With ‘Legend of the Sword,’ the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ director attempts to revamp the medieval icon.
Read the complete conversation and see new exclusive images from the film below.
We last spoke about a year and a half ago.
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Where are you in the process right now?
It has gone on for some time.
The release date shifted three different times.
Warner Bros. Pictures
What was the main reason for the date changing?
The date kept shifting, I think, simply because of competition.
That’s the only reason.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Did the shift allow you to do anything other than take more time with the special effects?
We’ve had the luxury of sitting back.
If we did not have that luxury, your visual effects aren’t going to be there.
Warner Bros. Pictures
We’ve had a year, haven’t we?
We’ve have a year to improve them, and today is the last visual effects meeting.
It’s a year’s extra work.
This King Arthur started as three different projects, including one you were developing.
What was different about your initial project?
This is the one, essentially, except in this one we’ve got 300-foot elephants.
Though really, that’s the only difference.
Your big idea was to bring this guy down to the street level, right?
He did a pretty good job at some aspects of it.
It’s a genre that’s hard to tackle, and I wanted to tackle it.
What makes it a hard genre to crack?
All genres are hard to crack if you’re familiar with a particular genre.
It’s easy for a filmmaker to stay within the genre he’s familiar with.
It’s more challenging when you get outside of that.
You have to use reference points that you’re sympathetic to.
What is a reference point to King Arthur that you’re sympathetic to.
The only thing I could think of is elements ofExcalibur.
There wasn’t anything to copy, right?
I have opinions about what they got right, what they didn’t get right.
So now you’re going, “Well, you have to run that gauntlet.
Are you funny and serious?”
That was a genre I hadn’t tackled before, so you have to find a voice within that.
So it’s challenging, and you doubt yourself.
Then you’re confident and you doubt yourself and you’re confident again.
There isn’t too many.
What has kept you from liking the genre?
It’s just my sensibility.
I understand that it’s not a language that speaks to me.Game of Thronesspeaks to me.
I understandGame of Thrones.
They turned it into an exciting genre, so it’s trying to find a voice within the genre.
It was bold and identified.
It’s fantasy, so it’s 500 to 1,500 years in the past.
So I’m sort of stuck in that world, so there are aesthetic correlations.
Now I’m going to take a stab at make the whole thing appeal to me.
What the big challenges with handling this character specifically within a big studio framework of today?
The challenge really is finding a tone that a contemporary audience can relate to and that you believe works.
There is no other challenge.
There’s your story.
You like the story.
We’re in with the story.
Now it’s a tonality that needs to be consistent.
It’s finding the voice of the genre and the tone of the genre.
That’s the only challenging aspect of making a film.
I’m not bothered by all of the other stuff.
When does that come in?
At the script stage?
Maybe when you see this, you’ll understand it.
There was a two-hour, 20-minutes version.
There’s a three-hours version.
And there’s the one-hour, 50-minute version.
The one-hour, 50-minute version is very different from the three-hour version.
The film eventually finds its own voice and rhythm.
Once it has found it, it’s found it.
In the end, it’s about finding the film’s rhythm.
Then it just changes everything.
It changes the tone.
Jokes that weren’t landing at three hours, suddenly land at two hours.
Action scenes suddenly find a voice that was previously muddy by its longevity.
I quite like the idea of long-winded movies.
My movies never want to be long-winded.
In the end, I always have to roll over to the fact that they move quickly.
This was no exception to that.
Did the change in release dates give you a chance to mess with the edit more?
That really doesn’t make any difference.
Honestly, it’s the technical aspects.
With these movies, the visual effects are so heavy.
That’s 50 percent of the movie, so 50 percent of your budget is visual effects.
Other than that, the film finds its pace.
Well, it will.
There’s a gun to your head when there’s a release date.
If there’s a gun to your head, you find what needs to be found.
Do you think audience expectations have changed in the last 10 or 15 years?
Film, like everything else, is subject to fashion.
But you have a broader tapestry, which means you might be more ambitious about the visual effects.
In turn, it affects everything else.
What did having Charlie Hunnam mean for that task, of updating Arthur?
To be fair to Charlie, Charlie won the role because he paid for his own flight.
I wasn’t even thinking about Charlie.
He wanted to be screen tested, and he won it, as did Astrid [Berges-Frisby].
They won it through the good, old-fashioned route.
What did you need from the guy who was going to be your Arthur?
I need someone who was going to understand my vision and have a similar disposition.
I needed him to trust me.
Those things were conspicuous in Charlie.
How does the model of a bad guy change when your hero changes?
He’s not a conventional bad guy, our bad guy.
Maybe that’s reflective of the time we’re in.
Not necessarily, I would have thought.
He’s playing with the dark side and can incarnate into quite scary things.
I know that Jude Law’s villain, Vortigern, is Arthur’s uncle.
What are the other dynamics to that relationship?
I think they’re similar in origin.
It depends if there’s a negative connotation that comes with the wordambitionorhunger.
Let’s say thathungeris the positive one andambitionis the negative one.
How does Arthur feel about his power?
It’s the difference between the ability to handle power and the inability to handle power.
If you’re ambitious in life, there’s no avoiding at some point having more authority over others.
The question is which part of your personality does it nourish.
That’s really what this story is about.
Arthur is going to be powerful, but the question is can he handle the power.
Are you corrupted by power, or are you not?
He’s a product of his environment.
He’s not a conventional good guy.
So much of what a character is to me is whether he’s charming.
Do you like that character?
It’s amazing what you’ve got the option to get away with when someone is charming.
What do we like about Arthur?
His intelligent humanity, I’d say.
He knows how to straddle the line between being hungry without being corrupted by that hunger.
At the same time, there’s no version of him being squeaky clean.
He has to get on with it.
You have to move forward.
Life is a dirty business.
Can you remain dignified during the process of life?
This is an origin story for Arthur.
To what extent does the movie end with unanswered questions about his character?
Learning doesn’t stop, does it?
There’s plenty of work to be done.
Originally, this was pitched as possible cinematic universe for the Knights of the Round Table.
What would excite you about going back?
As much as anything, I enjoy the process of filmmaking.
Going back toSherlockwas very fun.
Going back into this would be great fun.
I like the world.
I liked everyone I worked with.
It’s just a world that I’d like to stay within for a while.
There are lots of untapped narrative still to be dealt with.
