Director Guy Ritchie and star Charlie Hunnam explore the legend of King Arthur.
What was your first memory of the Arthur legend?
Charlie Hunnam: John Boorman’s Excalibur and I probably watched it too young! [I also] had read the Once and Future King. I was always carving sticks into swords and challenging my brother to sword fights. I felt like there was a good four or five year period where I was in it almost every day.
Guy Ritchie: My experience with the Arthurian legend is mostly by John Boorman’s film, which I found provocative and exciting when I was ten. I suppose that influenced me to want to make my own version of the Arthurian legend.
As a fan of Arthur, was that all it took for you to portray him?
CH: I was excited about what Guy would do with this world as an enormous fan of Guy’s. The idea of making this fresh, young, exciting and accessible for a new audience was thrilling. It was just the one-line pitch for me: Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur.
Warner Bros.
What do you think it is about King Arthur’s story that millennia have gone by and people are still fascinated by it?
GR: The essence of the legend is transcendence of self—to go from an infant to an adult or from a pauper to a king and from being completely dependent on others to being completely independent.
CH: The thing that I could relate to was the idea of the cultivation of self belief and subduing one’s inner demons in order to strengthen one’s disposition to be able to go out and do great things and beat insurmountable odds.