with hair sourced from India and Russia. Because of the hefty price tags, the wigs are washed, styled and indulged in glamorous products every few days.

Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa, has blonde hair in real life, but because she was only a teenager it was decided that they didn’t want to use peroxide on her – preferring instead to use around four different watercolour shades – which last around 10 days and need to be touched up constantly.

Jack Gleeson, who has naturally dark hair, needs his hair touched up daily, as well as kept short, as it makes him look younger for the role of evil young king Joffrey, who has blond Lannister locks.

Not everything is so glamorous and styled, however – multiple product brands, like Lee Stafford, VO5 Matte Clay, Fudge and Jonathan Dirt, are used for the peasant look, as well as Vaseline, and dirt powder, which is incidentally a real product.

Talking about dirtying up a garment, Clapton said, ‘If it takes three days to make a costume, it then takes another three days to destroy it and break it. After the actors have worn it a few days in the sun it gets even better – nice and ripe!’

Game of Thrones
 doesn’t look like any other fantasy epic, and Clapton puts this down to her refusal to ditch her work ethic. The ageing and breaking-down process of the costumes may be the most time-consuming process at work, but it is what makes the show so different from others that have preceded it.

‘When you are shooting in HD, breaking down a costume can’t be done too quickly or it will show,’ Clapton explained to the 
Hollywood Reporter
. ‘You spend two weeks breaking down, patching, dying, repatching. Then you trash it, age it, then trash it again and repair. You can’t just stick a couple of patches on it and spray it with dirt because that is exactly what it will look like on HD televisions.’

D

DAVOS SEAWORTH

Liam Cunningham said about the character to 
SFX
magazine, ‘Davos Seaworth aka – he’s probably got the unsexiest title of them all – the Onion Knight. He finds himself in a bizarre position because he was a criminal. Seventeen years before we meet him, there was a battle raging, and Stannis and his associates, family and everybody else, were under siege, starving, literally on death’s door, and Davos came in and saved the day with a large boat full of onions and meat. Stannis took him into his employ, made him a knight – hence the Onion Knight – but also he’d broken the law smuggling, so Stannis got out the cleaver and chopped off four of his fingers.’

He continued, ‘In a bizarre way, Davos has a certain amount of respect for that. He has a vein running through him of honour and duty and loyalty, and saw the right of that and has become Stannis’ right-hand man.’

His heroic gesture happened during Robert’s Rebellion.

The Storm’s End siege took place over a year, and his act allowed Stannis’ men to survive until Eddard Stark arrived.

Davos agreed to Stannis’ punishment as long as Stannis swung the blade himself, and kept the bones in a pouch around his neck as a good-luck gesture, believing it was what had given his family a future.

During Stannis’ attempts to overtake King’s Landing, Davos becomes part of the Battle of the Blackwater.

Stannis’ army is destroyed by wildfire, and he is thrown from the boat into the sea, feared dead. However, he is washed up and stranded on the Spears of the Merlin King.

When he is rescued, he attempts to kill Melisandre, blaming her for the defeat. Fearing that she would kill another of King Robert’s bastards, Edric Storm, as a sacrifice, he smuggled the young one out of Dragonstone.

It was feared that he was captured on the order of Cersei Lannister, with rumours that parts of his body were displayed for all to see. However, a lookalike prisoner was executed in his place.

Fan favourite Davos Seaworth is played by Irish actor Liam Cunningham.

Cunningham is a softly spoken actor but has an authoritative tone and commanding presence. It’s no surprise, then, that the 
Game of Thrones
 bosses were desperate to have him on the show.

‘I actually met them the first time around – for various reasons of timing it didn’t work out,’ he said to 
SFX
. ‘But they did say, “Look, we’ve got some really interesting guys coming in next year, please come up and talk to us.” Then Davos Seaworth came up and I said, “You bet ya, I’ll have some of that.” He’s not one of the grunts, anything could happen – who knows where this thing is going to go – but at the moment, I spend a lot of time talking and arguing, and trying to be diplomatic. It’s slightly more cerebral for the moment.’

Cunningham hinted at what is to come: ‘Things do get a little physical towards the end of this season, but I don’t want to give too much away,’ he said. ‘There’s an extraordinary climax that comes towards the latter half of the series (two), and the entire front of the series is building up this paranoia. We’ve got some great stuff coming up, certainly towards the end – Tyrion starts using his noggin that much more, not just to protect himself but to protect the kingdom and protect the throne. As the poster says, war is coming!’

DOTHRAKI LANGUAGE

One of the many tasks that faced Benioff and Weiss was creating a new language for the Dothraki clan – a fearsome group of riders and raiders with their own harsh tongue.

They turned to the Language Creation Society to create the sprawling language, asking members to come up with a single proposal – ultimately selecting David J. Peterson’s submission.

Drawing on vocabulary from Russia, Turkey, Estonia, Inuktitut and Swahili, he set about the mammoth task.

Peterson said in a statement, released by HBO:

In designing Dothraki, I wanted to remain as faithful as possible to the extant material in George R. R. Martin’s series. Though there isn’t a lot of data, there is evidence of a dominant word order (subject-verb-object), of adjectives appearing after nouns, and of the lack of a copula (to be). I’ve remained faithful to these elements, creating a sound aesthetic that will be familiar to readers, while giving the language depth and authenticity. My fondest desire is for fans of the series to look at a word from the Dothraki language and be unable to tell if it came from the books or from me and for viewers not even to realise it’s a constructed language.

For his part, Weiss added in the same statement:

We’re tremendously excited to be working with David and the LCS. The language he’s devised is phenomenal. It captures the essence of the Dothraki and brings another level of richness to their world.

We look forward to his first collection of Dothraki love sonnets.

Peterson didn’t take the task lightly. In Martin’s books, there are some choice words in Dothraki, but Weiss and Benioff were convinced the series needed an actual language, and not just some regurgitated mumbo jumbo, for certain scenes.

He created an extensive database of English to Dothraki terms, using nearly 2,000 vocabulary words, and recorded each on to CD so that the cast could hear how each word should sound. Those actors who would be speaking Dothraki would learn their language in English at first to get the pitch and emotion right, before then listening to the CDs in Dothraki.

Undeterred by learning a whole new language for the part, Jason Momoa, who plays Drogo, was just desperate to get started. ‘Some of the stuff I say, I’ve never heard said on TV or in the movies. So, to top it off with this amazing language that they’ve created, it was an honour. I don’t think I’ll ever get to play a character like that ever again. It’s just fantastic to submerge yourself in this foreign language. I can’t speak any other languages, it’s English and Dothraki now, but it was a trip.’

Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys (Dany), added to 
thisisfakediy.com
, ‘I remember on the first day filming Dothraki I was beyond petrified. You just have a mind blank when it comes to it. But once you get through that and the words start to become far more familiar you kind of almost just have to turn your brain off and you know it. It just comes out. So yeah, just trying to get some good acting in there as well is the difficult bit!’

A Dothraki day could make for a very long day’s filming, she added. ‘Basically it is a language that I could be fluent in but I’m not. You get the scripts through and the Dothraki on top of it so you get to kind of map the English onto the Dothraki, find the right intonations and all that kind of stuff, but it’s a language and a culture that has come from George’s imagination and we’re trying to put it on screen, so you kind of have liberty to sort of create it for yourself really as actors. So it was really, really good fun and it was a way of getting into Dany even more, and her world.’

However, creating a new language, unsurprisingly, has its hardships.

On 10 October 2011, Peterson was woken up around two in the morning. Being woken up wasn’t a new thing working on the show, with the production team hastily demanding a translation request despite the time difference, but he believed he had finished with series two.

Recalling the moment on his blog, he said, ‘I received an e-mail from Bryan Cogman at 4.03am [his time] entitled “EMERGENCY Dothraki line!!!” He said they needed the Dothraki for “Take all the gold and jewels”, and they needed it in a couple hours. Even though it was late, I quickly translated the line and sent it off to Bryan at 1.09pm [their time]. Unfortunately, it did 
not
, in fact, make it in time. Bryan wasn’t on set that day, but he said he thought they did it in Common language, which is unfortunate (the more Dothraki, the better!), but what could I do? So I chalked that one up to bad luck, and promptly forgot about it.’

However, he was stunned to find months later that Iain Glen had ad-libbed it. Luckily, he was impressed with Glen’s attempt and managed to work it in to fit the language that he created.

Glen himself said of the Dothraki language to
westeros.org
, ‘They’re a nightmare. It’s this gobbledygook language that’s very, very hard to learn, but it’s very much worth the effort because when you try and just make up your own, it always sounds very foolish. This very bright linguist developed this entire language, and so whenever a line is needed he’s referred to. He comes up with it, and it’s always very consistent. But it’s really hard. One line is okay, but if you have a speech, man, it’s hard – it’s really hard.

‘You really just need to learn it by rote. It’s this series of nonsense syllables. David says the line for you, so you learn the pattern but he doesn’t really do the intonation and he’s also American, so it sounds different. But he gives you the right sound. And then you think very clearly about the line in English and how you’d say it as you say the Dothraki line. So if it’s a line in Dothraki where you’re angry, you’ll learn it again and again to get it right.’

A hugely impressed Martin now seeks Peterson’s advice while working on the last two books, as he told 
Empire
, ‘I now consult him when I want to invent a new Dothraki word. He’s prepared a dictionary and a lexicon. It’s amazing; it added so much to the show to have them speak Dothraki with subtitles rather than just English.

‘In 2010, I visited the Jenolan Caves in Australia, and in some of the caves they have self-guided tours where you pick up a headset and get descriptions of what you’re looking at. Since this is a big tourist destination they offer these in many languages. One of which is Klingon. I was startled when I saw that. I do wonder how many people choose to take the Klingon tour. But that has now become my ambition, to have the Dothraki language added to that, so we have equality with the damn Klingons.’