Legend (1985 film)
Legend is a 1985 American epic dark fantasy adventure film directed by Ridley Scott, written by William Hjortsberg, and starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent, Alice Playten, Billy Barty, Cork Hubbert and Annabelle Lanyon. The film revolves around Jack, a pure being who must stop the Lord of Darkness who plots to cover the world with eternal night.
Despite its lack of commercial success and poor reception from critics, the film won the British Society of Cinematographers Award for Best Cinematography in 1985 for cinematographer Alex Thomson and was nominated for multiple awards: the Academy Award for Best Makeup; the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Saturn Award for Best Makeup; BAFTA Awards for Best Costume Design, Best Makeup Artist, and Best Special Visual Effects; DVD Exclusive Awards; and Youth in Film Awards. Since its premiere, reinforced by the 2002 release of the unrated Director's Cut, the film has been called a cult classic.
Plot
In order to cast the world into eternal night, the Lord of Darkness sends the goblin Blix to kill the unicorns in the forest near his castle and bring him their horns. Told by Darkness that the best bait is Innocence, Blix and her colleagues Pox and Blunder follow Princess Lili as she visits her forest-dwelling paramour, Jack O' the Green. Jack teaches Lili to speak to animals, then takes her blindfolded to a forest stream where the unicorns frolic. Despite Jack's fervent warnings not to do so, Lili holds out her hand to touch the stallion. This act allows Blix to shoot him with a poison dart from her blowpipe and the unicorns flee. Jack is angry, but Lili laughs off his concern and issues a challenge by throwing her ring into a pond, declaring she will marry whoever finds it. While Jack dives in after the ring, the goblins track down the poisoned stallion and sever his horn, causing winter to descend. Lili runs off in terror, and Jack is barely able to break through the surface of the now-frozen pond.Lili takes refuge in a peasant cottage. While there, she sees the goblins test the horn's magic powers and overhears how she was the bait in their slaying of the stallion. She follows the goblins to a rendezvous with Darkness, who tells them the world cannot be cast into eternal night as long as the surviving mare still lives. Blunder unsuccessfully tries using the horn to overthrow Darkness and is sent into the castle's dungeon. Meanwhile, Jack, accompanied by forest elf Honeythorn Gump, will-o'-the-wisp Oona, and dwarves Brown Tom and Screwball, finds the mare mourning the lifeless stallion. Jack begs forgiveness from the mare, who communicates to him that the horn must be recovered and returned to the stallion by a great hero. Deciding Jack is that hero, the group leaves Brown Tom to guard the unicorns while they retrieve a hidden cache of ancient weapons and armor. In their absence, Lili warns Brown Tom of the goblins coming back to kill the mare. He is then incapacitated by the goblins, who capture both Lili and the mare.
Upon returning, Jack and his group make their way to Darkness' castle. On the way, they are attacked by a swamp hag named Meg Mucklebones, but Jack defeats her by flattering her appearance and then decapitating her. At the castle, Jack's group falls into an underground prison cell, where they encounter Blunder, who is revealed to be a dwarf gone astray, before he is dragged off by an ogre to be baked into a pie. Oona, who is secretly a fairy, retrieves the keys to free the others.
Darkness realizes that even he is touched by Lili's innocence and releases her to wander the castle. He leaves lavish gifts for her, including an enchanted, dancing dress that hypnotizes her. Revealing himself, he asks her to marry him. She resists, but then agrees on the condition that she will be the one to kill the mare in the upcoming ritual. Overhearing their conversation, Jack and Gump learn Darkness can be destroyed by daylight. After saving Blunder, the group takes the ogres' giant metal platters as makeshift mirrors to reflect sunlight into the sacrificial chamber.
As the ritual begins, Lili frees the mare and Darkness strikes her unconscious. Jack fights Darkness, wounding him with the stallion's horn right before the redirected sunlight shines into the room, blasting Darkness to the edge of the void. Darkness warns them that because evil lurks in all beings, he will never truly be vanquished. Wavering in doubt, Jack finally severs the hands of Darkness, expelling him into the void. Gump then returns the stallion to life by magically reattaching its horn. With the stallion and mare reunited, winter immediately ends. Jack retrieves Lili's ring from the pond and places it on her finger, waking her from Darkness's spell.
Alternate endings
There are three different versions of the film's conclusion:- In the American theatrical version, Jack and Lili assure each other of their love and watch the unicorns reunite, and they run off into the sunset together, hailed by the forest fairies and the unicorns. Darkness watches them from the void, laughing.
- The European theatrical version also ends with both Jack and Lili running off into the sunset, but without Darkness's final appearance.
- In the Director's Cut, Lili wakes with Jack trying to convince her she was merely dreaming, but she is ultimately unconvinced. They confess their true love for each other, but Lili realizes they live in two different worlds. She puts the ring on his finger and tells him to treasure it, then asks if she can come back tomorrow. Jack says he will always be there for her and Lili returns to her home to her responsibilities. Jack happily runs off into the sunset, hailed by the forest fairies and the revived unicorns.
Cast
Production
Development
While filming The Duellists in France, Ridley Scott conceived Legend after another planned project, Tristan and Isolde, fell through temporarily. However, he believed that it would be an art film with limited audience appeal and went on to make Alien and did pre-production work on Dune, another halted project, which was eventually finished by director David Lynch. Frustrated, he came back to the idea of filming a fairy tale or mythological story.For inspiration, Scott read classic fairy tales, including ones by the Brothers Grimm. From that, he conceived a story about a young hermit who is transformed into a hero when he battles the Darkness in order to rescue a beautiful princess and release the world from a wintery curse.
Screenplay
Scott wanted Legend to have an original screenplay because he believed that "it was far easier to design a story to fit the medium of cinema than bend the medium for an established story". By chance, he discovered several books written by American novelist William Hjortsberg and found that the writer had already written several scripts for some unmade lower-budgeted films. Scott asked him if he was interested in writing a fairy tale. He was already writing some and agreed. Scott remembers, "The first notion was to actually make a classical fairy story, but if you actually analyze a classical fairy story, most are either very short, or very complex". The two men bonded over Jean Cocteau's 1946 film of Beauty and the Beast. In January 1981, just before beginning principal photography on Blade Runner, Scott spent five weeks with Hjortsberg working out a rough storyline for what was then called Legend of Darkness.Originally, Scott "only had the vague notion of something in pursuit of the swiftest steed alive which, of course, was the unicorn". Scott felt that they should have a quest and wanted unicorns as well as magic armor and a sword. Hjortsberg suggested plunging the world into wintery darkness. Hjortsberg's first draft of Legend of Darkness also had Princess Lili slowly transform into a clawed and fur-covered beast who is whipped and sexually seduced by the antagonist.
Initially, the quest was longer, but it was eventually substantially reduced. Scott wanted to avoid too many subplots that departed from the main story and go for a "more contemporary movement rather than get bogged down in too classical a format". By the time Scott had finished Blade Runner, he and Hjortsberg had a script that was "lengthy, hugely expensive, and impractical in its size and scope". They went through it and took out large sections that were secondary to the story. The two men went through 15 script revisions.
Pre-production
The look Scott envisioned for Legend was influenced by the style of Disney animation. He had even offered the project to Disney, but they were intimidated by the film's dark tone at a time when Disney still focused on family-friendly material. Visually, Scott referenced films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Pinocchio. The look of Legend was also influenced by the art of Arthur Rackham and Heath Robinson. Scott had initially sought the services of conceptual designer Brian Froud, but was turned down. He then hired Alan Lee as a visual consultant, who drew some characters and sketched environments. However, Scott eventually replaced Lee with Assheton Gorton, a production designer whom he had wanted for both Alien and Blade Runner. Scott hired Gorton because he knew "all the pitfalls of shooting exteriors on a soundstage. We both knew that whatever we did would never look absolutely real, but would very quickly gain its own reality and dispense with any feeling of theatricality".Scott also consulted with effects expert Richard Edlund because the director did not want to limit major character roles to the number of smaller people who could act. At one point, the director considered Mickey Rooney to play one of the major characters but he did not look small enough next to Tom Cruise. Edlund considered shooting on 70 mm film stock, taking the negative, and reducing the actors to any size they wanted—but this was deemed too expensive. Thus, Scott was tasked with finding an ensemble of small actors. Legend would be financed with a budget of $24.5 million, and would be distributed by Universal Pictures in North America and by 20th Century Fox in all other territories.
File:In the Land of the Giants.jpg|thumb|Scott was inspired by the Sequoias of Yosemite National Park
In order to achieve the look of Legend that he wanted, Scott scouted locations in the Sequoias of Yosemite National Park to see the grand scale of trees there. "The whole environment is so stunning... It was so impressive, but I didn't know how you would control it". However, it would cost too much to shoot on location and he decided to build a forest set on the 007 Stage, named after and used for many James Bond films, at Pinewood Studios. The crew spent 14 weeks constructing the forest set, and Scott was worried that it would not look real enough. It was only days before the start of principal photography that it looked good enough to film. The trees were 60 feet high with trunks 30 feet in diameter and were sculpted out of polystyrene built onto tubular scaffolding frames. In addition, other sets were constructed on five huge soundstages.