Ki ng arthur : lege nd ofthe sword
It’s Lock Stock meets Lord Of The Rings! You’re havin’ a giraffe, Gandalf!
it feels like a big responsibility,” says Charlie Hunnam thoughtfully, when questioned about carrying a monster event movie that has a mooted six-picture franchise riding on it. “Me being front and centre on one of these things where they’re spending whatever, a hundred million plus, does come with enormous stakes.” He leans back in his chair in the cavernous suite at Claridge’s hotel, interlaces long fingers together and nods. “And yeah, of course, a lot of that is to do with me. But Guy [ Ritchie] and I are a sort of a team in it together – the decisions he was making affects my performance, and the decisions I made affects his overall film. But Guy said early on, ‘Look, as long as we have fun – that’s really going to be the central mandate. Then we can’t go too wrong. Let’s forget about the end result, and just make this for us.’”
A noble pursuit, but in these days of gateway movies leading to bankable sequels, the emphasis on return on
investment and the importance of opening weekend box office, there’s no getting around that Ritchie and his lead had their work cut out. This being the umpteenth iteration of a Fifth Century English fable of sovereigns and sorcery going up against the established superhero stable, it’s perhaps understandable that the studio and the duo have taken their time – filming began in March 2015 – crafting a rollicking fantasy actioner that Hunnam has likened to “Lock, Stock And
Two Smoking Barrels meets The Lord Of The Rings”. But for all the finessing and tweaking, an untested new genre pic is still a gamble, right? “Filmmakers gamble,” Ritchie shrugs in the suite next door, “That’s just big boy gambling, really…”
Origin Story
Ritchie has been gambling on Arthur for some years now. Back in 2010, he and Trainspotting scribe John Hodge were developing a sword ’n’ stone movie (rivalling Bryan Singer’s planned remake of John Boorman’s Excalibur) at Warner Bros. But the studio won a bidding war to grab David Dobkin’s script Arthur & Lancelot (for a cool $2 million), which essentially left Ritchie’s and Singer’s projects dead in the water. Fast-tracked for a big opening the following year,
A&L courted both Kit Harington and Colin Farrell as prospective Arthurs before collapsing and opening the door for a still-interested Ritchie – now with Sherlock Holmes 2
‘Charlie Hunnam wasn’t on my list to be Arthur. But he was the only guy that kept coming back, the only guy that could sustain my interest’ guy ritchi e
box-office kudos under his belt – to return. But not before another, more fantasy-led project also interested WB.
“You’ll understand a lot about the politics of studios if you’ve been on this journey with me,” Ritchie laughs when recalling the on/off nature of getting KA:LOTS off the ground. “It’s a bit like trying to light a fire in a damp forest. If you just keep trying to light it, eventually something will happen. There was a lot of energy that went into it, and no small part from myself, to making sure that something will become manifest.” What finally provided the spark for a green light then? “I suppose it was when the fantasy aspect met the more traditional aspect. It gave it the ingredient that it needed in order to be theatrical.”
Theatricality became a key issue, what with small screen fantasy dramas satisfying audiences without having to leave the house. “What do you want from cinema? What’s going to make you go?” Ritchie enquires (he asks as many questions as he answers during our chat). “You need a degree of sensation. Otherwise, you’re going to watch it indoors. So movies have become more sensational. Budgets are bigger. There are requisite boxes that one expects from cinema – whether we like that or we don’t like that. So some of those components are inherent with what we’re doing. It’s quite a big film, and that’s intentional, because you have to be.”
With that in mind, though Ritchie’s original gritty but cheeky chappy premise remained – Arthur is brought up in a London brothel, growing into an artful pugilist and grifter who struggles with the mantle of power and expectation when he pulls the sword from the stone, incurring the wrath of evil ruler Vortigern (Jude Law) – he loaded the picture with fantasy eye-candy. Widening the scope meant adding 300ft fighting elephants, a Macbethian sorcery pact between the murderous Vortigern and a three-headed sea-witch, a female magi with beast-master abilities, huge CG set-pieces and an otherworldly realm crawling with gigantic rats and crumbling towers. While filming was set for physical rugged locations (in Wales and Scotland), the schedule now also needed numerous days of greenscreen and SFX – more of which later. And Ritchie needed a lead who could shoulder the heavy-lifting of the role; juggling the physicality, swagger and dramatic introspection demanded.
Usually, at this point, a director will wax lyrical about their pick, telling TF that there was only ever one choice for the role. But no such BS for the resolutely direct Ritchie. “I had hundreds of actors, Charlie wasn’t on my list,” he says. “I didn’t choose him. But Charlie was so insistent that he was going to be King Arthur that he became King Arthur, in spite of my reticence.” That reticence? “He’d only seen one thing that I’d done before,” Hunnam admits with a rueful smile. “It was the thing I was really least proud of in all the work that I’ve done. I said, ‘Look, I totally agree. The film was shit, and I was shit in it. But that’s not really indicative of what I’m capable of, or the work I’m aspiring to.’ I had put my name in the hat, and Guy had taken it back out. And I said, ‘Fuck that.’ Somebody I’d admired had a negative perception of me, I wanted to right that.” So much so that
he paid for his own flight from LA to a meeting in London to broker an audition. That bolshie attitude stuck with Ritchie. “The only guy that kept coming back from my point of view, the only guy that could sustain my interest was Charlie. So he won it fair and square, in spite of my prejudice.”
Campfire stories
With Arthur nailed down, Ritchie called in his Sherlock buddy Jude Law for adversary duties. “Being a Brit, people always assume you’re going to play the moustache-twirling villain at some stage,” Law admits. “So I’d avoided it somewhat. With this, I like the idea there was this added element that Vortigern was carrying this sense of grief, and there was another layer to him.” Eric Bana was locked as Arthur’s regal dad, Pendragon, Spanish model-turned-actress Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey as a magical sidekick, Hunnam’s Queer As Folk co-star Aidan Gillen as a rebel leader and a host of loveable rogues as Arthur’s geezer gang. Plus one David Beckham on cameo duties as a leader in Vortigern’s ‘Blackleg’ army. “He’s properly acting,” Ritchie enthuses of his footballing mate, who he uglied up with a prosthetic nose and some facial scars. “It’s important that there’s a veil in front of him. But he’s not too distracting, is he? He delivers his lines well, and he just felt like the right step.”
Team in place, Ritchie stewarded an unapologetically chummy location shoot where the cast and crew bonded in a grown-up scout camp and Hunnam, thrilled to no longer be working in the searing heat of Sons Of Anarchy (“I did get some leather trousers, just to make me feel a little bit at home”), went wandering in the glens and peaks until twilight. “We had a pretty extraordinary time together in this environment that we created of living together and eating together every night,” he recalls. “We had camp fires and were telling stories and drinking wine. So it was really beautiful. Every night after filming I’d go on these epic long hikes up into the mountains, and invariably get a little bit further than I intended to, then have to try to find my way back in the dark.”
For Law, whose scenes were mostly confined to studio work (“I was in my palace, in my furs”), the manly bantz happened in Ritchie’s self-built super-trailer/man-cave. “It’s this portable log cabin with a little fire inside and leather bunks. He’d cook chicken on the log fire. We’d sit and watch the morning’s rushes. With Holmes, we just had a van.” (“Oh yeah, I play mother most of the time. I had a full grill in it – good lunch,” nods Ritchie. “Kenneth Branagh has it now on Murder On The Orient Express.”)
The on-the-fly changes, bromances and improvisation that are his trademark filming style aside, Ritchie couldn’t ignore that (CG) elephant in the room – much as he might like. The fantasy and spectacle from elaborate action sequences and eye-saucering SFX weren’t going to create themselves. “It’s boring,” Ritchie states of fight scenes, admitting that one extensive, planned sequence was chucked out on the day and the stunt team were told to stand down. “We got rid of 90 per cent of it, we had some fun and we fucked about. It worked too.” His enjoyment of greenscreen is even less enthusiastic. “There’s aspects of visual effects that I enjoy, and there are other aspects that are mind-numbing. The world creation, I find great fun. The tricky stuff is Charlie fighting a green man, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like. For five days, he rattles around in a big green box with a green man and lots of ropes attached to him. Pretty boring. I couldn’t do it. So I left Charlie to it.” Hunnam laughs when reminded of his director chucking in the towel, “I wasn’t going to say that, but yeah, it’s a true story.”
Funny Busines
Filming wrapped in August 2015 with release destined for the following summer. Hunnam had 10 days off to slim down his muscle mass and recalibrate before he set off to work on The Lost City Of Z and Ritchie hunkered down to master his post-production SFX. Turns out he got longer than he expected: Warners moved the release date to early 2017 and then again to early summer. A sign of trouble? Of a project struggling to get a toehold on tone? No, attests Ritchie, a sign of a congested marketplace. “Look, I don’t want to be going up against Guardians Of The Galaxy,” he laughs. “God, that’s a whole dark art in itself, release dates. And it’s now more pertinent to understand that than ever before. As big movies have got bigger, it becomes more and more intimidating. And we are a big enough movie to have to really care about the weekend.”
In fact, he says, the delay was an unexpected gift. “Since [ the release date] was moving, I thought, ‘Ooh, we’ll just keep going with the visual effects then.’ I’ve had a year to hone those visual effects, which otherwise you would have had to have gone with.” One particular scene near the end of the film, when Arthur descends a staircase slaying a phalanx of soldiers as the power of Excalibur courses through him, took weeks of honing and tweaking (“More hours being put into Charlie coming down the stairs than almost any other visual effects of 40 seconds in history!” jokes Ritchie). The soundtrack was slaved over and the narrative finessed to become less linear. “There were essentially three movies. There was the visual effects component. There was the musical component. And then there was the film itself. It took three years to make this film, and I can’t see any version of it taking less.”
Without the constraints of a ticking clock, Law believes Ritchie has refined his mammoth event movie to be unmistakably his, complete with accelerated sequences, non-linear narrative, crash cuts and all-important swagger. “He’s one of the few directors in this type of film,
this scale of film, who has a really distinctive signature,” he muses, blue eyes serious. “We live in a time where the superhero film is dominant and you know, Guy’s style – I suppose you could say – is divisive. But at the same time, it has an authenticity. Anything nowadays that has a certain authenticity in a sea of sometimes corporate, a homogenous sense of likeness, I think is kind of cool and people respond to that.” Hunnam agrees: “I was surprised when I saw the film, just how renegade Guy had been in his editing process. We shot a much more linear film, and then through the process of editing and him exploring the most exciting, visceral version of the film he could make from the footage that he shot – it went back to being much more Guy Ritchie-esque.” Ritchie, having seen other fantasy films fail to engage with audiences (“I won’t point the finger”), felt the key editing criteria during his post-shoot tinkering was getting the tone right, a marriage between the solemnity of the source material and crowd-pleasing comedy beats. “To be both serious and funny is a hard thing to do. But there are things that I’ve seen in this genre where you think, ‘Fucking hell, you’ve gone down that road, mate.’ I just felt they weren’t that committed, or they just got the tone wrong.” Getting it wrong isn’t just about professional pride though.
King Arthur is planned as the origin story for a franchise, parlaying Camelot’s tale into years of box-office bankers. Mention of this prompts Ritchie’s only point of coyness in our
‘I was surprised just how renegade Guy had been in his editing process, exploring the most exciting, visceral version of the film he could make’ charlie hunnam
discussion. Does he have a plan for how the next few films would roll out, which legends would be ripe for regeneration? “Can’t tell you that!” he booms. But surely he’s left out key canon moments with a view to revisiting in later movies? “It was a conscious decision that we all made at the beginning… take out some of the iconic names that you know, and just put them onto the side. If you try to do too much: ‘Oh right, here comes Lancelot! Ooh, here’s Guinevere. Ooh, hello, then Merlin’s done that?’ Before you know it, there’s too much. You just end up tripping over yourself. So the idea was to dilute the beverage so it’s more palatable.”
Hunnam is certainly thinking of the long game; “I’d happily make another 20 films with Guy, let alone six. I asked [ him] in the beginning: ‘Is this a one-off thing? If you want to move forward and make more, would you be at the helm?’ And he said, ‘I’m not giving this to anyone.’ But it’s anyone’s guess what the people in the street decide they’re going to get behind and really put their [ ticket] money into.” For now, all anyone can do is sit and wait for opening weekend to see how the dice will fall and whether the duo will be re-teaming. “We’ll have to see how this one works,” Ritchie admits. “If we’re lucky enough to go again, then I’d love to.” He smiles with a knowing glint in his eye. “But you’ve got to remember, it’s gonna remain. Movies are around for a long time, and they can haunt you…” King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword opens 19 May.