Pike has to know things backward and forward. The production is huge and moving at warp speed. “It's not like working with David Fincher,” she says to me, referring to the Gone Girl director's penchant for shooting 70 takes of a scene. “I think that one got a bit phony.”įinally, Briesewitz calls “cut.” Pike retreats from the weather into a nearby tent. “Can I do one more?” she asks Briesewitz, while apologizing to the extras scattered about. Pike runs through her speech, which is heavy with exposition for both the characters and the audience, a few times. “Your life isn't going to be what you thought,” Pike intones, as various cameras circle her. The episode's veteran television director, Uta Briesewitz, is arranging four of the show's main cast of relatively unknown young actors in a moment of reckoning: Pike's character, a woman with mysterious powers, has arrived to awaken them and set them on their way. On one side of the green, a camera sits on a long dolly track another camera operator stalks the scene, taking various close-ups. It's November 2019, and the production-comprising hundreds of, and on some days nearly a thousand, people-is filming the end of the first episode of what everyone hopes will be a television show that runs for, well: six seasons? Eight? A show that will be as epic and sensational and ubiquitous as Game of Thrones once was. Michael McElhatton, who played Roose Bolton on Game of Thrones and is playing a character called Tam al'Thor on The Wheel of Time, sits on a stump in the middle of it all in a big down jacket, staring at nothing in particular. Rain has begun to come down in earnest, pooling in the muddy streets and making the extras and the stuntmen shiver. Rosamund Pike, who starred in Gone Girl, is smudged with soot. The actors who wander the Two Rivers are made up to match. Every house-interior and exterior-has been charred enough so that it shows on camera.
There are holes in roofs, artfully destroyed beams. The town's inn, an intricately rendered two-story building, is now blackened, its left side plunged into spiky rubble: Smoke machines give the impression that it is still smoldering. Then, a few days back, the producers and set dressers of Amazon's The Wheel of Time burned it down. Not long ago, this quarry, 40 kilometers outside Prague, held a carefully built fake town called the Two Rivers.
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