Jerry Bruckheimer: How did the story come to you? What sparked you? Did you research it? Did you just come across something on King Arthur?

David Franzoni: Well, I’d actually seen something about the fact that, um, the legends of Arthur may have come from the Sarmatians, who were sent over to Britain to fight with Rome. And, uh, while I was doing Gladiator I kept this thing in the back of my mind, you know, Arthur, the Romans. And so, uh, when I went off to Italy I began to research and to write it, and, uh, strangers in a strange land, sort of the wild bunch, uh, very different from everything we’ve ever done about Arthur, and, uh, for me, the first believable Arthur that I’d ever come across.

Guinevere: How many Britons have you killed?
Arthur: As many as tried to kill me. It’s the natural state of any man to want to live.
Guinevere: Animals live. It’s a natural state of any man to want to live free. In their own country.

David Franzoni: What did you think about the take on Guinevere?
Kiera Knightly: The interesting thing about it is that there is some historical relevance, because I think the Picts and the Celts were all matriarchal societies, and actually, the Celts, I think, were matriarchal until about the 11th century, or something like that, so that was sort of fascinating, if you do put it in a time- were you trying to make a reality out of the stories and you put it in that time, and it is accurate that she would have been a warrior.

Antoine Fuqua: And I think everybody expected you to be introduced in a completely different way, I mean we introduced you in a prison cell, and you know, you don’t look all glamorous and beautiful, you know, I think that was a good choice as well, you know. It’s a better way to get a relationship going with Arthur as opposed to you just walking down the steps looking like an angel, which we know you’re not.

Kiera Knightly: Shut up!

Antoine Fuqua: You walked right into that one.

Kiera Knightly: alright, alright!

Antoine Fuqua: Lancelot just looses again.

Ioan Gruffudd: Yes, yes, exactly, again, no…

Antoine Fuqua: How did you feel about that?

Ioan Gruffudd: Well, It was great fun to play, because we didn’t actually physically get in contact, you know, it was all sort of supressed or in the subtext.

David Franzoni: Antoine, when you first saw the script, I’m sure you began thinking about what it would be like to make this movie. What were the first things that went through your mind? How difficult this would be to shoot?

Antoine Fuqua: I had no idea how difficult it would be to shoot. I had no idea. Jerry tried to warn me but I had no idea. I mean, I think the first thing that went through my mind is how complex it was. The new information that you get when you read about Pelagius and free will and Arthur being Roman and Briton, I mean, I grew up studying Joseph Campbell mythology and things like that and I’ve never heard of anything like this before.

Clive Owen: Especially because every King Arthur movie that’s been made so far was only perception, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a myth that is, you know, there are different versions of. So I think any movie that’s been made is only somebody’s take on it, isn’t it.

Jerry Bruckheimer: Every generation has adopted their King Arthur. Back from the 7th century to today. We’ve just created a new King Arthur. This is one of the great soap operas of history, the story of Guinevere and Arthur, and it went through the whole French courts in in the 13th and 14th centuries, where that was the favorite story of the kings’. The jesters would come in and tell this wonderful story about Lancelot and Guinevere and the knights and they were enthralled with it so that’s how stories were told, by storytellers

Jerry Bruckheimer: I’m amazed by the choreography of the swordfights, I mean how detailed they are and how skilled the swordsmen were and you know, the tactics they used and, in, just amazing the first movie I’ve ever seen that really shows you the tactics, other than guys just clanging swords.

Kiera Knightly: that’s what was great about the stunt guys. I think they did give us all a different kinda characteristic through the fighting, which is really great. You felt that you kinda earned your own fight, your own style, and all the rest of it, and that was very clever, And to be able to, I mean, because we had three months before to train, we could do it ourselves, which I think for me really helped my character, 'cause suddenly you understood exactly what it would’ve- well, kind of what it would’ve been like to be in that situation and exactly physically what you needed to be able to do, which made it kind of fascinating.

Clive Owen: The only slightly annoying thing is, Rob, my stunt guy used to do all my fights in a tee-shirt. [laughter] And he’d be deft and fast and then I’d clump in with the armour going ‘Thanks Rob. Thanks for that, mate.’

Antoine Fuqua: With the real sword, too.

Clive Owen: Yeah, with the real sword.

Jerry Bruckheimer: I know you designed a lot of this stuff yourself, but who helped you in choreographing these? Did each actor kinda work with their own stunt person and kinda work it out or was Harry Humphrees?

Antoine Fuqua: Yeah, well, Harry Humphrees definitely. Harry Humphrees. I never saw a group of Irish sort of rogue guys get whipped into shape so fast.

Ioan Gruffudd: Yes, yes, yes.

Antoine Fuqua: Harry just sort of, like, I remember one day I said ‘ok, Harry, I need these guys to have a military quality but still barbarians and I need them to get it together and we got like an hour.” In about half an hour I heard the Saxons over the wall they were marching and doing battle cries and you know. And I looked over the wall and they were all lined up and in shape and they were you know, it’s pretty incredible.

Cerdic: Send what’s left of your infantry in.
Cynric: You wanna kill my men?
Cerdic: They’re my men!

David Franzoni: So what about Til and Stellan? As the heavies of the movie in a very heavy movie? I mean, how did you feel about those guys?

Antoine Fuqua: Well, I think Stellan’s a brilliant actor and so is Til. Stellan brings a lot to the table as far as being the bad guy.

Jerry Bruckheimer: He’s imposing.

Antoine Fuqua: He’s imposing, but there’s intelligence as well.

Jerry Bruckheimer: and there’s a brutality to him and a gentleness, and yet he frightens you despite it. The way he talks, the way he carries himself, just his body language is frightening.

Kiera Knightly: He was amazing, though. He’d come in every single day and practice with all the guys just to get it perfect. Cuz He chose very specific movements that he wanted to use, didn’t he, and as soon as he became the character, you would, you’d see him walk in a different way, I mean, he was absolutely terrifying. I wouldn't go near him on set. Yeah, it’s huge.

Clive Owen: I think it’s also a very exciting for the film that both, you know, you got Til, Stellan Skarsgard, Mads Mikkelsen, they’re some of the best actors from their own countries, you know. I was really excited. These have been the, you know, the cream of European actors, so it was very exciting to be able to work with them.

Antoine Fuqua: What was great ,too, was what you guys did on your own, as well, was you humanized it. Cuz it’s very easy to shoot an action sequence once it’s designed and laid out. You go shoot it. But it’s very difficult to make it into a dialogue scene , like you guys did. You actually, two people tired from fighting, they’re actually exhausted, you’re never going to see that in movies, people just fight and flip each other around and no one gets tired. These guys were tired, exhausted, and, you know, you brought that all to the table.

Hugh Grant: That wasn’t so much acting.

Kiera Knightly: Yeah, really.

Antoine Fuqua: But you know, it had a dialogue, it was like a. I always looked at the battle scenes more as scenes than just fight sequences because they had emotion tied to them. Lancelot trying to get to Guinevere, Arthur trying to get to Gawain and trying to get to Tristran before he dies.

Clive Owen: Well, I think that’s always important in those scenes. You’ve got to, you can always remember that characters are fighting with a perspective. It’s boring just watching a well-constructed fight scene unless you’re invested in it, unless there’s some purpose.

Jerry Bruckheimer: You have to be invested in the characters.

Antoine Fuqua: I don’t know if you guys realize, and maybe you do, how much work you actually put into the fighting and the horse riding. When I watch it, I’m fascinated at how fast you were riding these horses and how well you were fighting on these horses. You remember when you you were going through the crowds and you’re swinging these swords. It’s very dangerous, I mean I watch it now and I go “you know, wow” But it’s amazing that you all did that.

Clive Owen: I think it was quite exciting. I think we were all quite excited by that. W e did do a lot of the horse stuff and the guys took it through all that, Stephen and all those guys. They’re absolute brilliant stuntmen, brilliant horsemen, and we were taken through that pretty impressively in terms of, I know I personally sort of started from scratch you know in horse riding and literally the journey that I went on by the end in terms of feeling comfortable on a big, very lively animal. I think it’s unusual to see the actors do as much as we did ultimately. To go that fast through…

Hugh Grant: But we were on those horses every day. I mean, really, they’re the same horses obviously, so you do end up feeling totally comfortable. I’ve never had that feeling before. I know that reminded me of a sorry that I think you told me like, right at the beginning that you read, about Sarmatian warriors, when they would travel long distance on their horse, they would actually drink their horses blood from a tube. You know, so that they could just keep going.

Clive Owen: Well, you did that, didn’t you?

Hugh Grant: Well, I hate long journeys as well. But I mean that’s how much they were almost man and horse, they were one. So the fact that we did do a lot of our own stuff was all for the best.

Ioan Gruffudd: Never felt in any danger, did we?

Clive Owen: No.

Hugh Grant: Well, occasionally, when I was near you in the lineup, I was scared a bit.

Clive Owen: Horses would start biting each other.

Antoine Fuqua: Well, it’s pretty amazing, really, when you asked me when I first read the script what I found complicated about it. Everything was complicated about it, but to stage scenes on horses was almost impossible. Especially your horse. [points at Ioan] Remember those days when he would just, Lancelot’s horse would just do what he wants?

Ioan Gruffudd: He’s a Spanish horse, bit temperamental, really, I think.

Clive Owen: Also, there’s something I think that you came up with which I think was a really fantastic idea. Think that always it was a very important thing to always keep those horses moving. We never got into a static situation with two actors sitting on horses having a chat. There was, an energy and a sense of aliveness all the time. And that, that is incredibly difficult for you to direct and keep keep matching everything, it’s hard for us to act 'cause you think ‘yeah, we’ve all ridden now, I think I know what I want to do with this scene,’ and then it’s dictated by the horse 'cause the horse, and the horse is like that, and the horse bosses the scene, you know! But I think it was a right cool to take that on because we did every time ,you know, we have these fast action scenes, then everything stops and there’s two heads talking like that and then we go again.

David Franzoni: It’s also the first movie that I think I’ve ever seen with a bow with a personality. The use of the bow by the Sarmatians especially by Kiera, umm, what was it like training to shoot the bow?

Kiera Knightly: I loved it.

David Franzoni: yeah.

Kiera Knightly: in a way. No, it was great. And we did have different bows, didn’t we. There was the Sarmatian bow and the longbow I think we did. No, we didn’t use that, it was kind of a shorter version of the longbow.

Clive Owen: It was a shorter version of the longbow.

Kiera Knightly: Yeah. Um, but, no, it was amazing , it was really amazing. We had some really great guys, um, teaching us how to do it, and actually I was lucky, I got Flaming arrow, which I’ve always wanted to do. No, I mean, we did do a lot of training with that as well, at least I did, running with the bow and all that.

Ioan Gruffudd: Kiera was a wizard.

Kiera Knightly: Yeah, we did actually, we had contests, didn’t we. Mads was good.

Ioan Gruffudd: Mads was great. I first sort of met Kiera on the set. She'd been there for a couple of weeks, firing arrows. 60 in a minute, or something, And somebody said "Ioan, you’d better go over for your archery lesson" "Oh, this looks easy. If Kiera can fire off…" So I waltz up, you know, 'Hi Kiera' She’s hitting the bull's eye every time and I'm just sitting there. He gave me the heaviest bow and I just couldn't pull it back to begin with, let alone fire with it. “ar, there’s Kiera Knightly, Come on, come on, do it,” and the arrow just fell like, you know. "Aw, darn."

Hugh Grant: We’ll just give you two swords. Actually, the best bit for me, the bows was um, going back to the horse riding as well was learning to fire bows and arrows from the moving horse. You know, and to get in comfortable enough so that we could drop the reigns, pull the bow out, and an arrow, attach it, fire it off vaguely in the right direction, you know, I mean, just and then 'cause you can really only go up and down up and down, you can’t control the horse, so you have to put it back, grab the reigns, in time to stop the horse, turn around do the whole thing again. I spent days just doing that. And then when we came to it because Antoine wanted a shot, He just got someone to come in and hold the horse.

Antoine Fuqua: not every time.

Hugh Grant: No, not every time. We did that, we did do that as well.

Antoine Fuqua: You did that a lot.

Hugh Grant: Yeah.

Antoine Fuqua: You do that in the opening battle, and you did it in the end battle.

Hugh Grant: yeah, yeah.

Antoine Fuqua: 'Cause I filmed you guys riding and firing.

Hugh Grant: Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s an exciting experience.

Antoine Fuqua: Yeah, 'cause I mean, you guys were in such a you don’t really realize what you were doing. I mean, you know, you’re doing some incredible stuff, riding these horses at I don’t know what speed. I just remember yelling at you guys one day “Ride them faster,” you know, and then I see it and they’re really riding these things. And you’re firing at the same time and pulling swords out. And you. [turns to Clive] You pulled a sword out and flipped it in the air. Bet you can’t do that today.

Clive Owen: well, I think my arm is still suffering. I think that’s, I think I had 3 Excaliburs. There was the hero sword which weighed an absolute ton, there was a medium one, and a lightweight one for fighting, which wasn’t ready, early on. “Let’s do it with the hero sword,” Antoine said. “I really like that hero sword.” [mimes dragging out huge, gigantic sword and falling over backwards]

Hugh Grant: Falling off your horse at a 45-degree angle-

Antoine Fuqua: You were on your horse for 45 minutes, you even caught it, it’s in the movie.

Hugh Grant: It’s quite strange, sitting on your horses, you know, and you’re at one end of the field, and you know somebody’s about to say "Action," It’ll come in over the radio, but really, all you can see is a burning field. And there’s no camera in sight. Everybody could have gone home, you know. You’re just going to ride into this. Hopefully at the other side there’ll be a bunch of cameras, but maybe not.

Antoine Fuqua: And a few Saxons for you to kill.

Hugh Grant: And some Saxons, yup, but that’s, uh, that’s quite unique in filmmaking that you, that you are unaware of the cameras 'cause you can’t see them 'cause there’s so much smoke.

Jerry Bruckheimer: The hard part for Antoine and our cinematographer was they had so many cameras, you know, 10 or 11 cameras, and to place them where the other cameras don’t see them. And yet you had such huge battle scenes uh, and we had to cover it with a lot of different angles, 'cause you’re not going to get the extras to go more than once or twice. I mean, that’s going to be it.

Kiera Knightly: Yeah, you’d never tell us where the cameras were. It was always a surprise. It was like “Oh, there’s one, right, okay.”

Antoine Fuqua: It was like, some Saxon comes running up to you and he’s got like a camera

Arthur: If this be our destiny, then so be it. But let history remember that as free men we chose to make it so.

Antoine Fuqua: The great thing about the movie is that it opens up a new discussion of possibly who the man could have been and who the people were that were involved in the battle of Badon Hill.

David Franzoni: Part of the irony of the Arthurian legends is that they are so pure, that everyone is so noble, and their armour is so very clean, because they want to celebrate the glory of this one moment of Badon Hill, and yet that moment was as bloody and dirty and horrible as you can possibly imagine. But still, all that came from that, that is a remarkable moment in history.