Excalibur (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Excalibur, the 1981 epic fantasy film directed by John Boorman, opens not with a hero but with a sorcerer. In the Dark Ages, Merlin retrieves a magical sword from the depths of a lake and sets in motion a story that will swallow kingdoms, corrupt saints, and end on a ship sailing toward Avalon. The film was shot entirely in Ireland, on a budget of eleven million dollars, and went on to gross nearly thirty-five million in the United States and Canada alone. It was the number one film in the country during its opening weekend. But box office figures tell only a fraction of the story. The actors who appeared in it, many in their very first or second film roles, would go on to define a generation of cinema: Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne, Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds. The film began life not as an Arthurian project at all, but as an attempt to adapt J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It won Best Artistic Contribution at Cannes and received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. Critics were divided. Roger Ebert called it both a "wondrous vision" and "a mess". Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, said it had its own "crazy integrity". What exactly is Excalibur, and how did it come to matter so much? The answers lie in a tortured development history, a philosophy borrowed from myth scholarship, a cast assembled from unknown stage actors, and a landscape that made Ireland feel like the end of the world.

• 2. From Tolkien to Arthur

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  As early as 1969, John Boorman was planning a film about the Merlin legend. When he and his co-writer Rospo Pallenberg brought a three-hour script to United Artists, the studio rejected it as too costly and offered him The Lord of the Rings instead. No other studio would commit to Boorman's Merlin project either, so he spent years in development limbo. He eventually found a path back to the material, and much of the imagery and set design he had developed for his Tolkien project carried over directly into Excalibur. The film that reached audiences was thus a palimpsest: Arthurian on the surface, but layered beneath with visual thinking that had originally been imagined for Middle-earth. Boorman and Pallenberg drew primarily from Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, dating to 1469-70, but they did not treat it as a sacred text. They compressed, merged, and invented. Morgause and Morgan Le Fay were fused into a single character named Morgana. The knight who returns Excalibur to the water was changed from Bedivere to Perceval. A crucial source for the sword-between-the-sleeping-lovers image came not from Malory at all, but from the tales of Tristan and Iseult. Boorman even followed Chrétien de Troyes rather than Malory in choosing Perceval as the knight worthy of the Holy Grail, where Malory had given that honor to Sir Galahad. The writers framed the entire Arthurian cycle as an allegory for the rhythm of birth, life, decay, and restoration, stripping away what they considered decorative or insignificant detail. The resulting film, Boorman told a journalist during filming, "has to do with mythical truth, not historical truth".

• 3. The Charm of Making

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  Merlin's incantation, the "Charm of Making", became one of the film's most enduring signatures, spoken in what sounds like an archaic tongue at key turning points in the story. According to linguist Michael Everson, the charm has no attested source. It is an invention. Everson reconstructed the phonetic text as Old Irish, and the words spoken in the film, though their pronunciation strays from how Irish would actually sound, translate approximately as: "Serpent's breath, the charm of death and life, thy omen of making". The incantation was written in Old Irish by Boorman and Pallenberg as part of a broader worldbuilding effort. Another invented element was the concept of the world as "the dragon", probably drawn from the dragon omen found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of Merlin's life. The Charm of Making achieved a life well beyond the film itself. The British extreme metal band Anaal Nathrakh took their name directly from the opening words of the charm. The 2018 adaptation of Ready Player One used the charm as an activation code. The Charm's afterlife illustrates how thoroughly a piece of invented mythology can take root and be mistaken for something ancient.

• 4. Casting the Unknown

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  As early as 1974, Boorman had considered casting Max von Sydow, Sean Connery, or Lee Marvin as Merlin. The budget ruled out marquee names. He then considered Klaus Kinski before settling on Nicol Williamson. The choice carried a personal dimension: Boorman deliberately cast Williamson and Helen Mirren opposite each other as Merlin and Morgana, knowing that the two had been on unfriendly terms since a production of Macbeth seven years earlier. He confirmed on the Excalibur DVD commentary that he believed the tension between them would translate into their performances on screen. Nigel Terry, who played King Arthur, was thirty-five years old at the time, yet he portrayed Arthur from his teenage years through to old age. Excalibur was Terry's first leading role in a feature film; he was primarily a stage and television actor. For the part, Terry adopted a West Country accent to reflect Arthur's mythological association with Cornwall. Many of the remaining cast members were also at the very start of their careers. Gabriel Byrne appeared in only his second film role. Ciarán Hinds appeared in his very first. Liam Neeson, in his third film role, was cast after Boorman saw him on stage at the Abbey Theatre in a production of Of Mice and Men. Boorman also cast members of his own family: his daughter Katrine played Igraine, and his son Charley played Mordred as a boy. During filming, Liam Neeson and Helen Mirren became romantically involved and lived together for several years afterward.

• 5. Filming Ireland

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  Principal photography took place in 1980, across County Wicklow, County Tipperary, and County Kerry, with interior work at Ardmore Studios. Cahir Castle in Cahir, County Tipperary, a well-preserved medieval structure, served as the location for a critical early battle scene in which Arthur is knighted by Uryens while kneeling in a moat. The moat was the River Suir, which flows around the castle. The fight with Lancelot was filmed at the waterfall on the Powerscourt Estate. Wicklow Head stood in for the backdrop to the battle over Tintagel. The Kerry coast was used for the scene in which Arthur sails toward Avalon. A place called Childers Wood near Roundwood, County Wicklow, was the spot where Arthur discovers Excalibur in the stone. At the time, Boorman was living just a few miles from that location, at Annamoe. Production was not without difficulty. A fault in a light meter meant the opening battle sequence had to be filmed three times. The original director of photography, Tony Pierce-Roberts, suffered a nervous breakdown and was replaced by Alex Thomson. Heavy rainfall caused repeated delays. The costumes were designed by Bob Ringwood, and the armour by Terry English. Nicholas Clay and Cherie Lunghi performed their forest love scene nude, on what Boorman recalled as a very cold night. The film would later earn Thomson an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography and Ringwood a BAFTA nomination for Best Costume Design.

• 6. Music and the Classical Score

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  Richard Wagner's music runs through Excalibur like a second nervous system. Boorman used excerpts from three Wagnerian works: "Siegfried's Funeral March", "Prelude to Parsifal", and "Prelude to Tristan and Isolde". Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" appears as well. These pieces were given space to dominate the most important scenes. The original underscore was composed by Trevor Jones, at that point the South African composer's first score for a major feature film. The London Philharmonic Orchestra performed the score. Critic Thomas Glorieux noted that the classical pieces were given the opportunity to shine through the key scenes, while Jones's underscore served to bind everything together. The decision to lean on pre-existing classical repertoire rather than an entirely original score was unusual for a fantasy epic of this scale. It gave the film a grandeur that a commissioned score alone might not have achieved, and it aligned the Arthurian material with a Germanic mythological tradition that Wagner himself had drawn from. Wagner and Orff together evoke destiny and fate in a way that meshes with Boorman's reading of the legend as cyclical and primordial rather than chivalric and courtly.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  Excalibur opened in the United States on the 10th of April 1981, and in London on the 2nd of July 1981, before opening nationwide in the United Kingdom on the 5th of July 1981. The film was initially released in the US with an R rating. Distributors later prepared a 119-minute PG-rated version with reduced sex and violence, but it was not widely released. In the United Kingdom, the BBFC classified the film as "AA", restricting it to audiences fourteen and older; when the film moved to home video in 1982, the BBFC had replaced the AA certificate with the age-specific 15 certificate, which was applied to Excalibur. When it premiered on HBO in 1982, the R-rated cut ran in the evenings and the PG version during the day. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 73% score based on 99 reviews, with critics' consensus describing it as "visually remarkable" with strong performances from a lineup of British actors. On Metacritic, it scores 56 out of 100 from 10 critics. Variety called it "a near-perfect blend of action, romance, fantasy and philosophy". Pauline Kael wrote that the imagery was "impassioned" with a "hypnotic quality", but that the dialogue was "near-atrocious". Vincent Canby argued that Boorman's earnestness toward the myths was undercut by a pretentiousness that obscured his vision. The film won Best Artistic Contribution at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. Filmmaker Zack Snyder, in 2009, named Excalibur his favorite film, calling it "the perfect meeting of movies and mythology". Neil Jordan directed a documentary on the making of the film in 1981, entitled The Making of Excalibur: Myth Into Movie, and a second documentary, Behind the Sword in the Stone, was released in 2013, later acquired by PBS International and retitled Excalibur: Behind the Movie.