HBO won't let Game of Thrones look 'too dark' ever again says insider

Cinematographer Gustav Danielsson explains how the series departed from convention, while appeasing HBO's biggest fear

Seven months after the purposefully scrappy A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms wrapped its first season, Westeros returned to the kind of scale that has come to define it. House of the Dragon’s third season just concluded on HBO with another enormous, satisfying battle — and we’ll get one more massive, action-heavy season in 2028.

But as much as I dig watching dragons and armies fight for control of Westeros, it’s a testament to what the Kingdoms team pulled off that I’m a weeeeee bit nostalgic for that scaled-down saga from just seven months ago. That show was “expanded universe” done right.

According to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms cinematographer Gustav Danielsson, who spoke to Polygon on the heels of his Emmy nomination for season 1, the intention was always to illustrate what else Westeros could look like beyond Epic Fantasy. The production wanted to think smaller and rely overwhelmingly on the outdoors. As much as 90% of the series was shot outside around Northern Ireland, Danielsson estimates, trading the elaborate studio environments of HotD for forests, mountains, and mud. The Belfast weather did not comply, but he believes that variability allowed him and director Owen Harris to achieve something close to naturalism in the Game of Thrones universe.

“Nothing has to be consistent [in GoT] in terms of what HBO asks for,” Danielsson says of the visual relationship to the larger Westeros franchise. “Of course, I’ve seen it all before and it kind of relates to it in a way, but it’s its own piece, its own universe.”

“Naturalism” on a massive fantasy series is still a chore. A scene that looks like one continuous moment takes days to construct, with horses, extras, enormous lighting rigs and multiple units all needing to move in concert. The battle sequence Danielsson worked on in episode 5 took at least two weeks to shoot. The filmmakers wanted it to look like early dawn, which meant mist machines, wind, and supplemental VFX added later on all had to cooperate to make something that looked effortless.

Then there was the battle of just shooting the dang thing.

The fake blood was made with sugar, which attracted wasps. “You can actually see a few wasps in the final product,” Danielsson says with a laugh. Rather than necessarily removing every one, the production sometimes embraced them. “You can almost smell it when you have something flying around like that.”

If there were any real concerns inherited by Danielsson and his creative team from Game of Thrones, it was one of the oldest anxieties in Westeros: darkness.

In the wake of armchair cinematographers complaining about the OG Thrones’ lighting (likely due to their own home theater setups), HBO was worried about Seven Kingdoms looking too dark. Danielsson says there was “quite a big concern” early on when executives thought images were going too far into shadow, even as he, Harris and showrunner Ira Parker wanted a genuinely dark world. His target was the experience of being outside at night, rather than the artificially illuminated nighttime familiar from fantasy television.

“It’s never pitch black because your eyes adapt and you start seeing stuff,” he says. “So that’s the kind of night you want. You want to see stuff. You want to be dark, but you want to see stuff.”

It’s definitely not too dark.

That balance was not left to gut instinct. Danielsson and colorist Tim Drewett created a specific look for the digital cameras, one intended to feel somewhat filmic. On set, Danielsson could toggle between that finished look and the camera’s raw digital negative, checking that the image retained information in the shadows. On set, his Digital Imaging Technician, Cel Bothwell Fitzpatrick, could warn him when a shot was getting too dark.

And HBO had its own reality check. Danielsson says he spoke with the company’s engineers about a testing process involving a room filled with televisions configured in different ways to approximate the variety of sets viewers use at home. “We checked it out,” he says with a laugh, “and it’s definitely not too dark.”

Westeros is a world lit by candles and the sun, after all, and A Knight at Seven Kingdom was meant to feel even more born from the land. Looking back, Danielsson calls it a success: They didn’t invent a bigger Westeros or brighter Westeros. Just a different one.