'The Green Knight' Director Breaks Down the Green Knight's Introduction Scene

Hi, I'm David Lowry writer

and director of The Green Knight.

And this is notes on a scene.

[wind blowing]

[swords unsheathing]

Hold.

[tree branch creaking]

[David Lowery] I grew up just loving the Arthurian legends

and all the stories of the knights and their quests.

And at some point a couple of years ago, I just,

I kind of felt like making a fantasy film.

I really love movies like Willow and Excalibur,

and I just wanted to make one of my own,

and I remembered this poem.

I remember this story and thought that it would make an

excellent template for my own take on a medieval quest film.

The scene we were watching today is the one in which

Sir Gawain meets The Green Knight for the first time.

Friends.

[David Lowery] So this shot right here is one of my

favorites in the film because I'm a big fan of old fashioned

matte paintings.

Instead extensions the way they would have done them in the

1980s or prior to that,

all through cinema history up until digital took over.

When artists would paint by hand and create these giant

paintings on glass to help extend sets beyond what they were

able to build.

We couldn't get the camera this far back and I wanted this

shot to be wider. And so pretty much everything from here,

this stuff was all on set and everything else is painted in,

including some of these people like these people are

painted.

There's a lady over here, who's a painting.

And I really wanted to just see how far we could get with

doing a hand painted, matte painting,

including painting in the extras in all the Star Wars films,

like, you know, Return of the Jedi's.

Whenever there was a big crowd scene often those crowds were

painted in, you know, often those were stormtroopers.

So you can kind of get away with a little bit more,

but I was pretty sure that we could get some hand painted

extras in here. We didn't have a lot of extras on set.

And so we were always shuffling people around.

And so I really wanted to fill this shot in.

Lighting this set was a real challenge,

particularly because we finished building it the day before

we shot on it. So I think probably this,

the day we shot this, this image here was, you know,

the day they finished building it, you know, we,

we really were down to the wire and getting the set this

large constructed.

This scene takes place on Christmas day and it's not meant

to be night. So we had to have daylight coming through.

And yet at the same time,

we wanted to be really dark and moody and, and,

and lit by fire.

And so we have a couple of little windows here and there

throughout the scene.

There is actually an opening way up here,

way above at the top of the set so that a circle of light

can just come through and aluminate the round table,

but it was a real partnership with Andrew Palermo,

my cinematographer and Jade Healy, my production designer.

We really just spend a lot of time with models, building up,

you know,

the idea of what we wanted the set to be and working out

where those light sources would be,

because we knew we just wouldn't have time to experiment

before we had to start shooting.

We really had to kind of build that in, in advance.

So all of the lighting was really designed very specifically

before the set was even built

Brothers.

Brothers, and sisters.

[David Lowery] So this is Sarita Choudhury

who plays Morgan Le Fay Gawain's mother,

who traditionally is not Gawain's mother,

but that's one of the main tweaks we've made to our telling

of Saigon and The Green Knight.

And originally she was not part of this scene.

Originally we left it a little bit more obtuse,

a little bit more up in the air as to whether or not she had

been the one who brought The Green Knight

into King Arthur's court,

who cast a spell that summoned him.

As we were shooting the movie,

we just kept wanting more and more of Sarita.

I loved her. I love what she brought to the role.

And I knew that what she was doing was incredibly important

to the film. And eventually that led to this entire scene,

which wasn't in the screenplay,

but has become one of my favorites in which she and her

sisters cast the spell that summons The Green Knight.

This scene with Sarita here was one of the scenes that we

get a hundred percent story boarded because we had already

shot everything and then King Arthur's court when we shot

this stuff.

And so everything here was specifically designed

to be intercut with King Arthur speech

and to have sort of the counterpoint to the very reverent,

very traditional Christmas day speech that

King Arthur's giving.

And here we have the more pagan side of things,

the old world magic that Morgan Le Fay represents.

You have made no same hands upon our sacred brethren,

who now in your shadow, bow their heads like veins.

I decided to make Gawain her son.

And initially that was just out of narrative convenience.

I just needed a better way to introduce Morgan Le Fay into

the story. And I had a mother for Gawain already written,

but as soon as I made her, his mother,

it really added a dimension to the story that had never

existed there before.

I thank thee for breaking bread with me, this blessed day,

[David Lowery] All these little plaques that are all over

his costume, and each one of these represents something

related, not only to our theory and lore,

but to other films that I've made,

that my collaboratives have made all over his costume, or,

you know, the ghost from Ghost Stories here.

There's all sorts of like little clues, little details,

little illusions that are built in.

And every one of those matters,

every one of those little things with designed by somebody

and contributes to not just the lore of this movie,

but to our interpretation of who King Arthur was and what he

means in a historical context.

When I first started talking to Malgosia Turzanska,

our costume designer

about what the king and queen would look like,

obviously we, they need to have crowns,

but I wanted them to not look like traditional medieval

crowns.

And she found lots of examples of crowns throughout all

sorts of different cultures,

including some south American cultures that we pulled from

for these.

But the other thing that I really liked about these was that

it gives King Arthur and Queen Guinevere appearance of

religious icons, and they sort of represent, you know,

Christendom as a warsh.

They represent the, the traditional establishment,

the organized religion side of Western culture.

And as such, I thought it was really important that they

sort of almost, you know, have the countenance of saints.

Pour out my window the small night.

And I saw land shaped by your hands.

[David Lowery] One of the amazing things about

making a movie is when you have actors like Sean Harris,

who I've always admired and I've always wanted to work with,

and you get to cast them in a role like King Arthur,

it's somewhat a part that he's never played before and never

played a part like this,

even though he's played many medieval characters before,

the best thing I can do as a director is to just step back

and follow their lead.

And one of the things he brought to the table here quite

literally was the idea of walking around the round table

over the course of this speech.

When I wrote the script and story boarded the scene,

my intention was for him to stand at the head of the table

as he does at the beginning of the scene,

we got there the day of the, you know,

the day before we started shooting to do one quick

rehearsal.

And he stood there at the head of the table and said, well,

I'm the King.

Why wouldn't I just walk around the table to address my

subjects?

And that was something that he brought to the film was this

warmth.

And I, I am the luckiest here today.

Because I am amongst thee.

I had written a King Arthur who was dying,

who is at the end of his reign, who was very decrepit.

And Sean played all those notes, but also brought a warmth,

a sense of friendship and a love for his kingdom to the

part. We only did it, the speech,

maybe three or four times we did three or four takes of it.

And that's all we needed. He really communicated so much,

not just in the way he delivers it,

but the way in which he moves through this space.

And he defines the space in a way that I don't think we

would've been able to had he not done that.

[King Arthur] Peace, peace you're brought to you kingdom.

So it isn't peace that I, I now say to you.

Handwriting is very important to me.

It's something that I just keep coming back to in my movies.

I love watching people write.

I love watching people express themselves through their

handwriting. I have terrible handwriting myself.

I could never write a letter that looks like this.

We hired a calligrapher to do everything that you see here.

I love handwritten letters. I love receiving them.

I love writing them on the occasions that I rarely do write

them and all of my movies feature them in one way or

another.

And when I was trying to think about how I wanted to convey

the sense of Morgan Le Fay casting the spell,

I decided I just wanted to have her write a letter and in

doing so turns a magical incantation and to get another

aspect of the movie that feels incredibly personal to me.

I am amongst thee.

So before we.

[David Lowery] I really wish that I could draw lines

from one shot to the next,

because the way in which these scenes were intercut

King Arthur, giving his speech

and Morgan Le Fay casting a spell was one

of the most challenging aspects of this entire production.

And I think I spent probably a, you know,

over a year cutting just this scene.

And of course the rest of the movie,

I was cutting at the same time,

but I would just I'd work on a scene.

And then come back to this one,

working on a different scene, come back to this one.

I finished the movie once and then returned to this.

And I just kept working on it over and over and over again,

trying to get the cadence of everything just right.

You know, finding just syllables that I could cut out

or trim or move around between what Sean was saying

between what Sarita was doing

and trying to get that rhythm just perfect.

I am amongst thee.

So before we-.

Just having Sarita standing up

finding exactly what frame for her to rise so

that she can begin walking in a circle in the same way that

Sean is and bring her into that circular rhythm at exactly

the right point.

It was trial and error for a good 15 or 16 months.

But the first version of it was probably 10 minutes longer

than this.

And it was all the same material.

It was, everything was still there.

All the speech was there.

We didn't cut anything out of the speech,

just the rhythm of it was much slower and much more

methodical.

And we needed it to build when you had to reach this

culminating point where The Green Knight appears and to ramp

up to that required just a lot of little fine tuning in the

edit room.

[fire starting]

[wind blowing]

[swords unsheathing]

Hold

[tree branch creaking]

[David Lowery] Let's freeze frame on our Green Knight,

holding the branch of holly over his head as a sign of

peace. He's approaching King Arthur's court with,

with friendship in his heart,

in spite of his monstrous visage.

One of the funny things about shooting this scene was that

Ralph Ineson who plays The Green Knight is an excellent

horse rider.

He knows how to ride a horse like nobody's business,

but the horse that we'd had for him,

it turned out to be in heat.

So that lovely meyer on that day was just not behaving.

She just would not listen to him whatsoever.

And so in this shot right here,

he is a sitting upon a fake horse that our key grip built

out of a saddle and a bunch of speed rail.

And in a lot of the shots where you don't see the horse,

Ralph is riding that and we're just pushing him on a dolly.

And eventually we got a second horse in a horse that would

behave and ride around the table as, as we needed.

But the first day of The Green Knight walking into

King Arthur's court was far less majestic onset

than it appears in the actual film.

There are no visual effects at all

in the creation of The Green Knight.

He is a hundred percent,

a real character that we had on set,

looking exactly like he does in the movie.

And I really wanted him to be a character in the film to not

be a visual effect.

And so we cast Ralph who I have admired for years

ever since he was on The Office.

And I loved him in The Witch,

I've loved him in everything he's been in.

And I knew that he was a tremendous actor,

and I knew that he would be able to give her performance

through whatever prosthetics we put on his face.

And then Barrie Gower,

our makeup designer designed this incredible prosthetics

that were designed around Ralph.

And Malgosia built an amazing costume to compliment that.

And we really did our best to create

a truly supernatural presence on film

that still had an odd sense of humanity at the core.

And we use a lot of old fashioned tricks,

like just having Ralph standing on a platform to make them

feel bigger than Dev, Dev is quite tall in his own rights.

So we had to put him on a quite a few,

like little decks to get him elevated above him.

But nonetheless, we were able to just, you know,

through trickery sheer old movie magic,

create a presence on film that feels truly otherworldly.

Even though he was just a hundred percent photographically,

a practical creation.

[horse shoes clacking]

As a filmmaker,

it's really important to remind myself constantly that the

movies I make, aren't all that important.

Someday they won't exist anymore.

Someday they'll all fall away.

They won't be around they won't survive me as long as I

sometimes think they will.

And so more important than the legacy

I'm creating for myself with my body of work is the way

I comport myself as I make them the integrity with

which I live my life and my attempts to be a good person

to do good in this world.

And I wanted that to be one of the central conceits of this

film,

because here is a character who has a tremendous legacy laid

out ahead of him.

He is related to King Arthur,

one of the greatest Kings of medieval history.

He could be the successor of the throne,

but it was important for me to make sure that his journey

carried him to a place where he realized that more important

than that legacy was the idea of being a human being with

integrity and with goodness in their heart.

And that's what I wanted to convey in The Green Knight.