‘Game of Thrones saved my career’
After spending five “incredibly difficult” years in Hollywood chasing the dream, Australian Game Of Thrones production designer Deborah Riley was ready to pack it all in. Then came the phone call that changed her life.
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AFTER spending five “incredibly difficult” years in Hollywood chasing the dream, Australian Game Of Thrones production designer Deborah Riley
was ready to pack it all in. That was until an unexpected phone call thrust her into the violent world of Westeros and a place at the table of one of the most popular television shows ever made.
Riley, who oversaw a huge team designing sets for Game Of Thrones season four onwards, has won four Emmy Awards and a BAFTA for her work on the show. She traversed much of Europe in search of ideal locations to build her kingdoms, castles and battlegrounds.
But Riley was dangerously close to missing out on the life-changing opportunity after a brutal stretch in the unforgiving home of television and film.
“My career went down in flames for five years and it was really difficult, incredibly difficult,” she tells Insider. “Even when I think about it now I don’t know where the fortitude came from to stick with it because at every turn it was incredibly hard.”
A crippling economic downturn had left the film industry in a state of flux and despite being armed with an impressive resumé that included blockbusters such as The Matrix, Moulin Rouge and 21 Grams, the Queensland-born, NIDA-trained designer couldn’t score a break.
“The GFC (global financial crisis) had struck so it wasn’t like there were a lot of film jobs around so why would they give a job to an Australian when there were so many Americans who were out of work,” she says. “I would never have been hired on a show that took place in the United States because, as one producer said to me, ‘you wouldn’t know what growing up in Middle America looks like’.”
Those five long years in Los Angeles were financially and mentally crippling and on more than one occasion, Riley came close to admitting defeat.
“It was just very awful — I dug a very deep hole for myself,” she says. “The thing was, though, the longer I stayed there, the more I realised I couldn’t give up otherwise all that was for naught.
“There were a couple of times where I brought the boxes upstairs and decided ‘that’s it’ (but) there always seemed to be something, there always seemed to be one more carrot.”
With a milestone birthday fast approaching, Riley made the decision to give it up and move back home if something significant did not come up before that date.
“I gave myself until my 40th birthday and said ‘I’m not spending my 40th like this,’ ” she says. “My birthday’s in May and I got Game Of Thrones in February. By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. It was unbelievable.”
Riley was earning $100 a day working on a small film in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when she got the call from her agent telling her HBO was interested in her for the series, which was about to start its third season.
In a prime example of how it pays to never burn bridges and keep on pushing, it was HBO production chief Janet Graham Borba who had recommended Riley.
The pair had met briefly five years earlier when the Australian arrived in LA and was doing a round of meet and greets with the studios. Borba told Riley to keep in touch and that’s exactly what she did.
“I met her in 2008 and she phoned back in 2013 — that’s phenomenal,” she says. “That’s obviously where my career and my life took a very sharp turn.”
Coming on to the show from season four, Riley knew just how much of a global powerhouse Game Of Thrones had become. Ratings were increasing and the series was on track to overtake The Sopranos as HBO’s most successful show ever (which it did at the end of Riley’s first season).
“I was genuinely terrified just because I knew that there were people who had put their names on the line to have me there,” she says. “I knew personally this was my last chance. I knew there were so many people who had really taken a big leap of faith in order to sign me up.”
If there was any doubt lingering over her ability to pull off the role, it would have been wiped out when she was awarded a Prime Time Emmy award for season four — an accolade she would win a further three times. Earlier this year she also took home a BAFTA Television Craft award.
Having just wrapped up the final season — which will air next year — Riley is back in Australia for some much- needed rest and to take stock after a whirlwind five years.
“It was like being slammed up against the wall. It was still full speed all the way until the end — there was no tapering down,” she says. “It was very dramatic actually. It was work, work, work, work, work, stop, goodbye.”
As a youngster growing up in Brisbane, Riley had a natural talent for drawing and had her heart set on becoming a animator when she left school. But the academically gifted student eventually realised her skills weren’t suited to that sort of art and after completing her senior years started studying for an architecture degree.
After three years of pushing through the course with little enjoyment, she made a trip back to her old high school for some motivation and made a decision to change direction.
“I didn’t love architecture the same way other people in my class loved architecture,” she says. “I went back to my high school and looked in the career guides, in the days before the internet, and I thought what else can I do and set design was it.”
With little confidence of getting in, Riley applied for entry into the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney and, much to her surprise, was accepted.
The school, which boasts a who’s who of former students across the industry – actors Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson and Hugo Weaving to name just a few – is considered one of the best proving grounds for anyone in the industry — both in front of and behind the camera.
But such a reputation doesn’t come without a strict and disciplined approach to the craft that can shock some students.
“I’m so conflicted about my time at NIDA because it made me, absolutely, but I couldn’t even drive down Anzac Parade for years because I just felt sick because that was the feeling that I had the whole time I was there — I was filled with anxiety the whole time because you just don’t know whether you’re performing well enough,” she says. “It took me a long time to be able to drive past the building and be able to know that I could hold my head up high.”
However there is no doubt in Riley’s mind that her time at NIDA and the tough approach was what prepared her for what is often a cut-throat industry. While it took her out of her comfort zone, she credits her success to her years in Sydney.
“They were very small classes and the wonderful thing about it is you get a lot of attention there, you get a lot of one-on-one tuition and, certainly in those days, they didn’t pull any punches,” she says. “It was often a difficult place to be, it was often hard, but to be perfectly honest that was the best preparation I could have had for working in the industry.
“They were utterly realistic and I completely understand what they were doing and I am so grateful to have had the training that I had. The rigour and the process that they taught there was absolutely second to none and it holds up against anybody that I’ve ever worked with.”
It was after graduating that she got called to a warehouse in Mascot and offered a job.
After basically accepting the job with little knowledge of what it was about, she was shown around the area.
“(The art director) took me down to the workshop and there was a big fibreglass helicopter hanging there,” she says. “I asked what it was and she told me it was a feature film — it was the set of the first Matrix movie.”
While working on the set of Moulin Rouge during the height of the Australian film boom, Riley met set decorator Brigitte Broch — who would go on to win an Oscar with Catherine Martin for the movie — and the pair hit it off. During production, the German-born Mexico City-based Broch said something that would was music to Riley’s ears.
“She said the magic words ‘I will mentor you’,” she says.
The Aussie headed to Central America with Broche, where she spent time making television commercials with her mentor and four-time Oscar winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) before the trio worked together on 21 Grams with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
It was Broch and Iñárritu who helped Riley secure a US working visa and the Australian eventually headed to LA for the long and painful slog.
Riley will return to NIDA to give students and GOT fans a unique insight into the hit show tomorrow night.
* IN CONVERSATION WITH DEBORAH RILEY, PARADE THEATRE, NIDA, TOMORROW 6.30PM, $20. TICKETS: NIDA.EDU.AU