When Excalibur turned off the power in Bray
LARGE parts of Bray in Co. Wicklow had their electricity shut off during filming of the 1981 movie Excalibur because lights in homes were ruining the ancient setting of the movie.
A new documentary, to be shown tomorrow, reveals how the ESB solved a lighting issue on set in a very Irish way.
During a scene in John Boorman’s classic in which Gabriel Byrne rides across the clouds in the night sky, the crew needed to have no lights in the background due to the medieval setting of the film. But there were several lights coming from the seaside town Bray that remained in the frame.
Location manager Kevin Moriarty got in touch with a mobile unit of the ESB to see what could be done about the lights. One ESB employee came up to his office and instructed another one who was at the Bray switchboard over the phone. ‘And my vision of the whole thing is this guy standing down there with two or three different levers to pull. And he’d pull Lever A, and the lights would go off in half of Bray over on the left, and he’d go ‘“no, no, that’s the wrong one, try again”,’ said Moriarty.
‘And he’d push the other lever and it would go back on again. He did it two or three times, in the middle of the evening when people were having their tea or watching TV, lights would go out. And then he pulled one lever and the lights that I needed were out, so was another quarter of Bray.’
‘And he said: “We’ve got it. Great, give us a ring when he’s finished filming.” And I said: “What are you going to do about all the people?” And he answered: “Ah we’ll just tell them it’s a power cut.”’
‘I don’t think we’d get away with that now, but at that time it worked,’ said Moriarty. Excalibur: Behind The Movie, Monday, 9.35pm, RTÉ One.