Excalibur is a 1981 film directed by John Boorman, which was a creative innovation in remaking the legend of King Arthur, a gritty and violent anti-Camelot that sparked a new Arthurian film-making style that leads in an unbroken sequence to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. In the mid-1970s, Boorman had collaborated with film rights holder and producer Saul Zaentz to do a treatment of the Tolkien epic, but the project proved too expensive to finance at that time.
Excalibur stars Nigel Terry as King Arthur, Helen Mirren as his half-sister Morgana, and Nicol Williamson as Merlin. Liam Neeson, in one of his first film roles, plays Gawain, Patrick Stewart lends Shakespearean presence to a minor role. The motion picture is sometimes referred to as "The Boorman Family Project" since most members of the Boorman family starred in the picture. Igraine (Arthur's mother), the Lady of the Lake, and Mordred as a boy were played by Boorman's children.
To recast the Arthur legend as a myth of the cycle of birth, life and decay, familiar Arthurian sources, Malory's Morte d'Arthur and elements of the quest for the Grail, have been stripped of decorative or insignificant details— and also stripped of Malory's Christian piety— and seen through the lens of mythographers like Sir James Frazer and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. "The film has to do with mythical truth, not historical truth," Boorman remarked to a journalist during filming.
Merlin states the central theme:
The cinematography uses the gray skies, stone and bracken, waterfalls and tarns of its Irish locations in Wicklow, Tipperary,and County Kerry, cut sparely with the outstanding choreographed swordplay and some of the best armour ever seen in movies, whether rusted, bloodstained and mud-caked or shined like aluminum cookware.
The screenplay by Rospo Pallenberg with Martin Boorman, touches the heroic themes with directness:
The soundtrack is by Trevor Jones, with sound bites and samples drawn from Orff's Carmina Burana and Wagnerian motifs, of fate (Ring) and fatal attraction (Tristan und Isolde). Only the studio dubbing has staled with time.