‘How to Train Your Dragon’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“Hi, My name is Dean DeBlois. I’m the writer, director and one of the executive producers of “How to Train Your Dragon.” In this particular scene, it’s the catalyst of our story. Young Mason Thames, playing Hiccup, wanders into the woods to search for a dragon that he shot down the night before, and he finds it looking still and dead in a little gully in the woods. And as he approaches it, feeling victorious, he comes to realize that it’s still alive. And so he has to muster up the courage to pull out his dagger, act like a Viking, and kill this dragon in order to earn his place among the dragon-fighting warriors of his tribe. This is one of the scenes that follows quite closely the animated movie. It’s a handful of scenes that I wanted to recreate, almost shot for shot. “I did it!” But in this case, we realized we didn’t need a lot of the dialogue that we gave Hiccup in the animated version. So much of it could be played on Mason Thames’s face in pantomime, in the nuance of his acting, the bolstering of his courage, and also the recognition of his failure and to see his compassion come out. It was all evident in the acting without words. This is an example where John Powell’s score actually does a lot of the narrative work for us. So as Hiccup stands over Toothless and pulls his knife and tries to psych himself up to kill the dragon, instead of dialogue, we could lean on John Powell, building up the theme of Viking tradition and strength and having it all unravel as Hiccup realizes he just doesn’t have the will to kill this beast. I remember on the day talking to Mason before we started rolling cameras and I said, don’t forget, this is the moment you reference later in the movie when you looked into his eyes and you saw yourself. It seems like a moment of weakness, but this is that strength in disguise that causes Hiccup to be a new thinker that can usher in an era of peace that nobody saw coming. This whole scene takes place in Northern Ireland’s Tollymore Forest that we scouted and found a perfect little bowl. that would be a nice landing place for Toothless. We installed a broken tree and we dug out a trench to show how Toothless would have crashed hard and landed in the spot that he is. But this is one of the few scenes in the movie that is in a practical location, and I think it brings an authenticity to the world.