‘How to Train Your Dragon’ director breaks down Toothless flying scene

Mid-movie spontaneous applause is a relatively rare honor in cinema today.

But, there’s one moment so eye-poppingly good in the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon that it caused audiences to burst into cheers at every screening of the film that Entertainment Weekly has been to. The scene in question is pivotal to both the 2010 animated original and the new film, and features Hiccup (Mason Thames) and his beloved Night Fury dragon, Toothless, learning to fly together. Set to John Powell’s iconic score, the two take their first, full, successful flight, soaring through the sea and skies and cementing their lasting friendship once and for all. (Hey, we’re not crying, you’re crying!)

Ahead, writer-director Dean DeBlois breaks down exactly how he brought the epic moment to life in all of its live-action glory.

Assembling the team

“Well, it started with a phone call from Universal talking about how they were thinking of kicking the tires on an idea of revisiting How to Train Your Dragon, re-imagining it, and that first conversation was really about the dragons,” DeBlois recalls.

“How are we going to sell that with human actors on screen in built sets and shooting on location?” he adds. “How could we really blend them in and not lose the personalities and the traits that define them?”

The “real first step,” then, was to do a lot of concept design work with visual effects company Framestore; visual effects supervisor, Christian Manz; and animation supervisor, Glen McIntosh, who comes from George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic and Jurassic Park fame. “He was bringing that kind of paleontology and study of large animal movement to the wonderful whimsical character creation that Framestore is really known for,” DeBlois says of McIntosh.

Hatching the dragons

From there, they had to bring the dragons to life, with special emphasis on Toothless, of course. “Right from the start, we were looking at the animated movie and talking about the animal references that we had for each specific dragon, which kind of defined who they were in terms of temperament, but also in terms of design,” DeBlois says.

For example, Astrid’s dragon, a Deadly Nadder, is based on tropical birds, so it’s curious, moves fast, and sports vivid colors. Whereas the Gronckle, Fishlegs’ dragon, “might be a little bit more lazy and walrus or hippo-like, and equally temperamental, but a lot more lovable in his bulldog-like tendencies,” DeBlois explains.

Even in the animated films, Toothless is different than the other dragons, eschewing the more reptilian look the other beasts have. Several different species inspired the fan-favorite, but DeBlois cites a black panther as the main inspiration for his overall aesthetic. This created a challenge when bringing him to life in live-action, though.

“As we started experimenting and we were taking those giant eyes and shrinking them down to something that might be more believable in the real world, with every little increment we lost more and more of Toothless,” DeBlois says, admitting the process was “a lot of trial and error in the beginning.”

“So it was all of these adjustments. It’s like, okay, well I guess we need the big mouth and we need the ear plates and we need the big eyes,” he says. “So a lot of the work just went into getting the basics right, like the skeleton, the muscle, and the skin texture with his iridescent scales, and trying to give it a lot of credible features on top of something that we knew had to have an exaggerated expression and exaggerated facial design.” 

Time to fly

Creative team? Check. Star Mason Thames as Hiccup? Check. Toothless? Check. The only thing left to do? “Then we had to figure out how are we going to make these things fly and fly with humans on their backs,” DeBlois says. “That was a lengthy development period where we worked with some really amazing people who build gimbals and setups for humans to ride in other movies.”

Specifically, the filmmaker says the goal was for it to feel like Hiccup is a jockey on a horse, moving in sync with the animal’s movements. “That ultimately led to the construction of this giant contraption, which is about eight or 10 feet tall, and it moves on pistons, and so it moves in six different axes according to what we need the dragon to be doing,” he explains. But that wasn’t all. “On top of that, there was an animatronic dragon body, neck, and head that we would put a saddle on,” DeBlois says, adding, “when Mason would sit in the saddle and hold on, he’s got these little handles that are affixed to Toothless’ neck.”

The director continues, “Mason would actually move along with whatever we did, because we could control it remotely and on the spot, whether the dragon was ascending, or banking, or rolling, all of those movements would affect Mason. So he was moving with the dragon. He wasn’t just sitting in a saddle and being shifted around a little bit, as we’ve seen in some other productions. The idea was to make it really feel like they were symbiotic and they were partners in flying.”

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Thank you for the music

Speaking of Thames, while the 17-year-old star would visualize his dog, pitbull-boxer mix Brish, for the more emotional scenes with Toothless, he needed a little extra something for the flight sequence. It was his mom’s idea to play the film’s score, by returning composer John Powell, on set for Thames to listen to while they filmed it.

“So during that scene, I’m listening to the music, and it’s absolutely insane,” he says. “That helped tremendously because in the grand scheme of it, I’m on a gimbal with a bunch of blue screens with hair dryers blowing in my face, trying to look cool on a dragon.”

Even still, while he admits that “it was such a special moment filming” that scene as a whole, he still didn’t know exactly what to expect when he watched the final product for the first time. “You never know what it’s going to look like. I had no clue whatsoever, but after I saw the film and saw that scene, it just blew my mind. For me, I was working with something that was not there, and to see a dragon, and it looked so real — it was crazy.”

We’re not in Westeros anymore

As for actually shooting the big flight sequence (or indeed any of the film’s many dragon flights), DeBlois says an indoor blue screen was used. However, he adds, “We were very precise with the shots, having previsualization done of each shot, so we knew exactly what the camera was going to have to do and what the rider would be doing.”

Shots involving water were done in an underwater tank at London’s famous Pinewood Studios. All of this, however, was in contrast to the bulk of the film, which was shot in and around Belfast, Ireland. Specifically at Titanic Studios, on the same site as another famous series involving dragons — Game of Thrones. “When we first arrived, King’s Landing was still standing in the back lot and we’re like, ‘Get this out of here,'” DeBlois says, laughing.

Though the flight sequences called for blue screen sets and VFX magic, DeBlois, who was co-director or director on all three of the animated originals, is overjoyed to tell us how lovingly and painstakingly created the sets were for everything else, from the village of Berk, to the dragon-training arena, to the interior and exterior of the Chief’s house, or the marina, and Berk’s Great Hall.

All in a day’s work

Seeing everything — especially the magical Toothless and Hiccup flight — come together was “such an exciting process” and surpassed DeBlois’ wildest dreams, he says. “It did not disappoint. I was squealing inside,” he says of getting the moment right.

But, to be fair, he says he was “giddy” all the time. “Every morning we’d show up and be freezing and everyone’s drinking their coffee, and I would just walk around the sets like eyes wide, touching everything,” he says. “So much love was put into every detail of it, and I love that.”

And DeBlois wasn’t the only one. From the very first day on set, he says, “there was just a sense of childlike wonder” for everyone among the cast and crew, veteran or newbie. He puts it down to an unlikely mantra he gave on day one. “I just said that I don’t know how this movie will do in theaters. I don’t know how audiences will respond to it, but I can promise you that at the end of the day, it’s going to be something you’re proud of, and you can take your families to, and feel like it was worth all the time spent in the late nights and the weekends,” he says. “It is quite a sacrifice when you go into these film shoots. People work really hard, really long days, and it can weigh on you physically and in other aspects of your life, but when it’s a good movie, it’s all worth it.”