The meek have inherited the dragons. On season two episode seven of House of the Dragon, "The Red Sewing," Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) looks to the lowborn to become dragon riders and take on Prince Aemond in King's Landing. After a dangerous and deadly search for commoners with Targaryen blood, shipman Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty), blacksmith Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew), and tavern patron Ulf White (Tom Bennett) proved that they were capable of taming and riding dragons Seasmoke, Vermithor, and Silverwing—joining Rhaenyra and Syrrax in the fight for the throne.

On a new episode of Still Watching, “The Red Sewing” director Loni Peristere drops by to discuss helming the epic episode, which begins with Rhaenyra and Addam‘s standoff on the beach. “At the end of episode six when Addam of Hull claims a dragon, it is a huge threat to Rhaenyra and her seat on the throne,” the director says. At the beginning of episode seven, Rhaenyra “has flown all night long, looking for either an adversary or an ally. And we don't know who that's going to be.”

Vanity Fair: How did that opening shot on the beach with the two dragons facing each other come about?

Loni Peristere: That opening shot comes from traditional Western tropes. It's Sergio Leone, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood. Instead of guns at their holster, it's dragons. Instead of having a shot that's two men out in the middle of a desolate desert landscape, it's Rhaenyra the queen and… who is this guy? But they both have guns. The feeling of that opening shot for me was, how do I evoke traditional cinematic language—the big epic wide shot that puts two cowboys against one another—and also pull out that dragon level of epic.

The other most evocative moment of the episode is Alicent floating in the water, like an Ophelia figure. What inspired her sequence and her storyline in this episode?

When Alicent Hightower leaves King's Landing, you start to realize that she's doing something maybe nefarious or maybe dangerous. You don't know where she's going to go. When you read the screenplay, it becomes this narrative exploration, good or bad, of a life that is free.

In the Red Keep, she's living in Rhaenyra's room, right? She's the dowager—she's got no place in the red keep. Everything about her sense of place is a prison. Talking to Olivia [Cooke], [leaving King's Landing] was about finding this sense of space and safety. [Alicent] can feel the pressure from all sides. She's getting pushed out by everyone and there's nowhere to run. We started to think about, “Okay, where wouldn't I be seen? Where would I have run as a child? I would have taken the horse, and I would have run as fast as I could into the woods. And then as soon as I ran far enough away that I didn't feel like my mom was looking over my back, I would slow down.”

I really wanted it to not be not the best day. I wanted it to be beautiful, but it's raining and it's cold, and yet that doesn't matter. When she gets to that open field, I actually asked the greens department to plant several thousand flowers to embed them into the landscape because I wanted it to be this irony of rain and sadness with the light. I wanted to create that sense of ambiguity about what she's doing and where she's going so that the audience starts to feel nervous as she sees the lake, which for her could be the end or it could be a baptism. We don't know.

When we have that shot underwater of Olivia's beautiful red hair moving into the camera, I wanted everyone to say she's gone. And then she moves and she opens her eyes. And then there's this magical thing that happens where you see what she's seeing and she sees the bird in the sky and you're like, she's free as a bird.

This episode introduced viewers to a brand new character in Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes). He makes a really big splash and puts Daemon (Matt Smith) on the defensive. Can you talk a little bit about that scene?

Archie, what a young, special talent. It's so hard to find these young actors that can really own a space. We needed an actor that was going to be Like, how can you stand up to Matt Smith? I remember when Archie and I first started talking about the scene, he was like, "I'm so nervous. How would I ever take control of all of these houses? I'm so young. How would Daemon respect me?" We started talking about the layers of that. “Well, why are you the head of house? How do you think you were raised?"

If you are growing up in the house Tully, and you are a child of the lord you're going to work in the room where your masters run the Riverlands. You're going to have actually been in the room since you were a a little boy.

You know every one of those river lords better than anyone else in that Godawood. You've spent time with every one of them. You've heard them barter sheep, barter money, you've negotiated fights from the side of that table. So you're not coming in to meet Daemon cold. You're coming in to meet Damon as an intelligent, experienced, young leader.

I got to hand it to Archie, because that's the homework he did. When he showed up on the day, it was awesome during the rehearsal to see Matt kind of, like, chuckle a little bit. You can kind of see it in his performance. He has this, like, “you're way more than I thought.” [Oscar] earns the respect of Damon Targaryen and that's really special.

What should we come away from this episode thinking going into the finale?

Coming off of that final shot with Rhaenyra and her army of nuclear weapons, the Queen has more dragons than have ever been held there. I think what we're worried about is, is Daemon aligned or not? He's got a big army that just joined his forces. Is that army for the Queen Rhaenyra? Is it for, the King Daemon Targaryen? Or is it for someone else? What's going to happen there?

I think Aemond is set up in such a way that he's lost faith in his small council, and he feels like he needs to take matters into his own hands, and we don't know how far Aemond is willing to go. And what's Alicent going to do now that she's been baptized? She's heading right back to that Dowager's suite. What's her plan? Is she going to do something to stop the war on her end? And what's her approach in diplomacy?

When we come out of episode seven, we basically have a loaded gun. That was the concept that Ryan [Kondall] and Sara [Hess] has talked about constantly. The tee up for the finale of this season has to be about all the guns that are pointed at each other in a standoff. We have to feel like the stakes are as high as they can get, and at any second, those guns are going to go off and it's going to be messy. I'm hoping that we feel really nervous at the end of this episode.