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Guy Ritchie wants to make the definitive King Arthur movie. It's weird to think that there isn't one already, considering Arthurian legend is one of the most formative and best-known tales in Western literature, but perhaps that's due in part to the amorphous nature of the myth; ever changing in the hands of new poets, authors, and scholars over the centuries.

With King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, the historical and literary legend is getting the Guy Ritchie makeover treatment. Like Sherlock Holmes and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. before it, King Arthur is getting a kinetic, poppy, machismo revamp at the hands of the helmer and his creative partner, co-writer/producer Lionel Wigram.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Back in the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to visit the set of King Arthur at Leavesden Studios outside London, England where I spoke with the stars and filmmakers and toured the immersive, city-scale sets. Sets that both facilitate the scale of Ritchie's action set-pieces and the scale of the larger world he's building. From the winding streets of the ancient town Londinium to a full-scale (if short) drawbridge to a drained rock quarry littered with the decrepit remains of ships, molded over blue at the edges.

It's a world that will be familiar to fans of Arthurian tradition -- Excalibur, the sword in the stone, the commoner turned king, the knights, the round table -- but it reenvisioned with a macho, modernist bent; all rock n' roll and magic and everyman bruisers embroiled in enchanted destiny. In Ritchie's hands, Arthur is a street kid, raised by three prostitutes who took in the nameless baby after the murder of his father, the king Uther Pendragon. Nor is he the noble consummate good guy of tradition, instead a scrappy, coarse man's man, reluctant to accept the burden of his true identity.

During the day I spent on set, a major action sequence was underway, set in a courtyard where Hunnam and his loyal knights were locked in combat against a legion of men. Between takes, Hunnam pumped himself up with a series of jumping jacks and push-ups; something to keep the blood-flowing during the action. Watching a fight sequence is always a sort of mind-blowing experience -- every step, every single beat, takes such attention to detail and the collaboration of so many artisans, it's a wonder they ever get in the can. Which is why this particular action sequence was set to film over the course of an entire week. We watched them film for hours -- no doubt everything we saw will end up as only moments in the final film.

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Image via Warner Bros.

While on set, I had the pleasure of speaking with Hunnam; Wigram; Djimon Hounsou, who plays Arthur's most loyal knight Sir Bedivere; Aidan Gillen, who plays a slippery freedom fighter by the name of Goosefat Bill; production designer Gemma Jackson; costume designer Annie Symons; weapons master Tim Wildgoose; and producer Steve Clark-Hall. We caught up with them in the final days of production at Leavesden, before they picked up and moved to take advantage of Scotland's gorgeous scenery for the final weeks of shooting. Here's what we learned.

  • This version of Arthur is a back alley street kid raised in brothels, and he's as reluctant as anyone else to accept that he's the true born king. Instead of a kid who's brought up by the local squire, he's squire to the knight's son.
  • Guy Ritchie and co-writer/producer Lionel Wigram want to do a genre reinvention for the sword and sorcery fantasy like what they did for Sherlock and The Man from UNCLE.
  • Ritchie and Wigram were attracted to the Arthur story because there isn't a single definitive film incarnation of the character.
  • They wanted to offer a break from fantasy epics set in the sweeping landscapes of the countryside, so they designed King Arthur to have a more urban feel by setting it in Londinium, the settlement established at the site of modern London a couple centuries after the Romans left.
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    Image via Warner Bros.
    However, the film is set in a "fairy tale period" of magic and is not mean to take place at any specific moment in human history. It's a fantasy inspired by actual historical events.
  • This film is very specifically focused on King Arthur's journey from poor citizen to king, and what happens between pulling the sword from the stone and becoming the king. Don't expect to get into Lancelot or Grail territory in this film. Those stories would come in possible sequels.
  • Originally titled Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur, the film was conceived by screenwriter Joby Harold as the first in a series of origin stories starting with Arthur. Characters like Lancelot and Merlin would have followed with subsequent films.
  • However, Wigram says they're not going to take that exact path should there be sequels. "I don’t think we’re quite going to go that way, as things change – we’ll see what happens, we’re making the first movie – but if we do get lucky enough to do more, it’ll be slightly different to that, but it will still be the same idea: to give everybody their separate journey, and in the course of the movie we meet our main characters, in a slightly different way from the original story, and hopefully it reinvents them in a fun way."
  • The film also has a different take on magic, and indeed the Mages, as they're called, play a huge part in the film's setting and narrative. Wigram explained, "Rather than one magician, Merlin, we have a race of magical people we call mages, from which Merlin has come. That gave us more to play with, more scope." Jude Law's villainous Vortigern is also empowered by magic.
  • Merlin will be referenced in the film, and he plays a role in the story, but you shouldn't expect him to be a major player. He's going to influence the course of the film, but we likely won't meet him, and we definitely won't get into his relationship with Arthur.
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    Image via Warner Bros.
    Eric Bana plays Arthur's father Uther. In this version of the legend, someone puts Excalibur through his back and he becomes the stone in which the sword is trapped.
  • Aidan Gillen plays a member of Arhtur's loyal gang known a Goosefat Bill, thanks to his slippery and hard-to-catch nature. However, he's not a sleazy characater, he's a wanted man on the side of good.
  • Djimon Hounsou plays Sir Bedivere, a knight who was loyal to Arthur's father Uther and has been waiting in the decades since for the true heir to return. He's an older, wiser right-hand-man.
  • Hounsou says Legend of the Sword is very focused on how the Nights of the Roundtable came together to make King Arthur who he is.
  • Per Hunnam, the film is "a straight, grand drama that has, as Guy puts it, “a liberal sprinkling of fuck dust over the top.”
  • The cast had a hardcore crash course on the film when they arrived – Ritchie filmed the entire movie in only four hours. Hunnam explained, "Guy had this wacky idea that he wanted to take an afternoon before we started working and shoot the whole film in four hours. On two or three cameras and in a room all in black. We shot the whole film, and that’s where we met. That’s where most of the cast met. It was a baptism of fire. It was such a high-energy, sort of anxiety-inducing experience."
  • Hunnam split his eyebrow open while filming one of the action sequences.
  • The final three weeks of the shoot were almost entirely action scenes, and the sequence we witnessed them filming was scheduled to film for eight days.
  • The outdoor sets were designed to accommodate highly-mobile action scenes that follow the actors down the winding roads and twisting corners of the Londinium streets.
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    Image via Warner Bros.
    The production team also repurposed a giant life-sized rock quarry that was built on the Pinewood lot for Tarzan.
  • They also constructed a 300-foot bridge to allow the actors and stuntmen to get a full gallop going on horseback.
  • Production Designer Gemma Jackson, who previously worked on the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, said she wants to do for the U.K. what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand.
  • Ritchie doesn't direct entirely from the script, which was a bit jarring for Hunnam at first coming off of years of working within the rigidity of the TV world. However, it was also very freeing. "Guy has a sort of inability to fully visualize or understand or even allow himself to get excited about a scene before we’re actually on the day, on the set, in costume doing it," said Hunnam. "We’ll sometimes go to the opposite end of the spectrum from what was on the page."
  • Vortigern more pageantry based costumes are full of indulgent and vain details, but Law wanted to make sure his character wasn't camp. Referring to one of his most ostentatious costumes, costume designer Annie Symons "It's so powerful because the's the king, he's the only one who can wear white, so he does... He knows how to use the theater of pageantry."
  • By contrast, in his civilian clothes the character "looks like a mafia boss," wearing really elegant, well-cut and immaculate clothes when he's at home.
  • Maid Maggie (Anabelle Wallis) remained a mysterious character on set, but she's described as "a force" and "a very strong woman" who acts like a very kind woman. She looks after Vortigern's daughter, who he treats like a little bird.
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    Image via Warner Bros.
    Symons has hidden little emblems and images of oak trees and acorns into the costumes of the good characters to symbolize a good heart and the heart of England.
  • Gwynevere is a mystical character, who is "of the people and of the air." She's part action figure, part spiritual figure, part lady.
  • For the costumes that take place in the Utherian era, Symons chose rich colors that remind you of leatherbound books and stained glass. She wanted to evoke antiquity and learnedness. In contrast, Vortigern's reign is filled with cold, stripped colors with a more engineered imagery.
  • Symons describes Arthur as "a bit of a dude, basically," saying that Guy was really into the "maleness" of the character and wanted him to have a bit of swagger. She had to balance a look that is historically believable but appealing in a contemporary way.
  • King Arthur is a massive production, which means costumes had to dress hundreds of extras at a time regularly. There were about 30-40 extras the day we were on set, which producer
  • Ritchie and weapons master Tim Wildgoose didn't want Excalibur to be a flashy, guided weapon, as it's often previously been depicted. Guy was insistent that Excalibur would be subtle and elegant.
  • At the root of their attraction to the material, Wigram says they thought it would be fun to make a film about a magical sword and what it could do. The sword will have a lot of fun magical abilities that we'll learn about as the film unfolds.
  • The creative team invented a runic language that is used throughout the film, including on Excalibur.
  • By contrast, Vortigern attempted to make the second best sword in Camelot out of jealousy towards Excalibur, but despite being a good weapon, the entire sword is designed to speak towards trying too hard.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword opens in theaters on May 12, 2017.

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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.

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