Inside story of how Game of Thrones world was created

Windy, freezing, and built into a cliff face with a working lift and forge, Brisbane’s Emmy-winning production designer Deborah Riley reveals the stories behind the famous Game of Thrones sets.

Moments are often considered life-changing in retrospect.

But for Deborah Riley it hit her in an instant when she spoke to David Benioff, the co-creator of the television adaptation of Game of Thrones, over Skype in 2013.

She was working as a production designer at the time on a small film set in Louisiana, in America’s Deep South, earning $100 a day, five years after leaving Australia for Hollywood with grand dreams that were so far coming up short.

So the weight of being handed a job on one of the most successful television series in history crashed into her with full force.

“David said, ‘You’re a Riley, let’s take you home’, and I said, ‘As in, Ireland?’” Riley, 48, recalls, noting the HBO hit series was filmed in the ice-cold northern city of Belfast.

“He said, ‘Yeah Deb, you can exchange one swamp for another’, and I just sat on the floor, I was not even able to sit on a chair, just the power of what he had just said to me, I knew it was changing my life.”

Deborah Riley.

Riley, who had grown up in the northern Brisbane suburb of Bracken Ridge, took over as Game of Thrones production designer in season four.

For the next five years she travelled to Belfast to create the fantastical sets of the fictional world of Westeros, trips home to Brisbane growing shorter each year as each season of the mammoth production began to bleed into the next.

Her work on leading the 100-strong art department, until season eight finished with global fanfare in 2019, earned her four consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding production design, and other prestigious awards including a BAFTA.

After the series wrapped she consulted for Lucasfilm on a Star Wars project in New York in 2019 before returning to Australia where, with the pandemic altering her course, she signed on to new Channel 10 reality series Making It Australia and judged the works of Australia’s best craft enthusiasts.

As she chats over coffee, having wrapped filming the reality show in Sydney, she has just arrived back in Brisbane to visit her mother, Susan Riley, and her childhood friends, many of whom still live in Bracken Ridge, before she jets back to London to work on a sci-fi project for Netflix.

Deborah Riley with mother Susan Riley.

To call Game of Thrones life changing, she admits, doesn’t feel large enough.

“From my very first day I always knew I would be dreading the very last day because it was such a special place to be,” she says. “I always used to say, when I’d come home to Brisbane, ‘I’m leaving for Westeros’ because it wasn’t like going to anywhere.

“As you flew out of Belfast, if you looked out the right-hand side, you looked down on the set. It was extraordinary, it was mammoth, but we loved it. For a lot of us, it took a long time to land.”

During filming of Making it Australia in Sydney, Riley came back to Brisbane as often as she could to visit her mother, her best friend and proud custodian of her four Emmy Awards – dubbed “the girls”.

Her father, Leonard Riley, died of cancer in 2001, and so she knows her mother’s support of her jetsetting career is bittersweet because of the time she has to spend away from her.

“I’m very conscious of that and so we are very close,” Riley says.

“With texting, she’s like a teenager, she is better at it than anybody I know, so we are always in constant touch.”

Riley went to school a stone’s throw away in Bracken Ridge, first at St Joseph’s and then St John Fisher College, and the depth of her history there means it will always be where she feels most at home.

She was an only child, a bookish, budding artist to two outdoorsy parents – her mother was a bookkeeper and her father worked for Ford motor company – who spent most of their time in the garden of their acreage property.

“They didn’t know what to do with me and I didn’t know what to do with them, but we made it work,” Riley reflects.

In kindergarten, the teacher was so eager to tear her away from her art she gave her an ultimatum: come inside and socialise or do nothing. And so, Riley laughs, “I stood at the door and did nothing”.

By primary school she was attending a scholarship class at the Queensland Art Gallery and spent two hours every Saturday for three years crafting under the tutelage of artist Robyn Bauer, who still has a gallery in Paddington.

“That was where I started to find my tribe,” she says.

Riley studied architecture at the University of Queensland but she looked around her class after three years and again felt she didn’t quite belong in the group.

In a quandary she returned to her high school library, checked out the old careers guide she remembered flicking through as a teenager and landed on set design.

“And that was it,” she says.

“I applied to NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) and I got in. I remember Dad saying, ‘Now what are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess I’m moving to Sydney.’”

She gushes about the discipline she learnt during her three years at the prestigious school in the late 1990s and its reputation worldwide.

The elephant in Moulin Rouge.

Former NIDA graduate and filmmaker Baz Luhrmann said, “You’re NIDA aren’t you?” when she worked for him on Moulin Rouge! in 1999 and a colleague in London said to her many years later while she worked on Game of Thrones, “It’s not that drama school again is it?”

Her film break came in 1998 when, while working in costumes for the Bell Shakespeare theatre company, she got a call about an American film in Sydney that needed crew and was taken to a workshop in Mascot – not realising she had been taken inside The Matrix.

“There was this fibreglass helicopter hanging from the ceiling … And that was it, I never worked in theatre again,” she says.

But to juggle her immediate commitments, she worked as a set designer on The Matrix from 8am to 6pm, slept until midnight, and got up to work on theatre costumes.

She recalls how she would peer out the window of the studio and see a minder walking the pig playing Babe, which was filming at the same time at Fox Studios.

“You’d know it was Babe because he had that little tuft of hair; I just thought, ‘This is brilliant’,” she laughs.

“Whatever it took I was prepared to do because I knew once I stepped inside that environment that I was home.”

The Matrix broke new ground in visual effects and won four Academy Awards. Riley went on to work on a number of high-profile films including Anna and The King, 21 Grams, and Moulin Rouge! while her success also landed her a job as art director for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games closing ceremony at the age of 27.

Despite her international success in the 20 years that would follow, she still considers Moulin Rouge! and the film’s famous elephant, the home of Nicole Kidman’s Satine, as her most treasured work.

The eleophant from Mouline Rouge.

“In the script it said, ‘She goes inside an elephant’ and it wasn’t anything more than that,” she says.

Riley, inspired by the exotic Thai architecture from Anna and the King, sat up at night making pompoms, turned lamp shades into tassels and stuck belly dancing coins on garden chains she bought at a hardware store.

After reading that Kidman would sing as she walked up stairs on the elephant, Riley asked Luhrmann on set at Fox Studios if there were enough stairs for the length of the song. Suddenly the filmmaker was performing the Elephant Love Medley along the masking tape she had tacked down as makeshift steps.

“At the end he dramatically passed out and I remember clapping,” she laughs. “He said, ‘It’s going to be fabulous and the stairs are fine.’

“That was my first experience being able to create something no one had seen before … just make something spectacular,” Riley adds.

“That was when I understood exactly where I fitted in … it all kind of crystallised. I thought, ‘I stand a chance here, I want to be with these people.’”

Luhrmann by chance is also in Queensland, deep in post-production of his Elvis movie on the Gold Coast, as we chat to Riley. His producers tell us there are “punishing demands on Baz’s time” but at the mention of her, Luhrmann pulls himself away from his latest project, which he is again working on with costume designer and wife Catherine Martin.

“CM and I remember Deborah fondly,” he says. “She was a young artist working under CM’s tutelage and developing her skills and we are so proud that she’s done so well.”

But for Riley there was more to that film than finding her niche. It helped her father finally appreciate her work, having never been quite sure where her new passion was leading when she set aside her architecture degree for the arts.

Deborah Riley on the set of Moulin Rouge with her father Leonard Riley.

He stood in the elephant with her on set, a moment captured in a photo she still cherishes and, for the first time, she says “he really understood what I did”.

“We lost him not long after that,” says Riley, who was her father’s carer during his illness. “I think so long as he knew I was on my way he was fine.”

Leonard, who battled a terminal cancer diagnosis for 10 months, died at 62, shortly after he watched Moulin Rouge! in the cinema in 2001, determined not to miss his daughter’s work, despite how unwell he was at the time.

“Mum and I remember that as being a special time, we didn’t realise at the time how special it was but we reflect on it, knowing that he had that (moment).

“It changed me in ways I don’t think I fully appreciate.”

Knowing most Hollywood films came to Australia with production staff already attached, Riley decided she needed to go where movies were incepted and moved to the US in 2008. She travelled to Los Angeles and, at the direction of her agent, drove to every major studio, including HBO, to introduce herself.

It was five years of “art department wilderness” later before the day her agent phoned her and said, “I have a job I think you should interview for.”

“There were so many times where I thought, ‘I’m going to have to go home, this is not working,’” Riley says, recalling the near-misses that never resulted in a pay cheque.

The Game of Thrones show’s location manager Robert Boake joked fondly about Riley’s first day in Westeros until their last day on set.

They had taken her to Castle Black, the headquarters of the Night’s Watch, which was a 360-degree set built on a cliff face.

“It was windy, it was freezing and it had a working lift, a working forge. I had never been on a set like it in my life, and I still think it’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Riley recalls.

“I stood there and suddenly all the blood drained out of my face and Robbie took me by the shoulders and said, ‘You’re going to be fine.’

“If ever there was a moment I felt like running, that was it. It was that moment I will never forget – suddenly understanding what I had stepped into, and these mad people who were wearing all these clothes up on this windy cliff.”

The audience chamber in Game of Thrones.

Riley’s first chance to prove herself was building a new set for season four, the Meereen audience chamber, where Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke, would sit as queen.

It wasn’t an elaborate set, like the recognisable iron throne in King’s Landing; instead Riley constructed a modest bench atop cascading steps.

“The way it was designed her audience had to look up to her,” Riley says.

“The power was with her and that was really wonderful to see.

“You could just hear this collective sigh of, ‘She’s going to be all right.’ And that set stood for a number of seasons and when it came down I went and said a special goodbye to it because I knew how important it was in terms of being able to maintain my position there and bring something new to the show.” Each season thereafter, keenly aware of the anticipation of the show’s diehard fans, Riley’s team were “trying to top ourselves” and would look everywhere for inspiration, once touring five castles in Spain on a pre-season scouting trip.

By season eight Riley was building the entire city of King’s Landing, which was destroyed in a memorable scene by Targaryen’s dragons in a fiery storm.

Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) in the ruined city of King's Landing. Picture: HBO

They worked backwards, building the destroyed city first and carefully cladding it to be pristine.

“We almost had every piece of heavy machinery in Northern Ireland lifting out the facades and then peeling everything back to reveal this destruction,” she says.

“To build a city and then destroy it, it was kind of fabulous. We had amazing dragon fire sequences and we would all run outside to watch the monitors. We had to think about everything so carefully – which buildings would be on fire and how that would work.”

Riley was back in Sydney and still decompressing from the series’ final season when the pandemic hit in March, 2020, and halted productions around the world.

The team from Making It, a competition started in the US by actors Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman, asked her later that year to judge the new Australian version of the show, which is airing on Channel 10 and 10 Play.

She took on the role alongside fellow judge, paper engineer Benja Harney, and comedic hosts Susie Youssef and Harley Breen and filmed the series in Sydney early this year.

While she admits the opportunity was “utterly random”, those have always been the chances Riley has leapt at – from taking art classes as a kid in Brisbane to creating an elephant in Moulin Rouge! and the mammoth sets of Westeros.

Making it Australia Hosts Susie Youssef and Harley Breen and Judges Benja Harney and Deborah Riley.

“I never really thought about it much more than that. It (the show) is just an opportunity to share my passion,” Riley says, as she prepares to create another top secret fantastical world where her talents have led her to in London.

“The thing I’ve been good at, if anything, is being enthusiastic about whatever came my way, just saying ‘yes’ and giving whatever I thought I could bring.

“I was smart enough to know architecture wasn’t an exact fit and I was brave enough to try and find something else, I was brave enough to try my luck in America, and there were certain points where I kind of put everything on the line.

“When you think back to my time in Bracken Ridge, it’s illogical but at the same time kind of expected – this kid who only wanted to stay and paint, (I’m still) the same person.”

Making It Australia on 10 Play and on Channel 10 Wednesdays and Thursdays

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