‘House of the Dragon’ Production Designers Worked With Authorities to Make Spain Look Less Clean Without Changing Stonework

variety.com:

Todd Longwell From the majestic-but-aged environs inhabited by the British royals Netflix’s in “The Crown” and the decadent sun-drenched luxury of the San Domenico Palace resort in Taormina, Sicily, in HBO’s “The White Lotus” to the foreboding Ontario wilderness where a girls’ soccer team is stranded in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” the locations used in this year’s Emmy-nominated dramas loom so large they can be viewed as characters unto themselves that interact with the performers and help shape the narrative.

It’s especially true of the role Albuquerque, N.M., plays in AMC’s “Better Call Saul.” There’s no telling if the series would even exist if creator Vince Gilligan had gotten his way back in the mid-2000s and the studio suits at Sony agreed to let him use Riverside, Calif., as the setting for its predecessor “Breaking Bad” (2008-2013), which established the “Saul” characters and their dramatic universe. “I’m glad we won’t know,” says “Better Call Saul” producer Melissa Bernstein. “I think Vince always wanted those visuals to jump off the screen and tell you what you’re watching, and I’m just not sure that could have happened [if it had been shot in Riverside].

And the last episode had so many locations in it, but we weren’t like, ‘We’ll just go back here and here.’ It was, ‘We have to figure out the next new puzzle.’” One of the key puzzle pieces for the series finale, directed by co-creator Peter Gould, was the opening scene set in an otherwise barren spot in the desert with a stock tank and windmill, both of which had to be brought in for the shoot. “We had to find a desert location that could fit in with what we had shot the prior season,” says Bernstein.