Guy Ritchie’s new directorial project King Arthur is scheduled to open on May 12th across theatres in the United States.
It is starring heartthrob Charlie Hunnam as King Arthur. The two Brits offer some endearing responses, bound to fuel the anticipation and excitement surrounding this awaited blockbuster.
Q: With such a vast landscape and so many opportunities to do so many things with your characters, what singular aspect do each of you feel defines your character?
Charlie: That’s a big question, no warm-up just straight answer the hard questions.
*laughs*
Charlie: I mean I think for me, the thing that I could relate to most readily and was most excited about is the idea of the cultivation of self-belief and subduing one’s inner demons in order to strengthen one’s disposition, to be able to go out and do great things and beat the insurmountable odds. I mean that was the central theme of the film but something that I could relate to and was very excited about and we spent a lot of time looking at people that were out there in the world doing that, particularly Connor McGregor was somebody that I drew a lot of inspiration from, and that Guy and I discussed a lot. He was a guy, out there.
I saw one interview with him, whoever he was fighting, I think it was Chad Mendes and he was talking to a journalist and the journalist asked what specific challenges that he thought Chad Mendes would pose to McGregor and he said “there is no opponent, I’m in the octagon by myself” which I think it’s sort of like the Bruce Lee philosophy like you’re in there fighting yourself, it’s all about self-belief and knowing what you’re capable of and if you’re dialed in and focused on your true potential, then any obstacle is going to crumble before you.
Q: You all did a fantastic job of putting a fresh spin on a well-known tale. I was just wondering what each of your relationships was with Arthurian legend and if there was anything from the legend that you really wanted to incorporate in this? Even though it was really new.
Guy: Well, here we go. To a degree, I think Charlie answered it in his rather articulate answer previously that the essence of the legend is really about the transcendence of self and self-r2qeliance if you will. So the journey, the essence of the Arthurian legend is to go from an infant to an adult or from a poor per to a king and from being completely dependent upon others to being completely independent. That’s really the essence of the story. So, it’s a combination of, without getting too deep, of having a profound backbone if you will, and then having a rather pretty facade. So, you can enjoy it on any level. So, my experience of the Arthurian legend is first and foremost by John Boorman’s film, which I found very provocative and exciting when I was 10. I suppose that influenced me to the point where I’d be desperate to make a version of the Arthurian legend myself. So, that’s my story there.
Charlie: I again like Guy, had grown up really enjoying the John Boorman version of the story and I read The Once and Future King. But mainly I was just excited about the idea of what Guy would do with this world, as an enormous fan of Guy’s my whole life. So, just the idea of making this fresh, young and exciting and accessible to a new audience, just the one line pitch of “Guy Richie’s King Arthur”- it was familiar and I always loved Guy’s work. It just made a lot of sense right off the bat. Then initially, when I started talking to Guy because we’re only telling the first chapter of the story, it’s a real origin story. There was an opportunity there to go a little deeper into what that story would look like. I loved Guy’s instinct that it would be slightly more ignoble. We’ve all seen the very noble version, I always quote Guy but he said “We’ve seen the story of the nobleman who goes on the noble quest and become the noble king” and we just thought let’s do the opposite and that just seemed sort of exciting in the context of this being an origin story and like the true story of the reluctant hero but where that reluctance would come from starts to become really exciting within that paradigm.
Q: So you didn’t use any of the musical version of Camelot for your research?
Guy: I didn’t even know there was a musical version of Camelot.
*laughs*
Q: Charlie, you’ve had nine seasons on television, you’ve presumably have left television now, you’ve got a great…
Charlie: Never say never, I love the rhythm of television but right now I’m making some films
Q: … I was going to say, you got the James Grey another auteur that you just worked with, it’s gotten raves it’s doing good business. Now you’re in this blockbuster with another auteur. Where do you see your career going and what do you want to do next?
Charlie: I’m incredibly grateful and delighted with how things are going right now. Just to continue working with directors that I love and inspire me, and doing a diverse range of films, sort of more quite films, like Lost City and then big, exciting spectacles like this too. I suppose the one element that I want to introduce more is development. I’ve been developing few ideas. I have three projects set up at three of the studios and I’ve been really enjoying that. It’s been a steep learning curve for me. As actors we get to swan it at the last minute when all of the hard work has been done and just execute the vision, which is always exciting and fun, and then we leave. The rest of the filmmaking community has to put the whole thing together but I’ve actually been very very excited to be taking ideas from seed and trying to develop it. I have some aspiration long way down the line to direct a film at some point so we’ll see. But right now, I feel very happy with where things are.
Q: And you don’t know right now what you’re doing next?
Charlie: I just shot an adaptation of Papillon with Rami Malek with a great Danish director called Michael Noer directing. So that was a lot of fun and actually just read a script last night which I’m not going to talk about obviously *laughs* I haven’t even spoken to the director, but I read a script last night that I really like. So I’m just trying to take my time. I feel as though I’m in a better position than I’ve ever been in my career and I don’t want to f*ck it up so *laughs* I’m just taking my time and trying to find something really exciting to do.
Q: I have a question for Guy, one of the things that I really liked about this film was all the modern influences and I really did like the change of having Uther actually become the stone where the sword was in. Where did that idea come about?
Guy: I wrote my version of this about 5 or 6 years ago. For one reason or another, I got shelved because Warner bought another version and then there was a third version that came in. The third version had a fantastic element, it had two things that I didn’t have. One of the things is, they thinned out the story. So, the problem with the Arthurian legend is how condensed it is. As soon as you get rid of eight of the ten components and focus on two of those components, then all of a sudden, you got a narrative that you can follow. So that was one of their ideas. And the other idea was to put a fantastic element into it. So, the story is my story but it’s got the fantastic element into it and it’s got the thinned out version that Joby brought to the party. So, those ideas came from the first script that I wrote 5 years ago or so.
Q: Is it safe to say then that you are going to start adding in some more of those extra elements later in the series?
Guy: Well, that’s the idea. I mean all of us hope that we’re going back again and if that’s the case, yes. Because it’s such a rich stew, there are so many ingredients, but the problem was it was too rich. So, we got plenty more stew back there.
*laughs*
Q: Men, do you remember your first introduction to the King Arthur legend and did you ever think you would be part of it?
Charlie: My introduction was John Boorman’s Excalibur and from that moment on, I watched it very young, probably a little too young. I had some liberal parents so *laughs* I felt as though I had a good three or four year period where I was in it every day. I grew up in the countryside. I was always carving sticks into swords. I had one particular that was my masterpiece that I whittled down from a very large piece of wood into my version of Excalibur and I spent all day trying to coerce my big brother into engaging me in combat. Successfully one day, I was just, of course, the dorky little brother. I wore him down and he said alright let’s go *laughs* and we went into the backyard and we were engaging in dynamic sword fight and then all of a sudden, much to my brother’s horror, we realized the next door neighbor, this girl that he had this huge crush on for years was watching us. Not only did I not sword fight with him anymore after that, and was hated for many years for destroying his life, also the swords disappeared so I think that was my brother’s revenge.
Q: There’s a lot of physicalities and I wondered for all of you how you trained and if there were any mishaps during the combat?
Charlie: I think that Djimon is a little more formidable than I am. I worked very closely with the stunt team, learning lots and lots of choreography obviously. Everything was pretty easy, easy-going and there weren’t any big mistakes or anything or any big injuries. Then one day they all came in sort of limping and feeling a little sorry for themselves and just generally kind of beaten up and I said “oh what happened to you lot?” and they said “we shot a scene with Djimon yesterday” *laughs* so apparently Djimon pulls no punches in those sequences *laughs*.
Q: I’d like to know what it was like for Guy to edit this film and what was it like for the actors to see it all put together?
Guy: It was time-consuming. I think we had two years allocated to make this movie and it ended up being three years. My first cut was 3 and half hours long and I’m quite prodigal rather with my film, so I don’t mind chucking stuff out. The first one came in 3 and a half hours, I thought ooh, now that was me being strict. By the time I finished it, I cut it to just under 2 hours and that was honestly just hard work, getting it from 3 and a half down to 2 hours. So it was time-consuming.
Charlie: Guy is pretty bold in the editing room. I actually don’t think I’ve ever had an experience where the final result was quite as different from what I’d anticipated. We were fortunate enough to have a big fat budget, so we were able to shoot a lot of stuff and Guy also works a lot on the fly so we were trying stuff. I thought I’d have a clear idea of what we’d shot but then I realized, it had to be cut down to time. And so once you were going to lose essentially 50% of what we’d shot, it was anybody’s guess as to what would end up on screen and how it would end up in screen because some of the editing choices that Guy made were non-linear but it was very very exciting and I came out very excited about the film, and thought that Guy and James, Guy’s editor, did a pretty sensational job of keeping as much as they could and re-imagining it in a really energetic and exciting way and also seeing it with the music. I thought the music in the film is spectacular and I know that was a real challenge for Guy and everybody to get right, to tread that line of it feeling accurate ‘time period’ but also fresh and exciting and original but I thought it was one of the most exciting elements of the film, the music.
Q: Pemberton right?
Guy: Pemberton yeah
Q: Can you talk about how you chose him?
Guy: Yeah it’s a love/hate relationship. It might get emotional. *laughs* Hans Zimmer is sort of my go to man and he’s also the loveliest man on the planet but I wanted us to be challenged, so I chose Daniel and after buckets of tears and lots of screaming matches. It’s a film in itself actually the music. There were three components in this film. There was the conventional film, there were the visual effects and there was the music. Each one of those components took up as much time as the other. So the music was a big deal.
Q: What was your favorite part of immersing yourself into this type of medieval world and if there were any challenges, what were they?
Charlie: I think that for me at least, the greatest challenge at the beginning of this was understanding the tone because it was a pretty fine needle that we were threading with taking the world seriously and the story seriously and giving it the respect that it’s due and also throwing all of that out the window and tackling it with an appropriate level of reverence and originality. So I felt like for everybody, just the first couple of weeks, there was an ambiguity with the tone and we tried a lot of stuff. I’ve heard many filmmakers talk about this and it’s certainly been true of my experience, that a film sort of tells you what it wants to be and then that combined with the filmmaker’s creative true north, we just found a path and then it started to feel really good. But that first couple of weeks, tonally, I found challenging.
Q: What do you call that octopus-like thing in the water?
Charlie: Octo-pussy
Q: I knew you were going to say that!
*laughs*
Charlie: I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Guy: Well, we’re looking for a name actually so if you got any suggestions.
Q: you just named it…
Guy: We can do better than that
*laughs*
Q: But your creatures were amazing, those came from your head right?
Guy: That was a whole creative team. We made a decision that we wanted creatures, well other than the ’Octo-pussy’, creatures that existed. So, everything else is really a shift in size. I can get taken out of a movie when it’s a two-headed elephant, but as long as it’s an elephant, I can get my head around or oh it’s a 300-foot elephant that, I can accept. An elephant with two trunks is just too much for me. So yeah, any of the fantastic creatures were really about a shift in size and we came to that conclusion quite early on.
