Station Zero

My plans for making my own Arthurian home movie are continuing apace. I’ve arranged to shoot it in the last week of October on some handy locations here on Dartmoor - all on private land, so won’t have to worry about random ramblers wandering into shot, although if you’re operating a paraglider off Chinkwell Tor that week you might feel your ears burning.  I also have a script of sorts. Having considered and rejected various traditional bits of the legends as too expensive, I’ve opted for a bracingly non-canonical tale in which Queen Gwenevere sets off on an autumnal journey accompanied by one loyal lady-in-waiting and one rather grumpy young knight: along the way she’ll have one of those perplexing supernatural encounters which always await those who venture far from Camelot. The exact nature of the perplexing supernatural encounter is a bit vague at the moment, and it’s stuffed with scenes which can be jettisoned if the micro-budget doesn’t stretch that far, but it’s en...

The two other versions of Gawain and the Green Knight I’ve looked at on this blog both use the original story as a sort of springboard and bounce off it to do their own thing - Stephen Weeks turned it into a swashbuckling romp, David Lowery into the sort of bad dream a Portland hipster might experience after going overboard on the artisan cheeses. This Thames TV version from 1991 stays much closer to the source material, and, despite a lower budget and less starry cast, it’s easily the best. Screenwriter David Rudkin is mostly known nowadays for his famously spooky 1970s TV play Penda’s Fen, but he wrote a lot of other plays and adaptations, many dealing with eerie goings-on in rural settings - the type of thing that gets called ‘folk horror’ nowadays, though that’s not a term I like. Anyway, he clearly knows his stuff, turning in a taut hour-and-a-quarter retelling of Gawain with alliterative dialogue which echoes the original. The main change he makes is to open with Gawain set...