CREATORS AIMED TO ‘BRING SOMETHING ORIGINAL TO THE TABLE’
Writer/director and star of new King Arthur film talk about approaching this classic story ‘fearlessly’
Bearded and blokeish, actor Charlie Hunnam and writer/director Guy Ritchie look like they could be brothers and also best mates, as they kibbitz together during a Toronto Star interview.
They actually did become fast chums while making King Arthur:
Legend of the Sword, Ritchie’s radical remaking of heroic Arthurian legend, with Hunnam playing the sovereignto-be as a young scrapper and swordpuller.
They enjoy arguing with each other, which they proceed to do when I mention that the King Arthur saga, according to Wikipedia, is considered part of . . . drum roll, please . . . the “Matter of Britain.” It’s a body of Medieval literature and it’s taken very, very seriously in Blighty, even if it is mostly fictional.
“I haven’t heard that before,” Ritchie, 48, says. “Lucky I didn’t know about it!”
“There actually were two or three men given credit as the inspiration for Arthur,” says Hunnam, 37, who has heard of the Matter. “There was one in particular who was a general in
the King’s Army, who was apparently quite a formidable young man.”
“He’s f---ing making this up!” Ritchie interjects, amused by Hunnam’s scholarly manner. The two really get into it:
Hunnam (annoyed): “There’s a legend!”
Ritchie: “I’ve done all the research in the f---ing world over this!”
Hunnam: “Well, you didn’t read the same books that I did! Because there’s that guy that had the battle — he fought for 36 hours straight and killed 500 men. Ritchie: “Oh, that story! Ha-ha!” They aren’t about to let a bit of history get in the way of their fun as the interview continues:
It sounds like you two came to the story of King Arthur from different directions. Charlie, did you have to be persuaded by Guy to take a more irreverent approach?
Hunnam: Not at all! The only thing that Guy had tried to convey to me was the importance for us to have fun in the process. I can just tend to be a bit overly serious and earnest to the actual process of the work itself.
Ritchie: Which, by the way, I think is necessary. I think Charlie needs to take the position that he’s going to take the work seriously. And I have to take the position to corrupt that. It’s good cop, bad cop. It’s the Devil and it’s God. It’s positive and it’s negative, it’s yin and it’s yang. That’s really the point . . . so Charlie has this idea, I have to challenge it. I have an idea and Charlie needs to challenge me. But we sometimes know intuitively once one of us comes up with an idea that that is the idea that you should follow and that is the idea you should pursue and you don’t need a good cop or a bad cop. Sometimes you do.
Hunnam: There’s the other side of the coin, the argument of being beholden to the material. I think there’s also a sense of responsibility if you’re going to tell a story that has been told many times before to approach it fearlessly and bring something original to the table. Otherwise, those other adaptations still exist in the world, and people can go and watch them.
King Arthur is like the original James Bond. He’s a figure of heroism and adventure whose story keeps being told, with different people doing the telling.
Hunnam: Right, but ultimately when you’re a student of storytelling as we are, as we’ve spent our lives dedicated to that, you realize that there are only three or four stories that we tell over and over again. Like Guy has said, the story of Arthur is the story of Luke Skywalker, it’s the story of the hero with a thousand faces.
Ritchie: It’s a hero’s journey. And it’s important to understand that. As a storyteller you can’t be ambiguous about what the essence of a narrative is. It’s curious, because the clothes of a man are not the soul of a man. And often there’s a cover of the book, and there’s a book. And hopefully what we’re after is a great cover, and real substance in those pages, too. I’m going to see how many metaphors I can get in this while I’m in metaphor mode: You’re not going to swallow that pill unless it’s got sugar on it. So our job as storytellers is to somehow impart both sugar and medicine simultaneously.
I was amused by the language of this film, hearing Arthur and his men say “bollocks” and call each other “the lads.” How much of a discussion did you have about the vernacular before using it?
Ritchie: It was the tone of the film. The film sets its own tone. Our job, initially, is to be sensitive to where the film is going. Is it going to be that funny? Or it is going to be something else? And somehow you get those ingredients just right and you stick it in the oven and see what comes out. And one of those things is the vernacular of English street speak, if you will. So it only seemed pertinent that we should hold on to the essence of that.