‘How to Train Your Dragon’ Used Sheep Fur and Bagpipes to Bring Remake to Life

When Dreamworks released the animated feature “How to Train Your Dragon” in 2010, it seemed almost inevitable that a live-action feature would come along.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins gave the feature a stunning cinematic style that felt almost live-action, and composer John Powell added a sweeping score to the narrative.

Director Dean DeBlois heard a live-action movie was in the works, and he called Powell. The animated feature was not only beloved, but it had also become part of pop culture history. His first call asked Powell, “Should we do a live-action?” Powell says, DeBlois next said, “Well, if I do it, would you do it?”

Powell said yes. After spending over a decade scoring all three films in the animated feature trilogy, Powell felt a sense of responsibility to the music of the franchise. And who better to do it than he to breathe new life into a beloved score?

The new film follows Hiccup (Mason Thames), a young and scrawny Viking boy who refuses to follow his tribe’s tradition of hunting dragons. This is much to the chagrin of his proudly traditional father, Stoick (Gerard Butler), who happens to be the village leader and a legendary dragon slayer.

The film also stars Nico Parker as Astrid, Julian Dennison as Fishlegs, Gabriel Howell as Snotlout, Bronwyn James as Ruffnut, Harry Trevaldwyn as Tuffnut and Nick Frost as Gobber.

In his approach to breathing new life into the live-action score, Powell looked to make subtle changes in tempo, density and clarity. He says, “There’s some stuff that was made to be very much the same, and there are not many changes for 20-30 seconds, and then suddenly you might see something shift.”

One noticeable change in scoring the live-action was the use of bagpipes. This time around, Powell was able to use a real bagpipe player, Lorne MacDougall, founder of the Red Hot Chili Pipers.

With DeBlois expanding the story, Powell relied on the familiar, but he also found room to expand his score. In the father-son relationship between Stoick and Hiccup, Powell says that the theme did a lot of the heavy lifting. “We called it ‘He’s Not That Boy,’ which is funny because Marc Platt also produced this and ‘Wicked.’ During the end title, we have a song that is sung by a choir, and I said to Dean, ‘Do you want to write some words?’ and he did. It became this whole tune that threads through the movie.”

Costume designer Lindsay Pugh wanted to keep the essence of the characters that had been established through the animation and be respectful of that. Still, she also needed to find a characterization that would work in real life. Says Pugh, “It was trying to find that balance, but being respectful to what everybody wants to see.”

Pugh maintained Hiccup’s calmness from the original. “I didn’t want him to be very colorful,” she says behind her decision to anchor his palette in natural tones and green. “It’s very calming and a very gentle color.”

However, she wanted to give his outfit texture, and so she took a dive into historical references of embroidery, needlework and weaving techniques. “We found all of these different textures that we could use, and we wove all of the embroidery. So it gives us visual interest in what, from a distance, would be quite a simple garment,” but on closer inspection, that fine detail would reveal itself.

Pugh also paid attention to Viking culture. Since DeBlois was extending this universe, Pugh’s designs were “specifically Viking, as we would automatically imagine, because that’s sort of what the world was.”

She draped them in sheepskin and explained, “One of the very first scenes in the movie was the dragons going down and stealing or trying to steal these poor decoy sheep, so it’s a really perfect setup of having that.” The film has environmental goals, and aside from using sustainable materials where possible, any fur was made from sheepskin. She adds, “They have great fur, great wool and skins on that. Ecologically, they were not something that is as detrimental to the planet.”

Butler has previously joked that his outfit weighed over 90 pounds. Pugh’s response is, “I just want to say Gerry, it was with the helmet, the cape, the sword and the shield.”

She notes she wanted to give him weight and a foundation so he could push against it. “We have Gerry on the inside, and then all of these layers. We have leather and layer upon layer of natural fabrics,” explains Pugh, who used 3D printing wherever she could; it wasn’t always possible. “The intricacy of the work in everything adds a little bit of weight.”

Production designer Dominic Watkins wanted to make the world of dragons feel plausible. Watkins says, the world building was “very challenging and we wanted to make it feel real so that people believed that these were characters involved with dragons.”

During a location scout, Watkins felt the geography of the Faroe Islands lent itself how Berk should look. “There was one island on the Faroe Islands that we decided we were going to mold the village on, and that was going to be the epicenter of all the action,” Watkins explains. That became the center point of where the dragons and the rest of the world were. He saw the colors of the building and was inspired by what palette to choose from. “The rust, corn colors and greens were very specific, and we took that palette from there and brought that to the village.” He adds, “A lot of the medieval stuff in reality was quite grim, so we wanted to make it more colorful.”

Other real-world locations included Ireland and Scotland. Watkins also utilized the Belfast Titanic studios where he built out the rest of Berk on backlots and sounstages. “We built the center of Berk, but it was extended from ther. We built 16 houses around the center square.”

Elsewhere, he wanted to give the Vikings believability. Their purpose was to slay dragons, so Watkins carried that lore into his designs. “We had lots of carvings of dragons and motifs on the pinnacles of the and the eaves of the houses to just show there was a hatred of them.”

As for the film’s dragon arena, Watkins built a chain dome, but needed beams to hold it upright. “We found these ironwood beams that had sunk in Belfast harbor over 100 years ago, and coincidentally, they were pulling these 3040 foot beams out of Belfast Harbor. Our construction manager knew about them, and somehow he managed to get his hands on them.”

The beams had become fossilized after being in the water for so long and needed heavy cranes to be moved. “We were now repurposing them and putting in the arena, and it was pretty incredible.” Watkins adds, “We used them in a few other places, but that was predominantly where all the spiked beams were in the set. They were beautifully aged, beautifully tarnished, and they worked out.”