On its 25th Anniversary, Pavel Barter charts the making of John Boorman's Excalibur, with contributions from actors Helen Mirren and Nigel Terry, as well as costume designer Bob Ringwood.

Ardmore Studios, Co. Wicklow, 1981. Director John Boorman arrived with bad tidings for his crew. They were halfway through Excalibur's 16-week shoot, and the film's LA producers were visiting to check up on their $11 million investment. The moguls at Orion Pictures were suspicious of Boorman. Sure, he'd achieved box office glory with Deliverance, but his most recent venture, Exorcist II: The Heretic, had been a catastrophic flop. In the minds of these hard-nosed businessmen, poetic types like Boorman were potential liabilities.

Hooting history
Excalibur's modest budget had already been stretched canvas-tight. In one scene, two armies – one silver, the other black – meet by a river, but only 55 suits of armour had been created for twice as many knights. The solution? Film the silver knights, paint their armour black, then shoot the opposing army; scrub off the paint and repeat. Historians may have spotted the chinks, but Boorman couldn't give a hoot about history – he wanted the movie to look mythical, and as far from Hollywood convention as one could imagine. This was what worried him about the arrival of the producers.

Thankfully Orion liked what they saw, and Boorman's masterpiece was assured. Before Orff's 'Oh Fortuna' became the soundtrack for everything from Natural Born Killers to credit card adverts, before Peter Jackson's unsentimental description of a fantasy world in Lord of the Rings, and before the emergence of the Irish film industry as we know it today, there was Excalibur.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 110.