Ivan Waterman chats to Sir Ridley Scott as Kingdom of Heaven – Director’s Cut is released on DVD
IN the bowels of the Soho Hotel director Sir Ridley Scott holds court following a screening of his epic religious study Kingdom of Heaven – Director’s Cut. He is dressed in a black leather bomber jacket, an open neck black shirt and jeans. His hair is wavy and his trademark short beard has been trimmed. No matter that he will be 69 later this year, Scott is super cool. Film luvvies have worshipped him since he made the futuristic Blade Runner almost 25 years ago. His films such as Thelma and Louise and Gladiator have grossed way over a billion dollars and he has at least five movies in pre-production while keenly awaiting the release of Peter Mayle’s Provence set romantic tale A Good Year with Russell Crowe and Albert Finney. He is here to talk about his medieval historic romp which stars Orlando Bloom as Balian, a blacksmith who has lost his family and his faith. He is re-united with his long-lost noble father played by Liam Neeson he journeys to Jerusalem on a personal crusade to re-claim his pride and fulfill his destiny. He also falls in love with the beautiful Sybilla played by Eva Green and steps into history as a formidable warrior and leader of men. Spectacle or history lesson? The $150 million blockbuster is rarely dull and poses a range of controversial theological questions. Other stars of the Twentieth Century Fox film include Jeremy Irons and Edward Norton. Ridley Scott is also a businessman. Almost in his spare time, runs Shepperton and Pinewood Studios with his action-man director brother Tony. You could say it is a match made in heaven.
How close to the Director’s Cut of Kingdom of Heaven was the version you originally released?
Usually your first cut is proportionate; I’ve just finished a comedy (A Good Year) with Russell Crowe and the first cut of that was about 2 hours 10 minutes. The final cut will be 1 hour 40 or 50. This one, because it was a whopper with a 150 page screenplay, I think the first cut was about 3 hours 15 which is pretty good. It could easily have been about four or five hours. When you’re shooting with eleven cameras in battle scenes, and nearly always two or three cameras in smaller scenes, inevitably you move faster but you really churn some footage. So the editing job is quite tough. In this instance I thought three hour 8 minutes was a pretty good length, and I showed that to the studio. Let me footnote this, my relationship with the studio is really good. I think over time I’ve learned to stop being a screamer and get inter-active, otherwise you get killed in Hollywood. I stopped being a screamer shortly after Blade Runner, kicking doors and things like that, because I wasn’t actually getting anywhere.
So you don’t get annoyed if the money men interfere with aspects of your movie then?
If they pay for it my attitude is they’ve got a right to an opinion. That’s where I’m coming from, my first attitude is coming from being a businessman and a producer. If somebody’s given me x amount of dollars to fulfill a dream they’ve got every right to actually say something about it. Particularly if they think it’s too long – long means boring. So I always listen to that and consequently I’m very interactive and user friendly with studios. That immediately defuses the bomb. Be reasonable, because they may be right. It took me a lot of years to realise that sometimes they were right.
Is that why it was originally released under three hours?
In this instance the enemy was the [audience] preview, which has grown and grown and grown over the years and is becoming like a science. But it’s ridiculous. The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive. When you actually go to a preview you’re asking 600 people to come from different demographics, to become Siskel & Ebert (veteran American film critics) by the end of the evening. It’s absolutely rubbish. Normally people will come and say, at the end of the film ‘I liked that’ or ‘I disliked it’ or ‘I kind of thought it was okay’. That’s it. But at the end of a preview 600 sheets go out to 600 people, a very detailed questionnaire and that night it’s computerised so the following morning I’m looking at a breakdown of the information, fighting demographics of women under 22 or over 27 or guys under 18. By going to a preview a director become insidiously infected by the process, so by the end of it you are thinking ‘it may be a bit too long’. That’s how the original release arrived at 2 hours 23 minutes. So it was my fault. The studio aren’t to be at all blamed for this, they aren’t bullies. I could have said ‘3.08 and that’s it ’, and they’d have backed off and said so be it.
Were there other differences in what you wanted and what the studio expected?
Bill [Monahan] writes very dense, prosaic screenplays, some of the best I’ve ever read. The dialogue is very steeped in history, I would almost define him as a historian, he’s so knowledgeable. But the studio at one stage said ‘what’s this dialogue, the guy writes in double negatives’. I said ‘What’s a double negative?’ I said the dialogue was actually beautiful, it was a token to being period. If they really wanted to really go period you don’t want to hear William Shakespeare in a film that cost this much, so this is a good acknowledgement of the period.
The major beneficiary in the Director’s Cut are the scenes returned to the film with Sibylla and her son aren’t they?
Bill and I speculated historically and fenced endlessly with historians who said that a lot of this was inaccurate. What they didn’t know was that Bill had gone back to first editions of Muslim writings which were then translated from Syrian dialect into French and then into English. That’s the thing about history, they’re basing their findings on the priest in France in the 15th century writing about events in the 13th century. He wasn’t there, so what was he basing his writing on? He was basing his writing on another historian in the 12th century, so already we’re blind. History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
So how did you bring these historical characters to life?
Reynald (Brendan Gleeson) was a warmonger. Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) was married to Sibylla (Eva Green), who was the sister of Baldwin the Leper King (Edward Norton), who got leprosy at 15. Instead of being asked to stand down he insisted on becoming king. He became impossible to look at by the time he was 18. He had silver masks made and wore gloves because he was rotting from the inside out. And he functioned until he dropped down dead at 24. The boy king was then crowned, Sibylla became the Princess Regent. The danger comes from this lunatic Guy de Lusignan, to whom she was given at the age of 15. And this guy, because he’s a man in these particular times, would have definitely affected the decisions on the throne. We know the boy became ill after ten months of being crowned and history said the boy was murdered by his mother.
But you disagree with this view, don’t you?
We think that was nonsense because if you’re going to murder a boy for power you kill him with a bad oyster when he’s five or six. Or make sure there was a riding accident. You wouldn’t wait until he was already crowned. So you start to apply contemporary, sensible thinking to that idea, because it’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense. It’s been written, historically, that the boy may have died of leprosy. This is where the clue is, this is how you assemble these screenplays and this is where historians tend not to have the imagination they ought to have. We look at that and go, that’s interesting, because if the mum was rumoured to have killed the boy – and I don’t believe she killed the boy for power – if the boy was rumoured to have had leprosy then that may have been possible. She would have performed a mercy killing on the boy because of the hideous life that her brother had over nine or ten years, that she was not ready to let her son suffer. That made sense to me. So that’s where you reassemble the facts historically.
There is a final showdown at the end between Balian and Guy that you had also cut out first time round, which you describe as a movie moment...
It’s to do with revenge, the hero must avenge himself if for nothing else because of the bad behaviour of Guy de Lusignan. I was a bit uneasy about that scene because it was a little trite. The studio pleaded for this moment, so I said okay, even though we’ve had swordfights up to the gills in the battle for Jerusalem. I just played it out like The Duellists in the back yard somewhere.
Orlando Bloom has never been so heroic than in your film, has he?
He did pretty good. In Troy he was asked to play Paris, who essentially would be described as weak. The others are strong, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. They’re the hunks. And poor Orlando was there playing Paris, though he did get the girl! I think he did great in this, it’s a big film to walk into. He’s always been behind someone else. As Paris he was behind Brad and Eric, so he was supported, but here he’s right out front and I thought he did very well.
How important is it for an audience to know about the history and the characters in a film like this?
I think the story should unfold. I think a film should always be ahead of the audience. There’s no equation, a film can be an hour ahead of the audience and they’re sitting there going ‘what’s going on’ and suddenly it all falls together.
What was the reaction to the film in the Muslim world?
Some people liked to read the film as an attack on Muslims or blasphemous in our interpretations of the Crusades and Christian ethics. We didn’t set out with any of that in mind or to offend. People who have attacked us have inadvertently given us some quite healthy publicity which I am not complaining about. I’ve been asked to go to Egypt and Syria to pick up awards. And I’ve been asked to go to New York as well, to actually go to the Muslim societies where they want to thank me. This film is about good news, in a sentence it’s about accepting another man’s philosophy and religion. I think some critics misunderstood our intentions and the course of events. I never thought of the film as complex though I have to confess that this period in history can be difficult to understand. Which, to me, made it all the more fascinating.
The four disc DVD collection will be available on 25 September , price £29.99
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