Great Britain seems a bit devoid of magic these days. Fear and division rule, villainy feels prevalent, and the royal family is all marriage and babies instead of tales of dashing knights and warrior kings. Enter The Kid Who Would Be King – the new film from Attack The Block director Joe Cornish that looks set to cathartically explore those feelings, and dispel them with a fast, funny, fantasy adventure based on tales of yore. Just as his debut crashed alien sci-fi into the mean streets of South London, this time the tales of Arthurian legend invade the South London suburbs – an idea that first popped into the filmmaker’s head when he was 13. Empire spoke to Cornish to break down the trailer, talking King Arthur, zombie knights, and sneaking out of school to eat McDonalds.
Welcome To Dungate
We’re in a different area of South London compared to Attack The Block – a dull, middle-class neighbourhood where our hero, 12-year-old Alexander Elliot, lives and attends Dungate Academy. “The idea is that this kid is the least significant boy in history, discovering the most significant sword in history. So he lives in a very non-descript, average suburban neighbourhood,” Cornish explains.
“Dungate is a big old standard state school, a factory for young people, very keen on trying to turn them out as good citizens with decent exam results. It starts the film as your average young-adult factory, and ends the film as a contemporary version of a medieval fortress.”
Boy Hero
Louis Ashbourne Serkis (son of Andy) plays Alex, who’s almost grown out of his childhood. “He used to be very enthusiastic about fantasy adventure movies and novels and magic and escapism. But now he’s entering that mysterious adolescent zone where suddenly you realise that childhood fantasies may not be as useful or relevant to adult life as you thought they were,” says Cornish. “The grown-up world is slightly less thrilling, a little more cold and brutal, than you first imagined it. He’s got to get a bit harder and more cynical to survive.”
Best Budders
Alex’s best friend Bedders hasn’t lost that childlike outlook yet, though – something which puts him in the path of Dungate Academy’s bullies. “Alex and Bedders grew up together. Their houses back onto each other and they’re the closest possible mates,” Cornish says. “They really forge their friendship in the furnace of fantasy – they’re the kind of kids who would have played at being Star Wars characters, or Doctor Who, or Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.” Alex shows his true heroic potential in standing up for his mate.
’18 Bonnie And Clyde
At the start of the trailer, blonde-haired bully Lance (Tom Taylor) and his accomplice Kaye (Rhianna Dorris) are giving Bedders the old shake-down – but later on they join him and Alex on their quest. “They’re the Bonnie and Clyde of the playground,” Cornish jokes. “They go around fleecing younger kids, rinsing them, dangling them upside down and emptying the contents of their pockets. They’re older kids who pick on younger kids, they’re kind of insecure but they’re also very cool and confident. Lance, Kaye and Bedders are all analogues for the Arthurian characters of Sir Lancelot, Sir Kay, and Sir Bedivere.”
Excalibur Awaits
But before they join Alex’s quest, Lance and Kaye chase him down and accidentally lead him to his destiny. After hiding from the playground nasties, Alex finds Excalibur – the Sword in the Stone. Except, this time the stone is a concrete pillar in a building site.
“That was the closest thing Merlin can find to an ancient paleolithic site in central London, so it’s sort of like an urban version of Stonehenge,” Cornish reasons. “Under the moonlight it looks vaguely druidic and ancient.”
Google It
If there’s one thing King Arthur didn’t have, it was a smartphone. And if there’s a second, it’s Google. Thankfully Alex and Bedders have both, which helps significantly in translating the inscriptions on Excalibur. “The idea of The Sword in the Stone in the modern world immediately presented all these possibilities to revitalise a legend that’s constantly told in a rather boring sword-and-sandals historical way,” Cornish says of the culture clash. “You can’t get a greater difference than the Knights of the Round Table as we picture them in our imagination, and a bunch of contemporary teenage kids. Not many modern kids know what the chivalric code is. And the idea of putting any kind of sword or weapon into the hands of a London kid fills people with terror and apprehension. To me it’s a very entertaining, interesting, and exciting idea to revisit the legend in that contemporary context.”
Mini-Merlin
When you think of Merlin, you picture an ancient bearded warlock. But when we meet him here, he’s a sprightly teenager. “One thing that caught my imagination in the Arthurian legends is the notion that Merlin lives ‘backwards in time’,” explains Cornish. “Quite what that means is very hard to figure out, but I thought maybe it means that he’s like Benjamin Button – that the older he gets, the younger he becomes. Also it means that he can blend in with the other characters and be their mentor without it all looking a little bit weird. He’s an extra-eccentric, funny, wise, fish-out-of-water version of Merlin.” It’s not the only version of Merlin we see – but more on that later.
Rise Of The Fallen
Alex’s possession of Excalibur has an unfortunate side-effect: it awakens the villainous Morgana, who resurrects her army of warriors. “This comes from the idea that archaeologists are constantly discovering the bodies of ancient kings under car parks around Britain,” says Cornish, referring to the surprise unearthing of Richard III. “You just scratch the surface of this country and you’re itching the nose of some kind of fallen peasant or warrior or historical character. Morgana uses dark magic to reanimate all her fallen warriors who lie under the surface of Britain in their cadaverous, rotten state. She puts lava into their veins, and they rise up and attempt to battle our young heroes for possession of Britain and Excalibur.”
Twisted Sister
And then we see Morgana herself, played by Mission: Impossible star Rebecca Ferguson. In the legends, she’s Arthur’s half-sister with a legitimate beef about being stiffed out of her inheritance. And having been banished and trapped underground for centuries, she’s mad as hell – and she’s not going to take it anymore. Morgana’s also a timely villain considering where Britain is today, as Cornish explains: “She’s waiting for the land to become lost and leaderless, for the people of Britain to feel divided and lost and weak, so that she can re-emerge and gain dominion of the country that she lost. The United Kingdom, for the first time in a long time, is really potentially threated with break-up. One of the things King Arthur did, according to the legend, is unite the warring tribes of Britain. This seems like a good time to reintroduce that narrative, even in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way.”
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Merlin)
Merlin’s not only a wizard – he’s a shapeshifter. “In my movie he doesn’t change into quite so many animals, but he’s able to transform into an owl if he wants to get around faster. He’s a very old, scrappy owl that keeps shedding feathers and bumping into things.”
It’s An Extender!
As the young knights assemble, they need their own round table – or, a rectangular one that converts. “I think most domestic round tables have those little flaps,” Cornish muses. “That’s the scene where Alex has to give his very rousing speech and convince his former enemies, Lance and Kaye, to join his band of knights. Similiarly, King Arthur was very nearly killed by Sir Lancelot before Lancelot came on side. Every time Alex feels that he’s living the dream, there’s always some banal contemporary issue that pops up and undercuts him, like the squeaky folding table.”
Fast Travel
You know all those mysterious ancient monuments that Britain is packed with? They form an ancient transport system in The Kid Who Would Be King. “Stonehenge is like King’s Cross, the main transport hub,” explains Cornish. “So those trilithons, those arches, are actually doorways, and if you use the right gesticular magic you can walk through them and emerge from any other standing stone in Britain. All the stuff I was dragged around – Glastonbury Tor or Stonehenge or ruined castles – is a bit boring and dry to you when you’re a kid. The idea is to imbue it with magic and make a film that would make kids realise how exciting and incredible this country is. For something like Stonehenge to be sitting so close to London is pretty mind-blowing – it’s a very mysterious and exciting place.”
Knight School
Alex recruits more than just Bedders, Lance, and Kaye to his cause – the rest of Dungate gets involved too. “I don’t want to give too much away,” warns Cornish, “but if you want to see 600 school kids in suits of armour with swords defending their school against a massive army of zombie knights, then come and see The Kid Who Would Be King.” Sold.
Bunking Off
It turns out kids will do basically anything to get out of lessons – even signing up to fight the aforementioned army of zombie knights. “Me and Adam Buxton and Louis Theroux used to bunk off school in the morning and go to McDonalds in Victoria Street to have a delicious sausage and egg McMuffin,” Cornish recalls. “That’s hardly as noble a reason for skipping school as the kids in the movie have.”
Mer-Man
As promised, we don’t just get Merlin in teen form – he can turn into his older self, played by Sir Patrick Stewart, at will. “There’s more young Merlin than old Merlin,” confirms Cornish. “But old Merlin certainly makes a major impact when he appears.”
150CC
Kaye gets her big action moment in a car chase, pursued by one of Morgana’s warriors – and luckily she’s an old hand at driving having sunk hours into Mario Kart on the Wii wheel. “Kaye’s sort of beholden to Lance at the beginning, she’s like his henchwoman,” says Cornish of her arc. “But as the story plays out, she very much becomes her own person. She realises she’s sort of attached to this lunatic and she gets to show how skilled she is.”
The Lady in the Water
In the trailer’s final moment, Alex calls on the Lady of the Lake – one of the more familiar elements of the Sword in the Stone myth – to bring Excalibur to him. “She’s the guardian of Excalibur,” Cornish says. “She exists underwater, and when you throw Excalibur into the lake her hand rises and grabs it. When I was a kid and I thought of the idea, it was one of the first images that came to me – I used to sketch that image of a bath with the Lady of the Lake and Excalibur coming out of it on my school books.”
The Kid Who Would Be King arrives in UK cinemas on 15 February 2019.