David Lowery’s The Green Knight arrives in the UK this week both in cinemas and on Amazon Prime Video. To mark the occasion, Paul Simpson chatted with the writer, director and producer about the challenges of bringing a 700 year old tale to the screen…

 

I’m looking forward to seeing what the reactions are when it hits a British audience.

Oh yes, I am too, especially given that this is a particularly British tale. I hope I did your fellow countrymen and women justice.

I would say you have. What’s the fascination with it? Why did you want to tell this tale and why tell it so authentically?

The authenticity came down to a love of the text. When I first decided to write this, I wanted to make a movie about a knight on a quest. It was just something I wanted to do and I’d loved this poem in college when I read it. I loved that it was about a knight who’s on an adventure, the end of which is going to be his death and he knows that. Every step of the way he’s getting closer to his own end, and there’s something really beautiful and profound about that.

So I thought that I would write an adaptation of it that maybe wasn’t going to be as literal as it was. I picked up the poem again and started reading it thinking, ‘This could be a good jumping off point’ or a movie that is less related to the Arthurian legends than it wound up being.

As I started to research the poem I really fell in love with all the discourse around it that has existed at this point for over seven hundred years, and I found myself just wanting to stay as true to it as I could. Even in the areas where I felt the need to diverge from the text, I wanted to honour that divergence and make sure that audiences who know the poem recognise why I am diverging from it.

It really came from a deep love of the source material.

You’re taking something that has quite a specific structure in the poem and you’re putting it into a movie which is something that often also has a certain structure. Were there issues in terms of the adaptation for taking it to a screen story where people will be going in with, maybe unconscious, biases of how things are going to play out?

It did a little bit. One of the biggest changes that was enforced upon me by my own love of cinematic narrative was the perspective of the story and I wanted, in telling the story, to never leave Gawain’s POV. I felt it was really important that we root the entire movie in his perspective, and as a result of that we had to lose, what some scholars would say are some of the most important aspects of the poem which is the entire hunting sequence.

There are three hunting sequences in the original text which are so rich and have so much going on in them and reflect so much upon, not just the world, but the themes that the anonymous author intended to include in the poem, and those had to fall by the wayside.

Then in the editorial process you reshape things more. Originally we had shot quite a bit more with the Lord and Lady. Everything that happens in the poem with the exception of the hunting, we shot all of that and it all had to fall away because the movie was coming to life – the poem was receding and the movie was coming to life.

Then there’s the sense that you need a three act structure. You could say that in a quest movie like this, the episodic structure of it maybe you would say has five or six acts, but you need that middle chunk where he’s on the journey and he has these different encounters. Those are in the poem but they are all one line. There’s a line about having fought many battles or encountering giants – they’re just one line here and there and then you get to the Lord and Lady’s castle which is where most of the poem takes place.

To suggest that three act structure we needed to expand upon those. So he has these waystations along the route to the Green Chapel that fit a more traditional cinematic narrative structure.

It’s the same with taking anything from one medium to another isn’t it? You have to balance the requirements of both to make it work in the new form.

I’m a dork: I was like, ‘How can I take the bob and weave structure of the original with the rhyming structure and replicate that cinematically?’ I had to draw the line there, I never quite figured that one out.

Complimentary colours I suppose would be one way of doing it.

Or just repeating just the same couple of shots… Yes, I never quite figured that one out.

You mention the change in the edit. We all know a script is written, then it’s changed on set, then it’s changed in the edit bay – but this one changed twice in the edit bay didn’t it?

Yes.

What were the differences between the first version and this one thematically? Or was it a question of you being able to bring those themes out more in the version that’s out now?

The movie was exactly the same thematically; the themes just developed more room to resonate.

The real difference between the version that would have opened, that I was rushing to finish before the pandemic, and the version that is now opened is that it’s longer. For audiences that might be a negative thing but for me, it was really a beautiful thing to realise that the movie needed to breathe more. I was rushing so fast to try and get it done that I just got caught up in the idea that it needed to be shorter, that the pace needed to be quicker.

I had a movie that was under two hours long that was pretty good but once I revisited it I just felt that I was racing. I was trying to reach the end of the movie with greater expediency and no gain from that. There was no time to let these ideas and themes develop, there was no time to really let the world exist as a world unto itself, and so I just put some air back into it. That was really the biggest change.

There were a couple of scenes that I had taken out that I put back in with Alicia Vikander. I cut them because I hadn’t figured out how to make them work yet. I was heartbroken that I ever considered taking them out. Then everything else, I just let it breathe a little bit more. I just put a little more space in, I let these shots of the world that he exists in linger a little bit more, with a little bit more of a leisurely pace on screen.

Ralph Ineson’s performance is absolutely stunning. How much were you having to balance the practical effects with getting that clarity? Were there things you had to walk back in terms of the way that he looked?

No, everything worked perfectly with Ralph and with the character of the Green Knight. It was a sheer stroke of luck that it did because we didn’t really have time for testing [the costume]; we couldn’t make changes if we wanted to.

We cast Ralph and were designing the makeup at the same time. We really saw him in it for the first time about three days before we shot it. It was one of those beautiful moments: we were shooting another scene and our AD said ‘OK, Ralph’s ready if you want to come take a look at the makeup?’ We walked around the corner and saw him in that. The beautiful thing was, you see this incredibly imposing figure just standing in an office, basically, yet it was also instantly recognisable as him. It was instantly Ralph. You didn’t lose the human that was there in front of you and that was what my hope was.

The whole time working with Barrie Gower on the makeup, the idea was we should always be able to see the actor underneath this makeup. You should be able to see the human through it even though he’s got contact lenses that look like they’re made out of wood. Those wooden eyeballs should still twinkle like Ralph’s real eyes would.

Had it not worked, we would have shot the movie anyways! We didn’t have a choice, we would have had to shoot it, but it worked perfectly, it worked beautifully. It required no digital augmentation, it’s just all him, it’s just all Ralph. That wonderful work that Barrie and his team did on the makeup – and the thing that I hoped for – meant you can just hold on a close[up] with him and just see those eyes twinkle. That’s how we end the movie: the final shot of the movie is that twinkle in his eye, and it’s just because it worked so perfectly and so beautifully.

You’ve said that you’ve shot a more definitive ending. I don’t know if that’s going to be what’s in the poem or what we see leading to it? Will we ever see that? I don’t necessarily want to know what it is.

No, I’m going to tell you because I want to put it to rest, what it is.

At the end of the movie, when the Green Knight says his final line he then just stood up and lifted the axe. That’s the only other thing we shot, him standing back up. Initially there was the suggestion that he was lifting the axe to deliver the death blow and it’s like: he just said ‘Off with your head’ so we don’t need to see that.

It was literally that same shot, the shot that the movie ends on and we just kept rolling and Ralph stood up and lifted the axe.

The Green Knight launches on Prime Video and in theatres on 24th September