By Gill Pringle and Travis Johnson
King Arthur and his knights have bestrode the big screen in one form or another a number of times over the years. Starting way back in 1904 with Parsifal and going right up to this year’s upcoming Transformers: The Last Knight, with the intervening years offering up takes as diverse as 1967’s musical Camelot; 2004’s gritty, Antoine Fuqua-directed King Arthur; 1995’s best-forgotten First Knight, starring Richard Gere and Sean Connery; and, of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Yet one adaptation towers above them all: John Boorman’s gorgeous, mythic, flawed but fantastic 1981 epic, Excalibur. A passion project of Boorman’s (he knocked back Lord of the Rings to follow his Arthurian muse), the film is a mesmerising mess, drawing deep Frazerian symbolism to the surface of the source material, Thomas Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, and though it takes its own weird detours, it still stands out as the best screen adaptation of the Arthurian legend to date.
Thus, it can’t help but have an effect on the next Arthur movie to hit our screens, Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which sees Sons of Anarchy‘s Charlie Hunnam taking on the mantle of the legendary monarch.
It was Hunnam’s mother who turned him onto the film back in the day. “She remembered very acutely how impactful Excalibur was,” he recalls. “It ignited my imagination not only in storytelling but in the logistics around filmmaking so we have had a lot of discussions, me asking her questions that she struggled to answer, having very little knowledge about the film business, we both just recognised that it was something that felt significant in my life and that this had been a catalyst in inspiring this journey for me and then 30 years later, I’m playing the man himself.”
“Like Charlie, we were influenced by John Boorman’s movie,” Ritchie admits. “It was something that I could harp back to. It was something that I was very influenced by; the tonality of John Boorman’s film. I was keen to, but nervous to take a step into this particular genre because I have never been anywhere near this genre and that was principally the biggest challenge – how to find a tone and how to find an audience within a genre that I was completely unfamiliar with.”
Co-star Djimon Hounsou, who plays Sir Bedevere, first encountered Boorman’s film when he moved to France from the African country of Benin at the age of 12, and says it reminded him of stories of ancient kings in his homeland. “I came to a world that was a completely new world so it was the John Boorman film that I came across the first time and that was sort of like wow! Powerful white people talk about this type of story as well so my notion at the time and fast forward to a few years later, Guy Ritchie, he was thinking about me to play Sir Bedivere and so that was suddenly quite a find.”
Still, for Ritchie at least, his admiration of Boorman’s film is not blind, and he hopes that his version is able to side-step some of the narrative pitfalls that plague the 1981 epic. “Because the narrative or the legend is so dense, one of the things that Boorman’s movie struggled with was how to concentrate it. So the first half of the movie is fine, then it starts to get very thick towards the end of the movie. We liberated ourselves by just taking a couple of components and really getting into the sword and Arthur, leaving out some of the other mythology and that allowed us a clean trajectory for what the story was about.”
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is in cinemas this Thursday, May 18.