Gustav Danielsson, FSF: Chasing Dusk in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

02:02 Jared Levy Okay. So, again, thanks for joining me here. And I wanted to say before we jump into Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, just that I'm such a big fan of the San Junipero episode. I think it was my favorite episode of Black Mirror, and I was really excited to understand that you shot that. And I was thinking about San Junipero and how I think I like it so much, in part because it is tonally such a different episode than the rest of Black Mirror. I feel like Black Mirror can be obviously pessimistic in a lot of ways towards how technology will affect us. And this kind of had... It was just a more optimistic episode, and I think that was a part of why it resonated so much. And I think interestingly, as like a bridge into Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, I think you can kinda make the argument that Knight of Seven Kingdoms does that too in regards to the Game of Thrones universe. And I was curious if that had ever dawned on you at all, if you gave any thought to that, just the way that there was something lighter. Obviously, Knight of Seven Kingdoms has its moments of a lot of violence and things, but there's a lot of humor in it too.

03:16 Gustav Danielsson Yes. No, I think you are absolutely right at making this connection. I'm pretty sure that the HBO whoever decides who's gonna shoot this had San Junipero in mind, when they choose the director Owen Harris, and he chooses me. So I think they knew they wanted someone that could deliver really personal story, something gripping, but also visual, I'd say. But different. So I think you're absolutely right about making this connection. I do too.

04:02 Jared Levy Yeah, that's cool. I mean, so you're saying that you did, did you guys speak about that directly when you were either in the interview process or after?

04:10 Gustav Danielsson I mean, Owen and I worked on a couple of shows and a couple of feature films before. We know each other well, so I don't know how much we spoke about San Junipero. When you work quite a lot with a director like we have, you kind of start developing almost like a language about how you talk about scenes visually in my case. And so I don't know how much we talked about San Junipero. It's more that it crossed my mind to make this connection. But I mean, there's lots in San Junipero that is similar. I mean, we used the same tricks, for example. In San Junipero, when we got the script, it was all set at night. And it's shot in South Africa, and nights in South Africa are completely black. So then we decided, let's shoot most of this at dusk, and then so you start shooting scenes at dusk. And we did the same to Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Lots of the night scenes, we pushed to dusk. Lots of day scenes we pushed closer to when the sun is setting, just to kind of naturally get a really, really nice light.

05:35 Jared Levy Totally. I mean, that sounds so luxurious knowing how short that window is. Did that decision extend your total shoot days, or how did you make up for that?

05:49 Gustav Danielsson I mean, when I shoot a scene like this, when you shoot a scene in dusk, for example, you have to give room for actors to play. I mean, maybe the dusk lasts for, let's say, half an hour. You have a window of perfect light. You start shooting the wider shots in that moment. And we had two cameras on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. So maybe you can get four up to six setups, wider setups. And then when you start moving into close-ups of actors and acting, you manufacture this light with big lights, basically. Big lamps. Big lighting setups. So then you have all the time almost in the world to get the acting right. But the feeling of this light that you wanted to have. So that's something we did on quite a lot of scenes on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. And also, for example, there is a big flashback sequence in this Episode 5. You have the battle, but there's also a flashback, and that sequence consists of quite a lot of short scenes. And when you do short scenes, it's quite simple to actually shoot them in the perfect light. It's not simple but it's easier.

07:13 Jared Levy Yeah. And I mean, there must be just so much coordination with the AD team about... 'Cause especially with these larger scenes, Knight of the Seven Kingdom, there's so much going on. I was curious to talk in more generally about it, but with this in mind, too, of just the fact that there are so many background actors. There is environmental elements going on. There are horses. I could just imagine the resets alone take a lot of time, so that coordination must have been a lot, especially if in that perfect window for your wide shots.

07:52 Gustav Danielsson Yes, definitely. You're absolutely right. Maybe you've been on a set or two like this, but it's absolutely right. It takes a tremendous time to do a setup when you do this massive setup with horses, extras, and everything like this. Not all the night shoots on this show. We didn't manage to do all of them in dusk. But we tried to always think that, if it is the proper night scene, then you don't want to have the dusk light. Maybe you want on the white just to have a little bit of blue in the sky just to kind of get that depth and the sky going. But you're right. I mean, trying to reset these shots took a very, very long time. So I mean, it's all like a big, big cooperation in between the AD department, light department, me, and the director to pull this kind of things off. But if you're working with a visual director, he's also prepared to make these choices and to get everyone on board.

09:05 Jared Levy Mean, yeah, no, that all makes sense because one of the things that I was thinking about as I was rewatching episode five was that a lot of these fight sequences, especially in episode five are, they don't have any dialogue. So I'm so curious how those scenes read in the script and then how that was translated into fight choreography and how you and Owen were able to create a shot list based off of that, knowing that the script itself, I don't know how thick or thin it was really.

09:44 Gustav Danielsson I would say compared to other fights I've done, where a lot of time you just leave out the fight for the director and stunt coordinator and me to kind of deal with on set because it's a very, very visual piece. If you just get the main parts, then it's less for us on the set. But in this case, this fight is very, very, very detailed in the script to start with. It's a long read, this fight. I don't know. So, when I first got this script, when I read it, I had a feeling, all right, so now he's going to die, Game of Thrones style. That's the feeling I got from reading the script, and you feel sad because yeah, you like the guy. And so that was an important note for me to have when we started to talking about the mood for this whole fighting sequence. And we made decisions to shoot this in the dawn light and in a mist and in the mud. All of these decisions were made to kind of create this very, very sinister mood. And I think they were really, really effective when it came to this fight sequence even though it made our life on set really, really complicated.

11:26 Jared Levy Yeah. Well, that was the thing that I was writing down, and I guess it kind of related to my question that we've already kinda discussed a little bit, is just the light being so even. I'm like, either you're just shooting it in this very short window over many days, or you're also deploying balloons, a massive amount of fly swatters. Was it strictly just shooting in that dawn light for all of those wides, and you just did it over the course of many days?

12:00 Gustav Danielsson No, no. I mean, we shot from morning till, we kind of lost the light in terms of how much light we had. So we had to shoot full-on days because I mean, this dawn light, it's just a way too narrow window to do this. We had to control the light. Basically, we'd induce lamps on these sequence. You use the existing light, and then you use subtract light from the existing light with big fly swatters. So we had fly swatters on big Manitus, seven by... Now I have to say this in... It's hard when it comes to feet because I work in Europe, and in... I work with the metric system. You can use meters.

12:56 Jared Levy It's fine. Yeah, use the metric system. That'll do.

12:59 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. Should I use the metric system? Seven by four meters. That's 20 by 12 feet. We have four of them. Most of them black to kind of just to get the negative. But if you have a sun, for example, and you want the direction coming from where the sun is, you just wanna take the hard edge off. So we used combinations of double nets and white diffusion. And if you put that in front of the sun, you still have the right direction from the sun, but it looks like a cloudy sun. And so basically, we had to manufacture the right situations for this, and trying to do this during this time span as quickly as we could. And also shooting the right direction because it's a little bit more forgiving, the light situation if you shoot it backlit.

13:53 Jared Levy Yeah. Yeah, and I'm sure also the fog itself as an atmospheric element was helping break it up, too. That was something I was thinking about as I was watching it.

14:05 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. I mean, the fog helps a lot with the light, and also it makes it easier to control, use the close environment of the two fighters. So you can control the light there with fly swatters. But then in the background the smoke is quite forgiving. It softens everything, take the hard edges off. So you kind of lose the feeling of hard light, sunlight in the back. So it helped a lot, even though the smoke was really, really tricky to handle because it's just...

14:42 Jared Levy Yeah. I mean, were you dealing with a lot of wind direction changes and having to wait for that? Did it slow you down a lot?

14:49 Gustav Danielsson It looks like your questions are quite clever, I must say. It's almost like you've been on this set. Yes, we dealt with lots of wind direction changes. Actually, when we started this sequence, I think we were very lucky. We started out shooting and the wind comes from one direction. It was blowing from the sea. So you put out these lay flats, basically big, big tubes that you have a fan in the end, and you fill them up with smoke, and you have small holes, so you get this even layer of smoke just coming through the scene but I think that lasts for maybe half a day, and then the wind changes. And also, we shot this show in Northern Ireland, which is lovely. It's beautiful. It's beautiful landscape, but it's got like four seasons in a day. That's what they say. So you can start out with it's wind and it's cloudy, which was perfect for this scene, but then all of a sudden, sun pops out, then the wind comes from the other direction, then it starts raining. And then you have to deal with that.

15:52 Jared Levy Yeah, very difficult. I can only imagine. Taking a step back, I did wanna talk about just the show overall in terms of the aesthetic, the look, and what you think about knowing that this is from an extended universe, and that to a degree, the language has already been defined with not just one show, but now multiple with House of the Dragon as well as Game of Thrones. How are you and Owen talking about finding something that felt like yours while still being in that world?

16:33 Gustav Danielsson Yeah, we talked a lot about this. And I think, I mean, talking about the original Game of Thrones, I like the way it looks. It's not like we were saying, "All right, we need to do something completely different." I think it looks really good. I think it's really good crafted. But one thing that differs in this show from the other show, it's much more intimate. It's about two characters. We have the knight and young Egg. So it's much more intimate story, and you don't have all these storylines, and it's not depending on a big spectacle. Of course we're trying to get really nice scale of things, putting these people in the beginning, for example, in these massive mountains, like that. But since it was this more intimate story, we tried to steer away from set pieces and stuff that looked manufactured and big and where you at least as a filmmaker start thinking, "All right, this is done in post." We wanted this to feel real earthy and gritty and real. So also this show, it's got a smaller budget than House of the Dragon and the last episodes of Game of Thrones, so we had to rely on much more shooting stuff in camera. And so, I think all these...

18:15 Jared Levy Probably to your benefit.

18:16 Gustav Danielsson Yeah, I think so too. I think we managed to do a really natural looking show. And we're trying to steer away from fancy camera movements where you start thinking about other stuff than what's in the shot. Just simple and simple photography where the story itself and the characters do their part. And as I said, of course, we're trying to make shots that are stunning and beautiful, but always trying to make it look like we were lucky with the weather. We're lucky that the sun was just setting as he rode down the mountain. But of course, that takes planning and waiting for that cloud to disappear so you get the light, which we did sometimes. You can't do that too much, though, but.

19:19 Jared Levy No, it's interesting because it does sound like a mixture of indie sensibility with a larger scale and scope production, and I really do think that it served it so well. And I think that a lot of the acclaim and praise that the show got is how much that specific aspect resonated, especially because I think by the time Game of Thrones ended and with House of the Dragon, it became so gargantuan that the more down-to-earth vibe of this show is a big part of its charm. And it's nice that you guys managed to really understand that going into it, capture it, and have that really be like the soul of the show.

20:10 Gustav Danielsson Well, thank you. I think it's just as scary watching one person that is about to die if you are really invested in that person, which you are in Dunk and Egg. You invest yourself in them so much. And that's of course, the story, the script, and the actors. I mean, the chemistry between the actors and all of that makes it possible. But if you're fearing for Dunk's life, that's enough. You don't have to burn a full city with dragons. And I'm not saying that I don't enjoy burning a full city with a dragon. That could be really exciting to watch. This was something different.

21:04 Jared Levy Knowing that you had that in mind, I'm always curious to know, I think it's always interesting and revealing, heading into this project, and you heard about this, and you knew that you were gonna take this on, what were the aspects of it that might have made you nervous or like the things that you really felt you had to think deeply about?

21:29 Gustav Danielsson When I got asked, that was fun because I was back at home and my kids were old enough to see Game of Thrones. So I just re-watched the whole show. I don't know, I bought the Game of Thrones board games for the kids. It was all Game of Thrones, and then I get this text from Owen, "Do you wanna shoot a sequel of the Game of Thrones?" I'm like, "Whoa." And my family was like, "Yeah, you have to do this." So yeah, I had to do this. I had to finish a little bit earlier on the show I shot in Sweden to go and shoot this. But I'm very happy to do this. But as soon as I got on board, I start feeling, "Whoa, this is such a legacy. You can definitely screw this up if you don't make this good enough. You're going to be scrutinized in your work because people, there are so many... It's such a big fan base and so much interest in the Game of Thrones world. So it was both scary I'm sure and challenging and fun to jump on board in the Game of Thrones world. But I was definitely scared in the beginning. I was also a little bit, because the show starts out quite slow actually. If you see it. I mean, the two first episodes are quite slow, and I was thinking, "Are people going to enjoy this?" And you can't really tell until you start hearing people's reactions, and people really, really liked it.

23:04 Jared Levy I think it went back to the original aspects of the first seasons of Game of Thrones that got so much acclaim about its strongest aspects for that, it was just people talking in rooms. With great dialogue and acting and intrigue. So to go back to that felt like going back to what made the show its best really, in my personal opinion. As you were reading the scripts and as you were starting to understand the actual story of the show versus just understanding that you were taking on a Game of Thrones sequel, was there anything that you highlighted as these were gonna be the hardest aspects? What were they to you, and how did you deal with them?

23:53 Gustav Danielsson For me as a cinematographer, I mean, there was a challenge about shooting this show because it was almost all set in an exterior world. And I know Ireland, it's beautiful. The landscape is great. It's got all these different kind of looks. So you can shoot over there and it looks like it's almost Mediterranean landscapes. But I knew also that because it's just next to the Atlantic, you get all this weather passing. So it's technically really complicated to get to shoot these scenes and get a look for a scene. I mean, let's say a scene takes a day to shoot, and you start shooting and it's sunshine, and then it starts raining, and then it's sunshine again. And you can't have rain in one angle and sun in that. So I know it was going to be a big challenge, and I spoke a lot with Owen about this. I spoke to my gaffer, Seamus Lynch. He's a local guy. He's a brilliant gaffer. And we talked about how we can control the weather and how we can control the lights to make a consistent look for full scenes, and how we can use this changing weather in a way to our benefit. But it was a challenge to shoot this. And it was a challenge to shooting something in this universe where from the beginning I was thinking, "Well, we don't have all the resources we had." And I thought, and I had to worry people were going to miss the scale of dragons, armies all of that. But seeing us concentrated to this one story about these two people, and you get invested in them, that's plenty.

26:17 Jared Levy and you made it feel big. 'Cause I wanted to talk to you about the fact that I really enjoyed your shot sequencing and the not shooting, just not doing a lot of, not going over in coverage really. And I was curious about what that conversation was like with Owen. Who was leading that thought process? And how do you two work together for coming up with that kind of... Especially in what I had in mind when I wrote down the note was when at the beginning before the joust starts in scene five. There are a low number amount of shots, but they're all so great, and they help build the tension and the scale. And I'm curious what kind of conversations are going on with that stuff in mind.

27:15 Gustav Danielsson And we worked a lot, me and Owen, and we normally plan the week. I mean, normally we plan during prep. We start planning out scenes, and he makes shot lists and I make floor plans, and we kind of decide how we should all do the scenes. And then we always go back to the scenes the weekend before we start shooting the scenes just to update whatever we do. Why we don't use so many setups? I mean, there's always a time aspect of doing things. But I mean, it's also nice just to shoot the scenes, I wouldn't say the least setups because you can get rich if you have lots of setups. But this was definitely a show. And also it's about staging. If you have people moving slowly through rooms and stuff like that, you can get really interesting angles without trying to be over complicated with cameras. But I think we had a two-camera setup, and we're trying to not get too many setups on scenes because I mean, it's basically you get the shots that scene needs. And I don't know if I made a very good explanation on how we work. But basically that's how we do it. And then normally when we read a script, I mean, Owen has lots of ideas on how he wants to do scenes, staging of actors, and all of that. And I can have ideas too. So we basically sit and we pick our little cherries in the script and start grabbing scenes and ideas from "Oh, you know what? What if we shoot this scene like this?" And then you read through the script a lot of times. And when you're getting closer to the shoot, you might have done almost all the setups that you're about to shoot, starting from the ones you think is really important or to the shot. To important shots that you don't wanna miss during the actual shooting. And then we plan this and how you go on the recce. You find the places. I photograph all the angles, and then we start building everything up. So when we start shooting scenes everyone knows what we are about to shoot, and you start lining it up so you shoot them in the right time of day, and all of that kind of stuff.

30:17 Jared Levy I guess it's just so helpful when your director is aligned with you about the way that the show will be edited, which is kind of ironic that that's the conversation that is the most helpful between the director and the DP. But I think it makes a lot of sense because you're in agreement on what the coverage needs are of scenes. And that's just so valuable 'cause if you're not, I could see that being quite a challenge. But obviously you guys have a lot of work together, and I'm sure you've kind of honed each other's sensibilities over the years.

30:56 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. And I mean, I don't think Owen is a director who likes a lot of setups. He likes to have options in the edit, especially when it comes to acting and pacing and stuff like that. And there were scenes we shot that I know that he wanted to use, we talked about "Let's do this in one take." But then you end up, well, "Let's add that shot so you can mix in between two takes," for example, stuff like that. No one of us are like, "Let's shoot this in the least setups possible." It's just like let's just get the angles that we need for this scene.

31:58 Jared Levy Right. Yeah, no, that makes sense too. I think doing anything in an almost forceful way is not allowing yourself to be reactive to what the thing needs. So even though low coverage might be a good thing in a general way, it might not be the right thing for a specific scene. So that makes sense to me too. Talking about the middle of the episode and how it almost feels like a disservice to call it a flashback because it's not short. It's a long chunk. It's like a whole episode in and of itself. And were you thinking about the look and feel any differently for that? And if so, how? Let's start there.

34:15 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. We talked a lot about this, me, Owen Harris, director, and Ira Parker, showrunner, how we should do with these flashbacks because it's definitely... You could say it's almost like he's passing out and remembering this. So it's definitely a flashback. So we thought about should we do a different LUT, or look on this? But we decided, no, we don't wanna do that because we have this quite natural-looking footage, and we don't wanna do something that would look posty, I would say, like something manufactured in post. I talked to Owen. So let's do this. Let's shoot this on another lens. So we shot all the flashback, it was only one lens. It was a Panavision T Series anamorphic lens that was a little bit detuned by Panavision. And that lens is built for a Super 35 sensor, meaning when we shot this on the Alexa Mini LF. We used a larger sensor than this lens is built for. This is a trick that a lot of shows though does now, and I've done it long time ago with exactly this lens. But we thought that would be nice. It's got a different texture, basically. So you have a really, really organic fall off toward the edges where the lens kind of doesn't really hold up, and you have a little bit darkness in the top and bottom. And also it gets more lensy in a way when close-ups and stuff like that. And then also we started shooting this flashback sequence in lock offs. We later on changed that idea, so we moved the camera a little bit. But then that's how we started this. We wanted this to have a different feel. I realized this when I've seen it with colleagues, that it's not something that is completely obvious, but it's got a different feeling, when you look at the flashbacks. And I really like that flashback sequence. It was also fun to shoot because this is the time where you actually broaden the universe a little bit. You start shooting in what's it called? Flea Bottom, different part of Westeros, different part of this world. And we found all these forests, hills, beautiful places where you can kind of stitch together this little story.

37:05 Jared Levy Yeah. Yeah, I noticed most the bokeh and just the swirl that was going on. Were you guys still doing a 16 by 9 extraction out of the anamorphic? Was it wide angle in terms of the final aspect ratio?

37:22 Gustav Danielsson No, the whole show's final aspect ratio is 2:1. And that doesn't change during the flashbacks. It's the same. It's as wide as HBO wanted us to go, basically. They were pushing to shoot this in a CinemaScope. I think this looks quite good in 2:1. I think also you shooting Dunk and Egg is such a small boy and Dunk is so tall. So you get these odd frames, that could be funny, but maybe not in the right way. If you go CinemaScope, you have to go really, really, really wide.

38:13 Jared Levy Yeah. No, 2:1 is used so much in TV, and I think it's good for that medium. And it felt good here, and it also, you're still getting all of the texture of the T series anyway, and it was a noticeable shift in a really nice way that just felt, I don't know. Not warmer visually, but maybe warmer emotionally. And I really enjoyed that.

38:45 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. And also, so fun just to shoot a whole sequence just using one lens. With the exception of one time, I think. I'll leave to you if you can see it.

38:58 Jared Levy I wanted to talk about inside those small city streets of Flea Bottom. I'm always so curious as to each cinematographer's approach to working in such low lighting conditions. Are you creating a LUT that's pulling the image one or two stops? Or how are you approaching handling that, and what techniques are you employing to give yourself a certain level of comfort that everything is there, but operating at the knife's edge?

39:32 Gustav Danielsson I'm sure you know this, but we developed a show LUT. I did that together with the colorist Tim Drewett at Warner Brothers, De Lane Lea. I mean, I shot so many tests of lenses and all of that. I haven't gone through that yet, but there were massive shootings before we started, picking lenses, shooting all the different fabrics, shooting different lamps, and lanterns, and interesting and candles, and all of that. And when we did that, we sent some of off, and we start creating a LUT, which took us quite a long time. And when we started shooting, you have a LUT, and then, it's not perfect. You have the colorist correcting it. So by day two or three, we have almost like a perfect LUT that we knew this is how the show is gonna look. And it's great because everyone knows how it's gonna look in the very end. But basically, when I shoot in Flea Bottom, for example, not in the streets. They're not dark enough. But if you wanna shoot something really dark, then you have the LUT on and the LUT gives more contrast to the look. And if you switch, you can also always look at the raw image, the digital raw image that you have in camera, and it's got a brighter exposure, so you can always... I ask my DIT Cel Bothwell-Fitzpatrick, just, "Okay, let's check exposure." Since we're not shooting on film, you don't do it with a light meter anymore. You can basically look at the image, see how it looks if it looks good to the eye because the director, me and the showrunner, we wanted some scenes to be really dark. But then, again, you have the exposure in the negative.

41:44 Jared Levy And besides just the contrast, do you ever pull your image and rate the camera? Pull, multiple stops, or is that not something that you do?

41:56 Gustav Danielsson Oh, you mean, stop down a little bit just to be safe?

42:00 Jared Levy Your LUT is a stop or two pulled versus your negative.

42:10 Gustav Danielsson The LUT is, I would say, quite neutral. But it's quite contrasty, meaning the darks are getting darker in the LUT. So they will on a monitor look almost black. Now, I would say on a monitor when you shoot and you look at the LUT it looks great, but it looks on the verge of being a little bit too dark. But now it's one and a half years I've shot this. I normally when I shoot night stuff, if I wanna feel really safe, you don't wanna gain up the cameras too much because then you get the very unsafe medium to shoot on. We shot almost everything at 800, which is a safe exposure, I would say, because you know you can always crank the cameras to 1600, for example, so you always have one stop more. But if your question is whether we used night LUT, I know why we created a night LUT, but I'm pretty sure we didn't use it.

43:28 Jared Levy So you just had one single show LUT for the whole run?

43:30 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. Normally I tend to use only one LUT because I feel much more comfortable. Because also sometimes if you, let's say you're shooting a night scene and you have a blue sky, for example, and you add your night LUT, that blue sky is just gone because your night LUT is a little bit safe, exposing everything down. And then you have everyone standing looking at monitors that doesn't look good. So it's better, I'd say keep the Alexa at 800 and shoot with one LUT, and you have safe exposure, doing that trick. And also one thing, when we did shoot night stuff, we had another set of lenses. We had the Panavision VA lenses, and they open up to 1.4, which means you can get that little bit of, if you wanna get a little bit more of the night sky, for example, you shoot that longer. You get almost two stops more than anamorphic lenses that shot at 2.8. And another thing that it simplifies is if you shoot with candles, a double-wick candle that we used on this show could give enough light for a little bit of space, meaning you don't have to add lights from the outside. You have a very natural direction. It adds to the natural feel, I think, to be able to shoot with these lenses.

45:05 Jared Levy Yeah. The fact that you could at times use actual candle lighting is amazing. And given the nature of the show in particular and the medieval aspect of it all with no real, no electricity, obviously, kind of a real luxury that you get to do that.

45:27 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. I mean, yeah, definitely. I mean, we had lots of discussions also because basically, we didn't wanna shoot this too dark, which is something that I think all the Game of Thrones world, all these worlds are having a problem of how should we shoot night stuff? Because as I said before earlier, we did want it to look quite naturalistic in a way. We didn't want to have this very, very strong moon, meaning almost everything at night is lit by candles, flambeau, lanterns, stuff like that. And so it's a balance to how the world should look at night. I think my reference to a really nice night shots, I think is how it looks to the eye when you're walking around at night, and your eyes getting, are getting used to this light level. And basically, it's very quite rarely you have a pitch black night if you're walking around at night because your eyes get used to this. And of course, this has to be manufactured with big lamps a lot of times. Yeah, I kind of lost track there on your question. But yeah. No, I remember now. I remember it's the darkness in the Game of Thrones that you have the balance. I think we managed to find a really nice darkness. It was dark. It was quite dark, but it was rich as well.

47:21 Jared Levy No, you kept the detail, which I think was the problem that they ran into. I think there was that famous night battle in the original series that got a lot of flack for visibility issues and all of that, and I think that there's been a change of approach there. But I think by the time it came to your show, you guys had that figured out quite well. And I haven't yet had to do something where I'm in a story that doesn't have electricity as an option. And that obviously, at least in terms of motivated sources, it limits you. But I think it's really well said about how much your eye does compensate, and that if you allow that to be your guide for what feels natural or not, as you're lighting. It's like it seems so simple, but it's true. You shouldn't hold yourself back too much because you can see at night fairly well. Almost all the time.

48:26 Gustav Danielsson I think so. One technical thing about this night stuff and why people were saying that the Battle of the... not the Battle of the Bastards, but the Night King, is that everyone's got different televisions as well. And as I said, when I rewatched Game of Thrones and I saw this battle, I had a new television. And I thought it looked mind-blowing. I thought it was perfect. It was dark, but dark in a way it was supposed to be. So I'm guessing a lot of this criticism came from people who had really bad settings on their televisions or...

49:10 Jared Levy Absolutely. Bad settings. They watched it during the day with the windows open. It's like I watched it on my OLED in a dark room, and I thought it was riveting. And then I go online and I'm seeing people complain. I'm like, "I don't understand what the problem was."

49:29 Gustav Danielsson I was thinking to myself, "Did they regrade the whole show in... when they were sending it? Have they changed it?" Because it didn't look dark to me when I saw it.

49:41 Jared Levy Now that you mention that, I think that I read that they might have adjusted it after, but that's just online speculation stuff, so I really have no idea what they really did. But I did hear that maybe that happened. But again I'm not speaking about that from any point of real facts. But before we move into the final questions, I am curious to hear more about your lens testing. It sounds like it was really quite intense and detailed. So you must have also been working with other departments who, like wardrobe, bringing in textures and things like that. How in-depth does it get for you?

50:27 Gustav Danielsson Testing is something I think most DPs take quite seriously because that is the time when you can actually do some changes to lots of stuff. So let's talk about lenses. Yeah, I think I've tested almost any lens I can get a hold. Not all of them. Me and Owen talked about what kind of lenses we were looking, what kind of feel we wanted to. And we knew we were going to end up with a two-to-one aspect ratio, which is also a decision when you pick lenses. We both wanted to shoot this on anamorphic lenses because we wanted that natural bouquet you get from that. Something that feels very, very much in camera, which was the idea of this whole show. So I tested lots of lenses, and why didn't I choose Panavision Ultra Panatars from the very, very beginning? Because I've tested them quite soon, but they have a 2.8 stop, meaning you wanna stop, so you maybe end up shooting a little bit stopped down. So they're not super fast. They're quite big. They are vintage and quite hard to get hold of. We wanted two full sets, and I've been renting them from Panavision Ireland, and I got help from Dave Doyle. They had to call in lenses from America, I think from Cape Town as well, and we tested them, and they all had their different personalities. They were definitely the best 50 millimeter and not so good 50 millimeters. Normally shooting two cameras, you can always use that 50 millimeter. They had all these different personalities. It was kind of hard to get hold of two really nice functional sets, but we did in the end. I've definitely tested all the anamorphic lenses I could get hold of in Northern Ireland. But we landed on these because they had something really classy. They're a little bit soft, but they are not too soft. And they were really balanced, I would say, in terms of how much look you get and how much... they weren't too looky. But they were soft, and they had a classy feeling to them. So we decided to shoot on these lenses. And when we did that, I decided, "Okay, let's get some VA lenses for the night scenes we know we wanna shoot that are really lit by candles and stuff like that." 'Cause I knew they were going to look better on VA lenses. The VAs lenses are also vintage. You don't have the same squeeze, but it's something I think it's almost impossible to see, in a show like this, when we switch to the VA lenses. They are quite close in a tone.

53:50 Jared Levy Yeah. And also the fact that you're extrapolating for two to one, the squeeze is probably less of a...

53:58 Gustav Danielsson Exactly. I mean, they were only a 1.3 squeeze. The Ultra Panatar is only a 1.3 squeeze, so they're not super anamorphic. They were just perfect because we're shooting 3:2 aspect ratio on the Alexa Mini LF, and squeezing that to two to one meant that for using the Ultra Panatars, we got to use almost a full sensor size, which we wanted. We wanted to shoot as large as we possibly could on the Mini LF.

54:30 Jared Levy Yeah. So we got the lenses, especially for all of the portraiture.

54:32 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. We shot almost everything, as close to wide open as we could. But then when we have these lenses, and even before that, we start testing stuff with art department, for example. And we tested all the lanterns, the double-wicked candles scene. I mean, they gave huge flames that were really good for lighting people. So, I mean, almost all the time we did have lights on set. And we had also a gaffer that's very inventive, Seamus Lynch. And we had, for example, when we wanted to shoot fire lights, where we were experimenting. Okay, should we shoot this with natural fire? Should we shoot this with gas? It's called a witch's finger, which is basically, looks like a hand almost with pipes, with gas, and you use that for lightning. But we found that the witch's fingers had a flickering to them that looked almost artificial. It was sort of like this pumping light, quite fast in a very, very repeated, and no, that looked almost fake. So we ended up using quite a big lighting setup that the gaffer, Seamus Lynch had built. He called it the Dalek. The Dalek is a robot in a show in England. So it's like blinking, it's basically light bulbs. And we could have as much as I think 48 light bulbs in that, 500 watts or 275 watts photo flood lights. Quite heavy. Yeah, heavy setup.

56:49 Jared Levy Yeah, but those lights were all on a dimmer, so they were all firing at different times to create artificial flame?

56:54 Gustav Danielsson Our dimmer operator, Gino Lynch, he had a fire recorded on a video, and you basically program these lights to this fire. And then you can control lots of different aspects to this. And that looks just amazing, because you have the beauty of a tungsten light instead of the LED lights, which are nice, but it's always better to have proper tungsten. And we had full control. So whenever, almost every time we had fire, we did use this Dalek light, big, cumbersome, that sometimes we had to dig in the ground just to hide it from shots. I mean, it sounds amazing. And we tried to use it as much as possible. Yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing, but super fun. That was super fun. And just imagine having 48 500 watt lamps. Gets quite warm as well.

57:52 Jared Levy Yeah. Yeah, it's practically a real fireplace at that point.

57:56 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. No, so we tested lights like that, and how much we get from a candle, because there is a candle scene in this flashback moment where young Dunk and his friend sits around the candle. And it's not all candle, but we hide small lamps around that candle, and most of the light comes from the candle. And I worked with a set decorator, Stephanie Rea, with all these lamps and prepared them to, you could have a candle inside, we can hide small LED lights on the lamp itself, the lantern. And also, for all the tent scenes that we saw, we had to check all the different fabrics. They were imported from India, so they were quite... Takes quite a lot of time. You realize that the tent that has a really, really subtle color looking at the outside, and then you step inside and you start lighting it from the outside, because you wanna shoot the scene like that. And all of a sudden it's like almost neon pink. And it doesn't feel like anything in this world. So of course, it's nice to test that and then just to find yourself in a set that is almost impossible to shoot at. So it's all a very big, big cooperation to make all of this look good. And you talk about together with costume designer, Lorna Marie Mugan. Beautiful costumes, but it's also a question of how much should we wear this down, which colors work together. We wanted this to be rich and colorful, but you don't want it to look like some kind of... What do you call these things that people, though, when they're trying to do medieval stuff? You go to a medieval week somewhere and you dress up.

60:07 Jared Levy Oh, like Ren Fair?

60:08 Gustav Danielsson Yeah. That's... where's the balance? How do you get nice and colorful, but it shouldn't feel like that. It should feel really... So I mean, I'm very grateful because you can't do a good job as a cinematographer unless you have everyone is on board on this corporate work just to make a beautiful things on scene.

60:37 Jared Levy Yeah. No, totally, and I guess I was gonna ask to finish up, I have just two more questions, and this kind of seems like it is maybe the thing that you were reflecting on but I was curious. Obviously, you were nominated for an Emmy for this episode, and when you heard the news that you were nominated, I was just curious what that made you reflect on.

61:01 Gustav Danielsson Well, I was in a car, I was on vacation with my family, and I got all these pings on my phone. I think it was my agent that first started saying that I won. Not won, sorry. That I was nominated. But for me, this nomination feels a little bit like a win. I'm very happy just to be nominated. Of course it would be great to win, but it's so nice to be nominated for this. I'm happy to hear we got another, I think we have nine nominations in total. I'm really, really happy that the show got so many nominations. And yeah, Owen Harris called me up, and Ira Parker called me up. It was just great. I'm just grateful. I knew HBO sent in the show for...

62:11 Jared Levy Consideration?

62:12 Gustav Danielsson Consideration, yes. And parts of me wanted to be nominated, but I was very happy for everyone that we got so many nominations.

62:24 Jared Levy Yeah. Well, especially the way that you're describing even just the lens test, it's just so clear how much the collaboration is a part of even the cinematography alone. So it's just nice that it's getting all of those lauds for everything. And I guess my last question... Go ahead.

62:49 Gustav Danielsson Yeah, yeah. Can I just answer that quickly? I think you put it so well because every time you shoot something, you're trying your best to make the best cinematography, 'cause that's my job. But if you want this show or film to be recognized as something, everything has to be good. Because if something else fails big time, let's say it's bad acting all over, no one's gonna care about the cinematography. Or if the script is bad, or if you shoot, you take beautiful images, pictures, but the wardrobe or the setting, the art department, if that's not work, everything has to work perfectly to make my job reach this kind of level.

63:45 Jared Levy Yeah. It's true, and I think it's such a humbling part of this industry is how much is in your hands and also how much is out of it, and how much you have to rely on the people around you. And the last question is something that I ask everybody, and it's thinking about this project, what was the hardest day on the shoot mentally, and what was the hardest day physically? Were they the same? Were they different?

64:23 Gustav Danielsson Good question. Mentally, when we were getting closer to the end of the shoot, you find yourself having a few scenes, you've dropped a few scenes maybe trying to kind of puzzle in together, make everything last. And we have these big fighting sequence ahead of us. And I remember we were thinking, "How are we going to manage this in this time span?" And we knew there were no way we could get more days, but it felt like this is impossible. And you worked hard. You've been shooting for months, and you work so hard. Well, then you realize, well, you just have to work even harder for whatever weeks that are left. And we did. Well, you realize you manage. I think in the end, yeah, it was manageable, but it was really, really, really tough. It was one night, I can just tell you, one night when towards the end where we're shooting and I'm looking at the light. We have a big setup, people moving about. It's when Dunk comes to get his armor from the armorer. And I look at his face and I say, "Whoa, it's way too bright." And I'm talking to the dimmer guy like, "Oh, dim down that light to the right. Dim down that light to the right." And I look to the right and I see the whole set is too bright. I'm like, "You have to..." And he's like, "Oh, it's dimmed down." And it was kind of, everyone was tired. The problem on a film set is that everyone is just too motivated all the time to do their best. So that's why it takes time because everyone wants to finesse and blah, blah, blah. And as you said before, it's gonna take another half an hour to get this set up, and I'm fucking it up because there's this bright light just destroying it. And then I look closely in the monitor and I see it's not a light, it's a fire. And I look over there and then we see the whole crew sees the set is on fire. We had fire everywhere and you have this oven that just started to burn. And then within seconds, this quite big fire on set. And then you have the fire department coming in. They have the emptying there. For some time there, it felt like, whoa, the whole set is gonna burn down. A few minutes later, after a few buckets of water, they just readdress that piece of the set with some fabric and we kept on shooting, but it was just such a nice feeling in the team afterwards because everyone had been working so hard. Everyone was so almost, tense. But afterwards it just felt like was this big relief. I mean, the fire. That might been one of the days that was physically hard. I didn't operate my cameras myself, so that could be really physically hard. But I had A Camera Operator Sebastian Barraclough, B Camera Operator Peter Byrne who was these amazing operators. So physically it wasn't that hard for me, even though I had to, you run around, you check lights, you do all of that stuff. But you don't have to carry the camera all the time.

68:33 Jared Levy And also, that's why, I don't know, part of the great thing about these projects are you really, you go through this whole thing with people, and it bonds you. And by the end you really do feel like a company. And it's nice to hear that you experience that as well. And also just the capacity for you to take on more than you thought possible, in the end.

69:05 Gustav Danielsson It was very nice. Well, thank you. I had a very nice crew, and I know most of the crew are shooting season two now, and I hear from them. They have a nice time, but they also had horrible weather and all of that going on.

69:21 Jared Levy Well, yeah, no, it's a whole new circus I'm sure with all of it, with all the same levels of problems and difficulties. But this has been a great conversation. I've learned so much chatting with you, and it's great to hear your thoughts on everything. And so, thanks so much for coming on and chatting through everything with me. And hopefully, there's more projects we can discuss in the future.

69:45 Gustav Danielsson Definitely. Thank you so much. Thanks for a nice interview.