Deborah Riley, the show's production designer, discusses the real places that inspired the look of Dragonstone and other key locations ?If you?re asking an audience to believe in direwolves, dragons, and giants, you need the world to be as believable as possible.?
Production designer and art director Deborah Riley may have one of the most rewarding, and challenging, jobs in television right now: overseeing the set design for Game of Thrones, a series that consistently ups the ante for visuals and fantastic settings. And she believes that the upcoming Season 7 showcases her and her crew?s best work so far.
In recreating Westeros, Riley, who began working on the HBO series during Season 4, has overseen filming in locations across the globe, and created intricate sets for throne rooms and palaces spanning the entire fantasy world. The Australian designer and architect, however, was well trained to create spectacle on a large scale, having worked with Baz Luhrmann during Moulin Rouge and directed the opening ceremonies for the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics. ?I was 39 when I was first given the job, and probably wasn?t the most obvious choice,? she says. ?But working with Baz, as well as Alejandro González Iñárritu on 21 Grams, gave me experiences with visionary ways of approaching filmmaking. And working on the Olympics definitely teaches you to stay sane during the madness.?
To aid in her quest to make the series more believable, she often references real-world architec...