In the fall of 2001, after some false starts, it finally started to happen.
Scott was working on a different project with screenwriter William Monahan when he raised the subject. "I said, ‘What do you know about knights,’ " Scott recalls, "and he said, ‘In armor? Hard armor or chain mail?’ " The director laughs. He knew he’d found his man.
This conversation occurred “in the shadow of 9/11,” he says. He’s sure his knight film would have happened with or without that cataclysm or the wars that followed it – but he also says that 9/11, and the strong reaction to Bush’s crusade remark, was part of the reason he decided not to put the word in its title.
It was still going to be set during the Crusades, however. This was Monahan’s doing. The screenwriter had argued that these hard-fought holy wars would offer the most dramatic context in which to develop Scott’s knightly hero.
Whatever its intentions, Ridley Scott’s knight movie cannot escape either the historical era in which it is set or the times in which it was made. It’s likely to be seen as both a harmless Hollywood rendition and a dangerous provocation; as both historically evocative and historically obtuse. To a moderately neutral observer, it doesn’t appear to be intentionally anti-anything, except religious fanaticism of all stripes. But as one of Fox’s imported historical experts put it, the film is sure to be “interpreted by as many interpreters as there are.”
Screenwriter Monahan agrees. “Movies are such high-voltage cultural events,” he explains, “that they sometimes get people coming out of the woodwork to unleash programmatic rhetoric, irrespective of what the movie actually is.” The film he and Scott made has nothing to do with 9/11, he maintains, and as for accuracy, well, Shakespeare modified history too: “What you use, as a dramatist, is what plays.”
“This is not a documentary,” another Fox expert, Columbia medievalist and film scholar Hamid Dabashi, warned the press in Pasadena. “This is a work of art.”
Best, perhaps, to leave that for history to judge.
Still, if you talk long with Dabashi and others who’ve seen the film, one particularly striking sequence is likely to come up. It’s also the only one that Scott – the man with the Hollywood instincts and the visual DNA – mentions when asked to name the most meaningful visuals in his film.
It begins up close and personal, in the midst of that desperate struggle to hold the breach in Jerusalem’s wall. Orlando Bloom has lost his helmet – as all stars do in such battles, lest their fans lose track of them among the grunting, bleeding masses – and he’s slashing away like a berserker, sometimes backlit, sometimes in slow motion.
But then Scott’s camera gradually pulls us into the air above the shattered wall. We see the fighters shrink and the horizon expand. It’s as if we’ve taken God’s point of view, from which it is a great deal harder – impossible, in fact – to justify the savagery below.
“That clearly speaks for itself, right?” Scott says. “And that’s where I think the visual is better than words.”
This could be interesting. :)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/29/AR2005042900744.html
