THE GREEN KNIGHT
THE GREEN KNIGHT | David Lowery on his thrilling and weird Arthurian epic.
Dev Patel leads David Lowery’s Arthurian epic.
If Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon and The Old Man And The Gun all feel wildly different, it’s news to director David Lowery. “People are like, ‘You’re making a medieval film? What a crazy left turn.’ I was like, ‘No! Of course that’s what I would make next! What else could possibly make other than a medieval fantasy film?’”
A fan of Arthurian lore since he was a kid, Lowery first read the epic poem that the film’s based on in his freshman English class, alongside The Iliad and The Odyssey. “We ended the semester with Sir Gawain And The Green Knight,” he says. “I loved it then, and I really loved how strange it was.”
The story concerns Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain, a knight of the Round Table (and Arthur’s nephew). The headstrong young man accepts a challenge to take on the titular brute (Ralph Ineson) in a contest that will come back to haunt him one year hence…
Despite the macabre tone and avant-garde visuals the film boasts, Lowery was inspired by mainstream genre classics. “At some point, in 2018, I just had a wild inkling that it’d be fun to make a fantasy movie,” he reflects. “I love The Lord Of The Rings. I’m a huge fan of Ron Howard’s Willow. I unpacked some action figures I had as a child, and I just thought to myself, ‘It’d be really fun to make an epic quest movie, a fantasy film.’ I just started to think about potential source material, and Sir Gawain And The Green Knight flashed through my brain. And I just decided to start writing.”
Other varied touchstones were Scorsese’s Silence, Tarkovsky’s Andrei
Rublev, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. “It’s medieval in a sense,” says Lowery, “but it’s also completely fantastical, and there is no specific time period that it’s set in that corresponds to our own human history.”
The enviable supporting cast includes Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton and Barry Keoghan, but of casting Patel in the lead, Lowery explains that “the Gawain I wrote was a rather unsavoury fellow. So I knew I needed an actor who was charismatic, who the audience would side with no matter what. I knew that he would be able to get the character where he needed to be in the darkest of moments, and, at the same time, be so enduringly likeable that the audience would root for him no matter what.”
Much in the same way, it seems, that we would follow Lowery no matter which genre he’s working in. “I like being unpredictable,” he smiles. “As much as I feel that all these movies are cut from the same cloth, I’m really happy that they consistently surprise people. I hope that I never bore anybody.” MM
‘I HAD A WILD INKLING THAT IT’D BE FUN TO MAKE A FANTASY MOVIE’ DAVID LOWERY
ETA | 6 AUGUST / THE GREEN KNIGHT OPENS IN CINEMAS THIS SUMMER.