Bigger than Titanic and Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon sets the dial to supersize

Kevin de la Noy knows a thing or two about sinking ships. “I’ve got a bit of a cheat on this one,” he says: “I did Titanic .”

In the late 1990s de La Noy worked with James Cameron on the ultimate ocean-going catastrophe, overseeing the building of the giant water tank and then the construction (and post-iceberg deconstruction) of Leo and Kate’s doomed liner. But the great battle set-piece that opens the new series of House of the Dragon , he says, is even bigger.

Abubakar Salim (left) as Alyn of Hull and Steve Toussaint as Lord Corlys Velaryon in season three of House of the Dragon. What does bigger than Titanic look like? On the set of season three of House of the Dragon on the Warner Bros. lot in Leavesden, England, last year, I was granted hallowed access (it’s next to the Harry Potter set, after all) to watch filming of the famed Battle of the Gullet, which will open up the new season. Throne-iacs and readers of George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood bestseller will know that the Battle of the Gullet, a remorselessly brutal naval tear-up, is the defining point in the Targaryen civil war between the Greens (who support the claim of Tom Glynn-Carney’s Aegon II Targaryen to the throne) and the Blacks (who support Emma D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra Targaryen).

But you don’t have to know anything about House of the Dragon , Game of Thrones or indeed Martin’s entire Westeros medieval fantasy world to see that this sea battle is one big deal. To the untrained eye, the Battle of the Gullet set looks most like a theme park ride.

In a deep water tank 40 metres across, five hydraulic gimbals are pitching and yawing dismembered ships from below, Captain Hook-a-likes are jumping from poop deck to rigging, broadswords are swinging, everything is on fire and no one can see a thing. Film crew waft smoke and spray water guns. Steam rises and blood boils. A tide of silicon corpses floats among the boats. It looks like one heck of a ride.

“It’s controlled chaos,” said Abubakar Salim, who plays Alyn of Hull, a sailor in the Velaryon fleet. “It’s literally a ship that is breaking apart and moving. You have to really remind yourself that you are in a bloody battle … because all I’m thinking about is Pirates of the Caribbean .”

Naturally, creating chaos requires total precision. The ships’ movements, as powered by the pumps and gimbals, are all computer-controlled.

Salim’s Alyn of Hull surveys the carnage in the Battle of the Gullet in House of the Dragon. “We have a black box and we sent that out to sea on a sailboat,” says SFX supervisor (and Oscar nominee) Michael Dawson. “It measures all the degrees of movement so we can then we can come back and put it into our computer system. That will extrapolate those movements and put it into the hydraulics so that what the ship did on that day we can match here.”

A moving stage, minimal visibility and people running every direction presents obvious challenges for the actors. In rehearsal, Steve Toussaint, as Lord Corlys Velaryon and the commander of the Black fleet, jumps on a moving floor, turns to confront an assailant … and just falls over.

“We learnt all the choreography months ago but today was the first time we did it all in front of the cameras,” Toussaint says afterwards. “And so yes, I fell. I mean I went down in stages.”

Toussaint pauses to take a drink – it’s a hot day, despite all the water everywhere. He looks back at the enormous floating balance board that is his office for the day. “It is about the spectacle: we want people to sit back and go, ‘Oh my goodness, look at that, how did they do that?’”

HOTD ’s forebear, Game of Thrones , made its name with a series of increasingly bravura set pieces such as the Battle of the Bastards, and Hardhome, episode-long assaults that redefined what was possible on television. As executive producer, de La Noy understands the Battle of the Gullet will be compared to what has gone before.

Abigail Thorn as Sharako Lohar in House of the Dragon. “You have to do better,” he says. “That’s a minimum requirement, to do better than what’s gone before. We’re well aware of what happened in the Battle of the Bastards but, you know, that’s 10 to 15 years ago, so we have to keep improving.”

It helps, de la Noy says, that the technology has improved too. “Digital water has come on hugely, so you can add water in there. And also, you’ve got to remember, when we shot Titanic , we were shooting on film. Now we’re shooting on digital. We had 71 stuntmen sliding down that tilting poop deck on Titanic ; we don’t need that number now, we can motion capture them, put them in and you will believe it because the level of visual effects has developed so rapidly.”

Though the spectacle is indeed spectacular, it’s still the case that dramas such as House of the Dragon only work over time if they’re founded in character and story. Otherwise, it’s just a video game. Toussaint’s Lord Corlys is, the actor says, precisely the kind of multi-faceted role that keeps viewers int…