Introducing: On Set With
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Hi, HBO fans. This is Janice from the Max podcast team. Go behind the scenes with the production designers, set decorators, and the creative teams who made your favorite shows come to life. And check out On Set With from HGTV and Max. It's hosted by Suchin Pak. Listen and follow On Set With from HGTV and Max wherever you get your podcasts. Right now, here's an excerpt from the episode on Game of Thrones.

This episode contains explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. When you think epic, what do you picture? Maybe dragons soaring across the sky and acting vengeance with fire? Dracarys. Or a battle for survival against an army of the dead? Dracarys! Maybe you picture a caravan of warriors marching across a seemingly endless desert. Dracarys!

Or a 700-foot wall of ice at the edge of the world. The greatest structure ever built. The intrepid men of the Night's Watch. The wintry abode of White Walkers. Or maybe you picture all of these woven together in one dramatic story where a never-ending quest for power is battled out across generations. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

Game of Thrones changed the meaning of epic forever.

For eight seasons, this series took us on a journey across seven different kingdoms, exploring even the furthest corners of its world. It was so massive, you had to just live it. Taking a world this expansive from the pages of a book and bringing it to life on our screens is no small task. I remember just being blown away. I mean, it was an epic build, I have to say.

Luckily, there were two women who were up for the epic challenge. I'm Gemma Jackson, production designer for Game of Thrones. And I'm Michelle Clapton, costume designer for Game of Thrones. I'm Sujan Pak, and this is On Set With from HGTV and Max. Each episode, we take you behind the scenes of the most iconic on-screen worlds with the people who made them real. Let's go On Set With Game of Thrones. ♪

One of the most unique challenges for the Game of Thrones design team was the fact that they didn't just have to bring a world to life. They had to bring more than seven different kingdoms worth of worlds to life. I've got seven kingdoms to rule. One king, seven kingdoms. Production designer Gemma Jackson's goal was to make sure each of them felt distinct. My job really was to visualize and create the worlds.

It was very important that if you were to turn on your TV, that you would know which world you were in immediately. So there was a huge amount of thought and energy that went into how to separate each world.

Thankfully, Gemma got a head start imagining the Game of Thrones universe. It seemed to find her at its inception. My role has started in a slightly unusual way in that I happened to be in Los Angeles and one of the producers at HBO had been reading the books for her summer holidays and she was absolutely bowled over by them. She referred to them as crack on paper. She said, this is beyond, beyond incredible.

and she wanted some research doing. Was I up for it? And I said, sure, absolutely. And so I spent about three or four weeks quite literally down in the library. And it was just extraordinary because the more I read and the more I kind of looked into things, the broader the picture got. I mean, it ended up I knew that I could really go in any which way direction. And in fact, many years later, I talked to George Martin about this, who was not the most communicative person. And he himself said that

He just took this, he took that, he took things from wherever he felt they were appropriate to the storytelling. So I did this extraordinary kind of

of Bible for them. And then eventually it came round to actually going for the job. I hadn't got the job in this case. And so I went for the job and I said to the person from HBO, and don't forget my Bible because I'm not going to sit and do another mood board or something. Got to the meeting, it had vanished and it never showed up.

Even with her design bible missing, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were smart enough to hire the woman who'd done all of their preliminary research. Then it was time to find Gemma some collaborators.

So I've started the job and they're looking for a costume designer and we wanted somebody, you know, extraordinary and special. And there were a few lovely people we met, but nobody was really resonating. And a mutual friend of ours was in the shower and she went, Michelle Clapton and Gemma Jackson, it's a marriage in heaven. And so we met, she came round to my house and it worked, you know, that was it. We got married ready, didn't we then? We did. We did.

Yeah, it was funny because, yeah, my role, I mean, I came in obviously after you. And I remember coming to your house with a little trolley of books. And I said, this is how I see it. And you went, yes. And it was like this lovely sort of meeting of mine. But at this time, I hadn't met David and Dan. And so then I had a meeting, I think, at the Charlotte Street Hotel. And I literally went armed with a portfolio of my work.

I'd done so much on it because I really wanted to get it because I was really inexperienced at that time. And I started showing them. And I think about half an hour in, they said, well, you know, we really have to go somewhere else. No, you have to look at it all. They looked at me horrified. Anyway, then they had to leave. I said, oh, my God, I've really blown it. And then I got a call later saying, can you come back this afternoon and finish showing us what you had in your portfolio?

Ultimately, they must have been impressed with her preparation because Michelle got the gig. And then I was so terrified.

Because it was enormous. I mean, I hadn't ever worked on anything of that size before. And actually, Frank Dolger was amazing. He was a person who almost can't be and just said, don't look too far ahead. Have your ideas. We hope you enjoyed the beginning of this episode. Head over to the Onset with Feed to listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.