Highlander

[Slushy]

How we made Highlander: 'Connery opened his homemade whisky on the plane.



Russell Mulcahy, director
I’d made dozens of music videos when EMI came to me with Highlander. Its original title was The Dark Knight. I loved its graphic novel quality and this idea of an immortal who can never fall in love again, because he’d had to watch his first wife grow old.

Lots of names were bandied around for the part of Connor MacLeod, the lead. I was flipping through a magazine and saw this picture of Christopher Lambert in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. I said: “This is the guy!” His eyes had a timeless quality. The fact he couldn’t speak English didn’t really matter. So we ended up with a Frenchman playing a Scotsman, and Sean Connery as the Spanish-Egyptian immortal who trains him. We didn’t bother changing Sean’s accent – this was Sean Connery! These guys had been around for centuries. They could have picked up accents from wherever.

We shot fast – in Scotland, London and New York. The budget was just $13m so it was guerrilla-style film-making. When we were in Glen Coe, the producer had to run down the mountain with a pocket of change to call the studio from a phone box. On the plane up, Sean brought out a bottle of homemade scotch a friend had given him. “C’mon, laddie,” he said, “have a nip of this.” It blew my brains out.

When Sean and Clancy Brown, who plays the villain, had their first big fight, Clancy was meant to burst in and slice the table in half with his sword. But he struck it with the flat of the blade and it broke. A shard shot over Sean’s head. He was on the verge of walking. He put on his dressing gown and called a meeting. Clancy said: “I’m so sorry. I was so nervous because it’s Sean Connery.” Sean was gracious but said: “Maybe we’ll use my stunt double more.”

There was very little CGI in those days. But because I grew up in theatre, I knew a lot about tricking the eye. For the fights, we strapped car batteries to the actors’ legs and wired them up so they’d spark when a sword struck. After about three takes, the sword handles would get really hot and we’d have to stop.

In another shot, Sean and Clancy are climbing some steps and a wall just breaks up and falls away. We did that by having a load of guys with fishing lines attached to each stone. On the count of three, they pulled the rocks down. The sky behind was a painted backdrop you’d normally see in an opera. It was a one-take affair; it would have taken all day to set up again.

I was at a point in my career when I could call in a few favours. Queen had done a great score for Flash Gordon, so we gave them a 20-minute reel of different scenes and they went: “Wow!” We’d only expected them to do one song, but they wanted to write one each. Freddie Mercury did Princes of the Universe, Brian May did Who Wants to Live Forever, Roger Taylor did It’s a Kind of Magic.

The US release was a disaster. It had one of the worst posters ever: a black and white closeup of Christopher. It looked like he had acne. You thought: “What the ****’s this about?” But at the premiere in France, there were 30-foot cutouts of Sean and Christopher all the way down the Champs-Elysées. The audience went ape****. It became an enormous hit in Europe.



Christopher Lambert, actor
My English wasn’t as good as it is today. When I met the producers, the way I was speaking was probably a bit shocking. They expected someone who could do mid-Atlantic English. So I worked with a dialect coach for months: four hours of accents in the morning, then four hours of swordfighting in the afternoon, letting all that stress go.

I was training with Bob Anderson, who’d been Darth Vader’s stunt double. I’m very short-sighted and was nervous. We started with plastic swords, then wood, then aluminium, then light steel, then heavy steel. When you miss with heavy steel, it can be bloody. You have to practise – a lot.

It was my first time in Scotland. Insurance people completely forbid drinking on set, but try that up there and you’ll get shot. I’m not saying Scottish people drink all the time, but if they drink, they drink. It’s not a sip of wine, it’s a quarter of a bottle of scotch. There were 1,000 extras for the battle scenes and they went at it for real. After each shot, the cries went up: “Doctor!” “Nurse!”

When my brother died of cancer, I had the same feeling I had during Highlander, with its idea that you cannot get the past back – life has to go on. If Connor MacLeod can get through five or six lifetimes, we should be able to manage one.

• The 4K restoration of Highlander is available to download now and is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 11 July.

Its been 30 years. What are your thoughts on this classic film?

 

[elgaz]

Loved it, it's a classic. The sequels soured it for me a little, but the original was a great story. Not the best acted film in the world, or the best effects, but it all just gelled and seemed to work. It felt like a very unique and fresh story when I first watched it.

I'm not normally a fan of remakes, but I feel the core story of Highlander is perfect for a remake. Imagine a much bigger budget and making the story more epic in scope; instead of Macleod's story going back a few hundred years, go back a thousand. Have flashbacks to different eras showing stunning landscapes from different times, and having amazingly choreographed swordfights highlighting how these immortal beings have learnt swordfighting techniques over hundreds of years from all around the world. As good as Highlander was, you always knew you were watching a film made on a fairly limited budget. It's a story that could be scaled up IMO.

 

[Dave McFly]

I would LOVE if if they released it in the theaters for a short run or even over the 2 days Cinemark does as part of their classic series (2 shows on wed and one on sun).

 

[Fallen Angel]

Highlander is a classic. Everything after that is an abomination.

 

[TheVileOne]

I love Highlander and even the first sequel has a bit of kitschy appeal to me.

The story works the best if you ignore everything after the first one. Plus all that great music by queen.

 

[elgaz]

Yeah the soundtrack really helped the film, Queen delivered on the songs and then some - so many memorable ones.

Hard to know who could do a modern day soundtrack for the same film, there aren't really any bands like Queen any more. Muse are the only ones that spring to mind, some of their less hardcore tracks are a bit epic and operatic in nature and have spun some Queen comparisons, probably due to the harmonies, guitar/piano accompaniments and so on.

http://www.nme.com/news/muse/47809

United States of Eurasia is nothing if not a Queen tribute.

 

[Alien Anal]

I was having this discussion today and I think they could get away with using the original soundtrack.

 

[TheVileOne]

What's the point of a Highlander remake though?

The Highlander movies were never really even box office hits. Yeah they had an international and cult following, but I don't get why this of all properties needs a reboot.

Highlander is this cool little piece of 80s pop and a product of its times. It had a cool original premise and a great soundtrack.

How do you seek to duplicate it in 2016?

 

[LoganGambit87]

^why do blade runner 2 then it bombed in the 80's

 

[Alien Anal]

What's the point of a Highlander remake though?

The Highlander movies were never really even box office hits. Yeah they had an international and cult following, but I don't get why this of all properties needs a reboot.

Highlander is this cool little piece of 80s pop and a product of its times. It had a cool original premise and a great soundtrack.

How do you seek to duplicate it in 2016?

I think for that reason. Better to remake something that wasn't great than an already great movie.

 

[elgaz]

What's the point of a Highlander remake though?

The Highlander movies were never really even box office hits. Yeah they had an international and cult following, but I don't get why this of all properties needs a reboot.

Highlander is this cool little piece of 80s pop and a product of its times. It had a cool original premise and a great soundtrack.

How do you seek to duplicate it in 2016?

You don't duplicate it. You take the fundamentally strong parts of the story and modernise it, make it more relevant.

Cast aside the swords and the fights and the whole backstory of immortals battling it out until one remains, and Highlander was essentially about a man who had the ability to live forever, something which many humans dream of, but who lamented it after watching his one true love grow old and die - while he remained the same.

It's not a unique story - even Captain American has elements of that man-out-of-time angle - but there are lots of way to bring it into 2016, a modern world where people are obsessed with staying young and millions are spent on plastic surgeons, genetic research and so on to achieve that. Imagine a world where Immortals are known about by a select few, and not only do they have to fight each other to the death, but they have to evade capture by humans who seek to find the source of their immortality. Or a world where those select few see immortals as Gods on Earth, and worship them. There's lots of angles you could take here.

 

[NHawk19]

^ This is one of the few films I'd support for a remake / modernization.

They would need some long term planning though. The original saw him as the last immortal. Then they struggled with the sequels because eh he really wasn't. Maybe use the first to set the stage and introduce immortals with a large fight at the end that leaves further clues about their origins and the final quickening.

The TV show really got it right though after season 1.

 

[Peyton Westlake]

I was a fan of Highlander because of the story & Connery.
I always thought they should expand on the Quickening.
Explain how when 1 immortal kills another, everything the slain immortal knew & could do , would be absorbed into the other immortal.
I wouldn't mind another version if its modernized or even the now dreaded re-imagining.

 

[elgaz]

Immortals becoming more powerful as they slay one another (by absorbing not only skills/knowledge from another, but their power) would be good too. A bit like that Jet Li film 'The One', where there are multiple versions of him from many different alternate universes and each time one dies, the power is shared amongst those remaining.

 

[elgaz]

Channel hopping last night and Highlander 2 was on ........................... meh. It hasn't aged well!

I think there's been no better time for a Highlander reboot, especially in a TV format. You could have multiple parallel timelines showing the Highlander in the past, present and even future. Add in the medieval swordplay, the magical (or possibly scientific?) immortality angle, and it would be like Game of Thrones meets Westworld. So much potential.

 

[DarkKnight88]

Channel hopping last night and Highlander 2 was on ........................... meh. It hasn't aged well.

It was terrible in 1991 too.