'How to Train Your Dragon' director details challenges, rewards of live-action adaptation

Actor Mason Thames portrays young viking Hiccup, who forms a friendship with his dragon, Toothless, in a scene from "How to Train Your Dragon." Courtesy of Universal Pictures

By Baek Byung-yeul

• Published Jun 2, 2025 5:06 PM KST

Dean DeBlois, director of the live-action “How to Train Your Dragon,” emphasized that his foremost goal was to honor the emotional heart and sense of wonder that defined the original animated classic, while embracing the opportunity to make the fantastical tale a vivid reality.

“It was essential to keep the sense of wonder and the emotional journey that made the original so beloved,” DeBlois said during an online interview with Korean reporters, Monday.

“At the same time, we wanted to ground the film in a believable reality. That meant searching for real-world locations, like Iceland, Scotland and the Faroe Islands, to create a convincing home for Berk (a fictional island) and its dragons.”

“How to Train Your Dragon” follows Hiccup (Mason Thames), a young Viking who struggles to fit in, and Toothless, a mysterious dragon, as they overcome prejudice and forge a unique friendship that changes both their world and the fate of their village.

DeBlois highlighted the key differences between animation and live-action filmmaking.

“The biggest difference I've found between animation and live action is that animation is a slow process where we create everything … You can just imagine it and design and create it digitally, whereas in the in the crafting of this film, we went and found physical locations,” he said.

“We designed costumes for our actors to wear and the greatest surprise is once you put the actors in these environments that we built, the story comes to life in a way that I didn't anticipate.”

DeBlois said he also focused on portraying how Hiccup and Toothless influence each other in the live-action version.

“It's a very powerful bond that humans share with animals and we tried our best to really deliver on the wonder and the wish fulfillment of what it might be to be friends with such a powerful and amazing creature,” the director said.

One of the biggest challenges was bringing the dragon Toothless to life.

“The design of Toothless was particularly tricky because ... in trying to interpret his animation design into a more credible, naturalistic creature, we found that as we made alterations to the size of his eyes, his mouth or anything that seemed a bit broad and perhaps cartoony, Toothless felt strange and different and he would lose a lot of his charm and appeal. So we found a way of preserving as much of the design from the animation in our interpretation for the live action creature,” the director said.

DeBlois described the unique freedoms and challenges of live-action filmmaking, citing the film’s aerial sequences as an example.

“We took aerial photography and we enhanced and captured all of this in the computers so that the visual effects artists were able to create the island, the surrounding land, the skies and the clouds, so that it was all photographic.”

The director added that they created a robotic dragon to show actor Thames flying on the dragon in the most realistic way.

“We had to add the dragon into this mix that required building a large contraption that was nearly three meters in height and it could move in any direction and it had a robotic dragon built on top of it, so that when Mason Thames was sitting in the saddle, he would be influenced by the rolling and diving and all of the movements of the dragon, so that it could be convincingly married with the animation of the dragon,” he said.

“How to Train Your Dragon” will hit theaters in Korea on Friday.