Like many other films debuting in 2021, The Green Knight was originally meant to open last year. Writer-director David Lowery, best-known for low-key, Western-influenced indies like Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story, and The Old Man & the Gun, was all set to unveil his adaptation of the Arthurian legend in his home state of Texas at the 2020 South by Southwest film festival. There was only one problem: He didn’t like it yet. “Sometimes movies just aren’t ready,” he tells Vanity Fair.
SXSW wound up being canceled anyway, as the world ground to a halt due to COVID. Lowery then spent six months re-editing The Green Knight into something he could be proud of. “I just gave myself permission to dig back into the movie, unlock it, and rework the entire thing,” he says. “I found the affection I needed to cut it with love in my heart instead of disappointment and hate. It’s different—it’s much better.” The resulting film—an unsettling, visually dazzling, and fantastical hero’s journey starring Dev Patel—opens later this month. It just might just be Lowery’s masterpiece.
The Green Knight is adapted from the anonymously written, 14th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which most English majors have had to read at least once. It tells a rather simple story about King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain, who accepts a challenge from a supernaturally oversized knight on New Year’s Eve—and has one year to deliver on his side of the bargain. On his journey to find the Green Knight, Gawain encounters the usual Arthurian tests of honor and character, and comes out the other side a little more worse for wear than some of his fellow knights of the Round Table. Those familiar with the poem might be surprised by a few aspects of Gawain’s journey as depicted in the film’s trailer—giants and talking foxes, oh my!—but those elements, Lowery says, came directly from the text.
The anonymous Gawain poet gave Lowery something of a gift in the form of just a few lines they used to yada-yada over much of Gawain’s journey. Lowery filled in those blanks with, yes, a lot of beautiful shots of Dev Patel trudging through the muddy Irish countryside, but also a keen eye for any stray word he might spin out into another adventure. “I hadn’t read the whole thing since college, so I started reading it and writing the script at the same time,” he says. “I didn’t have the balance of the poem in my mind, and so I’d reached the lines you mentioned that have one reference to Holy Head or mention of giants or ogres, depending on the translation you read—and I think there’s serpents and great battles.”
Lowery transformed those thinned-out mentions into supernatural encounters with the Welsh town of Holywell’s legendary St. Winifred (Erin Kellyman), eerily CGI-rendered giants, and a scavenger played with creeping menace by Barry Keoghan on the desolate remains of a bloody battle. “Winfred’s the most prime example,” Lowery says. “The text has an inference to a specific place that has a great deal of history and a great deal of lore to it. It was sort of irresistible.”
The corpse-choked battlefield Gawain travels across was inspired, Lowery says, by the Battle of Badon, in which King Arthur was said to have killed 960 men all on his own. Lowery’s take on that battle calls into question Arthur’s “peaceful” reign. In the original poem, depending on the translation you read, Arthur is described as “lively” and “boyish.” Lowery cast frequent film villain Sean Harris (Mission: Impossible) as Arthur and The Witch and Game of Thrones alum Kate Dickie as Queen Guinevere, styling them as fading, sickly monarchs in order to imply some rot in the heart of Camelot. “In the screenplay I described them almost as looking like extraterrestrials,” he says. “It was designed to make people feel uneasy about them. At the same time Sean’s performance is so warm. So there’s a complexity…and it’s one of the richer aspects of the film.”
That sense of unease is greatly enhanced by the film’s sound design and score, which come courtesy of Lowery’s constant collaborators Johnny Marshall and Daniel Hart, respectively. That ineffable A24 horror vibe that put audiences on edge for films like The Witch, Midsommar, and Hereditary shines through here as well, thanks to Lowery’s request that Marshall and Hart make his Arthurian adventure tale “feel more like a horror movie.” But that, he says, is what he always asks of them. “Every movie we’ve made, including The Old Man & the Gun, I’m like, ‘Make it more of a horror.’ That one, probably it didn’t come through.”
For the sound design, Lowery asked Marshall to punctuate pauses with unsettling, tension-building noises, like “a crow calling in the background” or “the sound of a two-by-four slapping another two-by-four.” But the most frequent sound in this film is “the sound you get when you’re weeding the garden, and you’re pulling the weed out by the roots. I love looking for those strange sounds.”
All that eeriness—the elemental spirituality of nature at war with the Christian court of Camelot—stands in stark contrast to some of the more wholesome influences on Lowery’s Arthurian tale. Some classic film-school favorites, like Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, make their mark on Gawain’s journey. But another prime inspiration, he says, was Ron Howard’s 1988 PG-rated adventure, Willow, about a fledgling magician played by Warwick Davis and the scoundrel Madmartigan, played by Val Kilmer, who battle an evil queen to save their kingdom. One Green Knight shot in particular, of a skeleton in a cage at a crossroads, is a direct homage to Madmartigan.
Lowery further engaged with his love for ’80s fantasy and adventure by deploying the occasional matte painting and as many old-school practical effects and in-camera tricks as he could, in order to give The Green Knight its throwback feel. “The aesthetics of those ’80s and ’90s films,” Lowery says, “they didn’t have the tricks up their sleeves that someone like Peter Jackson or even we had. There’s a tactile quality that helped stick them in my head. I love Willow because I was seven years old when I saw it, but also [because of] its craftsmanship.”
The Green Knight’s throwback vibe was also strategic. “We couldn’t afford to do an actual, literal period piece in the 14th century with period-accurate costumes,” he says. “So [we were] finding this weird middle ground where it doesn’t have to be true to history and yet also feels grounded. Films like Willow and Ladyhawke did that really well.”
Though there certainly is plenty of CGI to be found in The Green Knight, the film’s most dazzling practical effect is the Green Knight himself, played through layers of latex by another Game of Thrones and The Witch alum: Ralph Ineson. “There are no VFX at all” involved in the film’s depiction of the Green Knight, Lowery says proudly. “We went through a lot of crazier designs, but ultimately I wanted him to be an actor underneath that makeup. We even talked about doing things like a puppet. I decided the best thing to do was cast a really great actor and design some incredible prosthetics around him.”
The fantastical adventures, menacing Green Knight, and decaying Camelot court scenes would not work without the right leading man to anchor it all. Lowery found his ideal Gawain in the irresistibly likable, compulsively watchable Dev Patel. Patel needs every shred of charisma to get audiences to root for this version of Gawain, who suffers, Lowery says, from the same affliction the director did as a young man: “failure-to-launch syndrome.”
This Gawain, not yet a knight, still lives at home with his mother, drinking away his nights and sleeping away his days with the help of Essel (Alicia Vikander, in one of two roles). “I don’t know at what point in the production I realized I was just writing about my own relationship with my mom, who I love dearly,” Lowery says. “She eventually had to force me out.”
So, too, does The Green Knight’s Morgana. As played by Sarita Choudhury, she’s something of an architect behind her son’s adventure. (This is a significant departure from the original text, in which Morgana is Gawain’s aunt and the story’s antagonist.) Lowery’s decision to strip his Gawain of the title of Sir gives audiences “the anticipation, the expectation that by the end, maybe he will become a knight and be worthy of the Round Table and worthy of Camelot.”
With Patel in the role, audiences are primed to root for this ne’er-do-well Gawain. “It’s impossible not to, isn’t it?” Lowery says. “You just want to spend time with him. There were days where he just wasn’t smiling ever, and yet he still had that magnetism to him that made you want to just, you know, get the camera closer.”
Patel may not be the first actor some audiences would think of for a tale that is, as Lowery puts it, “traditionally perceived as a very white story.” With Choudhury in the Morgana role, the casting wasn’t exactly colorblind. But Lowery didn’t change the script from his original concept once he landed on Patel for the part. Still, he was “aware,” he says, that “when you introduce an element like this, are there any accidental subtexts? I’m very sensitive to that…and imagine what people might think. Not the trolls on the internet who were just going to complain; they can all go to hell. But just making sure that we’re not giving a message that we weren’t intending to give.”
The ambiguity of the story introduced by this much messier Gawain extends all the way to Lowery’s decision on how to end the tale, which will be sure to spark debate as audiences leave the theater. The story’s unusual rhythm, which Lowery found during those six extra months of editing time, may also cause chatter; it encourages a slower, more patient watch than more action-heavy takes on Camelot. Alicia Vikander, Lowery says, benefited the most from his recut of the film. In her second role in the film, as the mysterious Lady that Gawain encounters and wife to Joel Edgerton’s Lord, she gives an intense, lengthy monologue the likes of which you’d never see in another Arthurian adaptation.
For Lowery the most exciting elements of the Arthurian legends he read as a kid were “the way in which human foibles intersect with honor and chivalry, and then the strange combination of Christianity and magic”; he first “discovered all these stories in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” These elements can be difficult to find onscreen. “As someone who grew up loving all those myths,” Lowery says, “most of the films about King Arthur, I’m not a huge fan of.” His two favorites? The 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “It is actually a really good medieval film!” he says. He also has room in his heart for 1981’s Excalibur and even, yes, some elements of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur. “But a lot I don’t like, and I don’t know if there’s a secret recipe to cracking that code.”
For his next project Lowery will be tackling another oft-told story: J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, for Disney’s upcoming Peter Pan & Wendy. The film stars Jude Law as Captain Hook, Yara Shahidi as Tinkerbell, and Ever Anderson—recently seen as young Natasha in Black Widow—as Wendy. “I know people will be like, Oh, great, another Peter Pan movie,” Lowery says. “I know; I feel the same way.” Still, he says: “It’s my favorite thing I’ve made so far.”
This is Lowery’s second outing remaking a beloved Disney film, and his profoundly emotional Pete’s Dragon, though not a huge commercial hit, is often praised by critics as the best of the recent remake craze. His Pan, he says, won’t deviate too far from either the Barrie play or the Disney cartoon.
Lowery calls his take on Barrie’s boy who wouldn’t grow up his “most mature” film yet—a fitting coda to his journey with Gawain. “This is the movie that I’m making in which I’m finally embracing adulthood,” he says. “You don’t have to be revisionist with it—you just try to deepen it and illuminate it, and that’s what I do with The Green Knight. There’s lots of, you know, flying and sword fighting and swashbuckling, but there’s emotional stuff going on in this movie that I think I wouldn’t have been able to do had I not made The Green Knight.”
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