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.

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.

“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