Roger Avary

**Roger Avary** (0:24)
I loved this movie Excalibur when I was young. It's like one of my favorite movies of all time. I don't know if you know the movie. It's The Arthurian Legends. It's directed by this guy, John Borman, whose work I love. It's swords. And I was a Dungeons and Dragons kid. I loved Dungeons and Dragons. I grew up in the South Bay of Los Angeles. When I was in high school, I was disinterested in anything but making movies. And so I was just suffering through high school. And but in English class, I was handed a book and it was Beowulf. And so I see this book and I'm like, okay, there's a guy with a sword. Only it's the Burton Raffale edition. A guy with a sword, a dragon. Okay, this is for me. And then I proceeded to try to read it. And it was like it's epic poetry, written in a kind of high middle English. It was almost impenetrable. I couldn't figure it out. I probably failed that class.
But I stuck with it over the years and I read it and I read it. And then I learned like Shakespeare, you actually have to read it out loud. That's the only way to engage with it. If you read it out loud, you have a different relationship with the written word. And suddenly, I started to understand it. But I still was like, something's wrong with this story. It's bifurcated into two parts. It's Beowulf the young man, Beowulf the old man. There's all sorts of weird things that happen in it. Grendel's mother is this kind of demon. And when he goes to fight her, he goes into this cave and they describe him like underwater for four days, I think is what it is. And when he comes out, he doesn't come out with the head of the mother. He comes out with the head of Grendel and with this other sword. So we don't know what happened to the sword. And so I was really into the idea of the unreliable narrator.
And so I decided I wanted to make this as my Excalibur. I've been chasing Excalibur my whole life. And whenever I write anything that's even remotely swords and sorcery, or swords and sandals, or whatever, I wrote a Robin Hood script, still was chasing Excalibur. The themes of Excalibur, the look of Excalibur, the way that Borman was able to take Le Morte d'Arthur and the Arthurian legends and turn them into a very entertaining movie, which gives you a gateway into something that's great and eternal. And so I wanted to make this since I was very young. But I'd only kind of figured out the first half of it. And I was working on the Sandman film at Warner Brothers. It didn't go well because John Peters, like I don't want to besmirch the guy, but he just thought, oh, it's Batman. And there should be fist fights. And I don't know if you know the Sandman comics, but I love the Sandman comics. And I basically walked, I didn't walk off the project, I left the project. That's actually, I learned a bad thing to do in Hollywood. They don't like it when you do that.
Like it kind of taints you a little bit. I was like, there's no way I'm going to be the guy that ruins Sandman. I had a very clear vision of it.
Then I got a call from Neil Gaiman, who was the writer of Sandman, he's a novelist, and he just called me up to thank me. He said, hey, I want to thank you. I understand you actually left the project. You were trying to stay true to it. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, well, what are you doing now? I said, well, I'm trying to figure out Beowulf. I've got these ideas about it. I started telling him my ideas. But I said, I can't figure out why is it bifurcated in the end? Why is this fractured storyline? Why is it suddenly, I can't figure out the old man part of the story. It's a very odd structure for a movie. Then he said, well, but Roger, if everything you say is true, if this and this and this and this and this are true, that means the dragon is Beowulf's son. It was like a third eye opened up in my head and I was like, oh my God, you're right. Let's write it together. I already had a bunch of it written. A friend of mine was, he's deceased now, John Langley, the producer of Cops, the TV series and he had a house in Mexico. So I asked him if I could borrow his house and we went down to Mexico and in just in like two weeks we just wrote the script very fast.