Long ago, in the years before CGI,
it was a time of giants in Hollywood -
an elite group of film-makers who controlled great riches
and told grand stories by mobilising huge armies
of cast and crew.
These were heroic tales,
some new, some handed down through generations.
They devised new ways of telling them
in the biggest, widest and most colourful ways they could.
The public came in their millions to marvel at these great works
and they were called...epics!
So, what constitutes a Hollywood epic?
There are different interpretations but most of the films
we're looking at here share some key ingredients.
The setting is usually historical,
often biblical.
I am the god of thy father.
The god of Abraham.
The god of Isaac.
And the god of Jacob.
The sets are huge, budgets lavish,
screens as wide as possible.
The casts number thousands.
And the duration, well...
..three hours or more wasn't unusual.
The intermissions were as much of a godsend
as some of the storylines.
And then, as we shall see repeatedly,
there's the Charlton Heston factor,
the actor who, over the years,
became so associated with the epic
that he once said a film only qualified to be one
if he was starring in it.
I think the epic film is the most difficult genre
in which to succeed creatively.
Er...
Or, to put it another way,
it's the easiest film to make lousy.
LAUGHTER
It's terribly easy to let the whole thing just dissolve in kind
of a seething minestrone of extras with torches
in which individual performers disappear completely.
Of course, Charlton Heston isn't the only figure inextricably
linked with epics.
The man usually credited with creating the genre
is the legendary producer Cecil B DeMille.
He was one of Hollywood's founding fathers.
In the 1920s, DeMille made The Ten Commandments
and King Of Kings.
In the '30s, he made Cleopatra
and in the '40s, he had a huge hit with Samson And Delilah.
Then in 1956, he remade The Ten Commandments,
a film that is considered one of the key epics.
Great Pharaoh...
..I stand in the shadow of your justice.
Whose work is this?
I warned you of his treason, my father.
NEW SPEAKER: Treason?
Judge now if I spoke truly.
The evil star foretold him as the destroyer of Egypt
and deliverer of slaves.
It is not possible.
A prince of Egypt? He is not a prince of Egypt.
He's not the son of your sister.
He's the son of Hebrew slaves.
CROWD MURMUR
DeMille's motivation as a movie-maker was, of course,
partly a desire to make an epic profit.
But he was also a man who believed he had a mission from above,
as he explained on a visit to the UK in 1957.
Why did you choose to remake The Ten Commandments 30 years
after the first version?
If you could read the letters that I receive - thousands and thousands
and thousands of them -
you would understand why I made the picture
and why I take no financial reward for it.
Letters from children and all ages,
up to 96.
People would say, "This picture has made God real to me."
That is reward enough in itself?
All the reward that any man can ask in life if he has accomplished that.
Yeah. If he's carried the Word of God
to the hundreds of millions of people
that I have, around the world, he can ask no more.
If he can make God...change God from a myth to so many,
to a reality that they can lean on and have all through their lives
and know and be with them and have an understanding of him.
The Ten Commandments of course had Charlton Heston
playing the central role of Moses.
But Heston wasn't the first actor cast in the film.
That honour went to Yul Brynner,
who played the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses
and got the call during the interval of a stage performance of
The King And I.
Where is this would-be deliverer who would set the Hebrews free?
Who can say, Immortal Prince?
They do not confide in me.
But it is possible to learn.
No doubt.
You have a rat's ears and a ferret's nose.
To use in your service, son of Pharaoh.
Add to them the eyes of a weasel and find me this deliverer.
I had a rule that nobody could come and see me backstage
during the play
or in the intermission.
Only after the final curtain.
And the doorman
at the St James Theatre came to me
and said, "There's a grey-haired gentleman
"that says he's Cecil B DeMille
"and he must see you now during the intermission."
I said, "If he doesn't mind seeing me naked, tell him to come in."
He came in and shook my hand.
And he had a wonderful kind of squint and a glint in his eyes.
He was a marvellous man, anyway.
He said, "Mr Brynner, how would you like to be in a movie
"that your great-grandchildren will see?"
I said, "I'd like that very much."
He said, "Well, in that case, please accept to play the Pharaoh
"in The Ten Commandments."
We shook hands and that was our deal.
So Yul Brynner got a handshake from DeMille.
Charlton Heston's casting was down to a hand wave.
I was then working on the Paramount lot,
where he had his independent unit set up.
And I had made a film, was going back to New York to do a play,
was out briefly, and...
..was very young, very callow then.
But I had been introduced to him.
He'd been one of the major sights of Hollywood
and I was driving off the lot one day in a convertible
with the top down, and passed his building on the steps
of which he was standing with
some key members of his staff, including his secretary who,
contrary to legend, did not take down everything he said
but took down a good bit of it.
And as I drove by, I saw him, of course.
He was instantly recognisable
and I thought, "Well, I've met him. I suppose I should wave."
So I waved. And he nodded graciously and waved back.
And as was later reported to me,
he then turned to Henry Wilcoxon, his associate producer, and said,
"Who was that?"
And Henry didn't know.
And the secretary did and flipped back through her book
and she said, "That's Charlton Heston, a New York actor
"who was signed to do a picture by Hal Wallis.
"He made the picture. It's called Dark City. You ran it ten days ago,
"you didn't like it."
He said, "Yeah, but I like the way he waved."
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
For years afterward, I waved to everybody!
And that's how you got the part of Moses, in fact. Yes.
Amazing. What's it like playing...? You took on this part
in The Ten Commandments.
What interests me is how you play a part like that
unselfconsciously.
How do you unselfconsciously become Moses?
In the case of Moses, as in many other parts, to be on the ground...
The first shot I did as Moses
was to walk barefoot down Mount Sinai.
Now, I propose to you,
it's very hard to be in that situation and not feel a little...
..a little capable of leading the Israelites out of the wilderness.
Along with a walk down Mount Sinai,
one of The Ten Commandments' most famous scenes
was the parting of the Red Sea.
Not surprisingly, this was a huge undertaking
and very expensive to shoot, as well as being spectacular.
It was also the source of a much-repeated tall tale.
Well, we did have three cameras on the scene
and there were 8,000 people and 5,000 animals.
And it did take for ever to get them through the shot even.
It's the only DeMille joke I ever heard DeMille laugh at.
It is an apocryphal story, but it is funny,
and it has entered the language.
We finally get them all through
and he turns to the cameraman on the number-one camera,
with the close lens, and he says, "How was that, Fred?"
And he says, "Mr DeMille, I'm sorry, but that camel fell down
"right in front of my lens." He said, "I've got 50 feet
"of marvellous stuff but by the time they dragged him out the way,
"the shot, we were out of film."
And he said. "It's all right, OK, OK."
He said, "You had the 40 on over there, didn't you? How was that?"
He said, "Mr DeMille, my assistant left the lens cap on.
"We got nothing. Not one foot."
Mr DeMille kept control of himself and picked up the loudspeaker.
There was a long camera about a quarter of a mile away, on a ridge.
He said, "How was it for you, Fred?"
He said, "Anytime you're ready, CB!"
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
An epic that predated The Ten Commandments was Quo Vadis,
directed by Mervyn LeRoy,
who was a huge admirer of Cecil B DeMille.
There was a man in our business who was pretty well-known -
called Cecil B DeMille -
who made a lot of the Roman pictures and big epics,
as you know.
And as I was leaving Hollywood,
I called Mr DeMille and I said, "CB..." We were very good friends.
I said, "Why did you make all these spectacles
"and all these things about Rome?"
And he had a great answer, which I think you'd like to hear,
and his answer was, he said,
"Mervyn, why should I let 2,000 years of publicity go to waste?"
And that's a true story. And every day that I shot Quo Vadis,
I thought of what he said.
CROWD CHEERING
As with any epic worthy of the name,
the crowd scenes in Quo Vadis
involved thousands of extras.
For most, this would be their first and only acting experience.
But in this case, one future superstar did stand out
from the crowd.
Her name - Sophia Loren.
On Quo Vadis, I went to Rome
and we didn't...
..even have the money to make a phone call.
So we walked from the station
to Cinecitta
because we knew that Quo Vadis was...
They were shooting Quo Vadis.
And they needed a lot of people to be extras in it.
So just to make a little money,
we went there to Cinecitta,
and we saw Mervyn LeRoy,
and he spotted me right away
and he said, "Come, come."
So... He did this, so I understood it. He said, "Come."
Because I didn't speak a word of English.
So, I did go in his office and he started to ask me many questions
and my mother say, "You always say yes. You always say yes.
"No matter what he asks you, you say yes."
And finally after half an hour, he really found out
that I didn't speak any word of English, because otherwise
he would have given me my first chance in an American film,
in Quo Vadis, a small part.
But I had to speak English.
But the fact that you took that part, as an extra,
that wasn't really the thing that made you decide,
"I must be an actress"?
You'd already decided that way back? On the trip. Oh, yes, absolutely.
And then... I wanted...
Maybe it was the feeling I wanted to get...out of anonymity.
I wanted to do something.
I needed to work. I didn't have any money.
I had no future, I had nothing.
Two years after Quo Vadis came The Robe...
..starring Richard Burton as a Roman soldier
whose life is transformed
after the crucifixion of Jesus.
It was notable for being the first feature film shot
in the widescreen CinemaScope format...
..which presented the actors with a set of unfamiliar challenges.
Well, now, let's move on to The Robe.
This was the first CinemaScope picture ever.
Yes. And there must have been a difference surely for you
in making this?
Well, nobody knew quite what the technique was.
Everybody thought there was going to be a great depth of focus and,
consequently, we had to be ourselves
and not use doubles, for instance, in any dangerous sequence.
It actually turned out not to be like that.
Also, we shot everything in great long takes.
Instead of the normal 40 or 40 seconds or a minute and a half,
you suddenly were doing five and six-minute takes.
Which involves a lot of memory and mental work.
Yes, and it's not anything like as easy as it sounds.
People thought that stage actors would be more adaptable to this
but it's not really so because, unlike the stage,
you have to hit minute spots, you know, for lights and so on.
Yes. And it's a very trying business altogether.
Well, Richard, let's have a look at this excerpt from The Robe.
And this is the part where Richard Burton as the tribune fights
as a Christian for the first time,
against a centurion who's defied him.
Well, what are you waiting for?
Finish it.
You may give that order now, centurion.
It was quite a scrap. How long did it take to work it out?
It took about three months' rehearsal. Mm-hm. And...
But, unfortunately, it should have been shot in one day
but the cut that I received in the arm is real cut.
It wasn't meant... How deep? It wasn't very deep, no,
but it sort of was funny and painful,
so we had to stop shooting for three weeks.
In actual fact, it took a long time to shoot.
Would you call that an occupational hazard? Sort of, yes.
It looked like a full-blooded swipe to me, you know. It was.
Huge battles and spectacular fights
sat right at the heart of most epics,
giving stuntmen and effects teams plenty of opportunities
to surpass themselves.
An example, one of the most celebrated scenes in cinema -
the chariot race from 1959's Ben-Hur,
starring that man again...
..Charlton Heston.
I did not, I hasten to add, do the jump.
The man who did the jump, Joe Canutt,
interestingly enough, is the man that directed all our...
..action sequences in Antony And Cleopatra.
Yes. He's, I think, the best stuntman in the world, and rapidly
becoming, as his father was before him... Yes.
..the, one of the best second-unit directors.
But the scene in which the... Ben-Hur's chariot jumps
a wrecked chariot was... Yes. ..that was Joe.
CROWD ROARS
APPLAUSE
We really could see that sequence 100 times
and still pick things out of it which are...
Every time I see it, I get anxious, thinking,
"What if I don't win this time?"
LAUGHTER
Was that most demanding part, you think, physically demanding,
that you had to play?
Well, learning to drive the chariot was certainly
an enormously complicated problem for me. Yes.
Even to learn to drive it in a fixed race! Yes.
Fortunately, I had three months in which to learn it before...
And... Which was...an enormous asset.
It's... It implanted in me a lifelong resolve,
whenever I have to learn to do anything difficult,
like capturing Spain
or parting the Red Sea...
..to get a lot of lead time!
Ben-Hur became one of the biggest-grossing films
of all time.
But, interestingly, it wasn't Heston's favourite
of his epic films.
He preferred El Cid, a three-hour extravaganza he made in 1961
based on the life of the 11th-century Spanish folk hero
Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar.
The character was an enormously attractive one.
It had an advantage over Ben-Hur in that it was a real person.
The Cid was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable men
of the Middle Ages...
..and very much, apparently, on the
not insignificant record, very much
as we sketched him in the film.
CHEERING
El Cid is one of the films I would love to be able to make again.
I think... I think it's perhaps true to say it's a good film.
I think, given the material and the character, it could be
a great, great film.
The character offers as much potential for a truly great film,
perhaps the definitive epic film, as any I've ever read, and I think
I've read most of the material for all the epic films that have been
made in the last 15 years!
In fact, the only thing Heston didn't seem too enamoured with
in El Cid was his love interest,
that former face in the crowd, Sophia Loren.
El Cid was the advent of hormone replacement therapy,
because although you aged, Sophia Loren didn't!
But... It irritated me at the time, but I've since thought
that it was necessary to have Jimena, the mythic beauty,
throughout the film... Staying beautiful.
My daughter was not born when that picture was made, but they
rereleased it about eight years later, and I said, "Honey, I want
"you to see this film.
"It has a lot of battles in it, but it's a love story, and I think
"you'll like it." So I took her to the theatre, and when the lights
went up afterwards, why, she'd been weeping appropriately
through the movie, and I said "Well, what did you think, honey?"
And she said, "Oh, Daddy, you were beautiful then!"
Ahhh!
El Cid was directed by Anthony Mann, best known for some
classic Hollywood Westerns.
A year before, in 1960, Mann had been directing
another epic, Spartacus.
But he was fired after just a few days, following a disagreement
with Kirk Douglas, and he was replaced
by the brilliant Stanley Kubrick.
Douglas had been spurred into making the film after missing out
on the lead role in Ben-Hur, and, as he was the producer as well
as the star, on Spartacus, he always got what he wanted.
I didn't have any intentions of becoming a movie mogul
and making a lot of movies, it's just that I wanted to have
more control in the process of making films.
You know, I wanted to play a part in the making of films
and picking films, like Lonely Are The Brave, The Vikings,
Spartacus, Seven Days In May, Paths Of Glory.
I mean, those are movies that my company, Bryna, made,
and I'm proud of them.
He came to me and said, "Listen, I'm going to do this picture.
"I've got this great cast. I need you for a couple of weeks' work."
I says, "Fine, great."
Nine months later...
What kind of work did you do?
A singer of songs.
A singer of songs?
In Spartacus, all of us were slaves.
Where did Kirk Douglas come up with that crewcut?
Did he go to the barber in Beverly Hills and say,
"Give me a crewcut - I'm doing this scene in the arena"?
I mean, I never got over that one!
I won't let them crucify you.
What are you doing? Do you realise
how long it takes to die on the cross? I don't care!
Forgive me, Antoninus.
Spartacus told the story of a slaves' uprising
against their Roman masters
and drew parallels with America's history of slavery.
It also helped kill off the notorious Hollywood blacklist.
Its writer, Dalton Trumbo,
was accused of being a Communist sympathiser
and had been forced to work under several aliases.
Despite protests, Kirk Douglas decided that Trumbo deserved
a proper screen credit and broke the ban.
Douglas also made sure he was surrounded with some of the finest
acting talent around - Laurence Olivier,
Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov, who donned a toga for
an Oscar-winning performance as the owner of the gladiator school.
People have said it's the most intelligent epic of all.
Do you reckon that's justified? Yes. It may not be saying much!
No, no, but I really think Kirk Douglas deserves all sorts
of laurel wreaths for his courage...
..in countenancing such a thing, but I think he's always been slightly
a man who knew exactly how to swim,
where to swim but occasionally chose,
not for no reason, to swim against the tide. Mm.
There are moments in history where you can create a different
movement, and I think he was always conscious of that. And he had
ambitions to be a great producer. I think it's interesting -
to risk whatever it was, $15 million, which at that time
was a huge amount of money, on an adventure like that,
I think was a very brave thing to do and only someone
with his sort of star power could have persuaded the money men
to let him do it. I don't know whether he saw it as a vehicle for
all kinds of different styles of acting. No.
I think he saw himself as a kind of superman, but also,
when he was dubbing his part and was on the cross, I entered the
dubbing theatre, because somebody gave me a message to deliver to him,
and he was lying on the floor in the position of a crucified man,
but on the floor doing the lines, and he was crucified on the stage.
So I lay down next to him as though I was the man on the next cross
and said, "There's a message."
The thing is, he didn't enjoy it very much, I must say.
Well, you can't go on as long as that
and on that scale without it being troubled, I don't think. Mm.
I know that the producers, the money people, were most nervous of all.
The film went on for so long with all the retakes, and I flew out
to do a retake after it had opened.
Did you? I arrived at night,
did it in the morning and was back on the next plane, which is an awful
long way to go for one line.
And my daughter, that was born at the beginning of it,
by the end of it, was old enough to answer questions
in her kindergarten. "What does your father do?"
She was able to say... LITTLE-GIRL VOICE: "..Spartacus!"
Ustinov may have found Spartacus a challenging experience,
but it was nothing compared to one of the most fraught and expensive
productions in cinema history,
Cleopatra. Filming started at Pinewood Studios in 1960,
but then Elizabeth Taylor, the first actor ever paid a million dollars
for a role, fell ill.
The sets were destroyed and the whole production was moved to Italy.
The delay meant a change of cast that saw Rex Harrison brought in
to play Julius Caesar and Richard Burton cast
as Mark Antony.
And so began one of Hollywood's legendary romances...
..the Burton/Taylor affair, an epic within an epic.
I'd known him since I was 19, and I used to say, "Well, I'm not
"going to be another notch on his belt! Huh!"
And the first day that we worked together, he was suffering
from a hangover. Surprise!
LIVELY CHATTER
And he was looking so vulnerable in his little Roman dress.
And his hands were all shaky. He looked such a mess.
And he was trying to drink a cup of coffee, and his hand
was going like that.
And I said, "Would you like me to help you?"
So I held the cup to his lips
and our eyes locked.
And he drank the whole cup and we just kept looking at each other.
Looking back on your career, it seems to be divided in two, almost
exactly, by Cleopatra.
Would you agree with that, that it changed course
completely after Cleopatra?
Well, I think my life was changed by a woman, you know,
who's called Elizabeth Taylor.
I'm not entirely sure what exactly she did to me.
Well, no, I mean, I adore Elizabeth Taylor,
but, I mean, we did have a certain amount of problems on that.
And I'm very fond of Richard.
But it was a sort of film... It was going very, very well.
We sailed along, Elizabeth and I, for about the usual time, doing
three minutes a day.
We did about three months together as Caesar and Cleopatra,
and then old Richard
came on the scene and then the balloon went up, you see. Right.
And he'd be a... Because he'd been hanging about
in Rome not doing anything, for three or four months.
And so he was determined to put things right when he came
on, because Elizabeth was always apt to be very late on the set.
There was always something wrong, some legitimate excuse.
But she was always keeping us waiting, I must admit.
And so Richard came on determined to sort of put all that right.
So then he started to do a huge he-man act with Elizabeth
and ordering about and things like that, and the company,
Fox, liked that. They said, "You've got her under control."
And then, of course, the great romance started,
which was fine as far as I was concerned,
except I was kept hanging about as Caesar,
because if by some mischance they were incapacitated
in any way, they didn't want to close the studio, so they kept
poor old me waiting around with a few key scenes to play
in case of accidents.
I got very fed up with this.
I mean, they were paying me,
but I was then doing nothing, like Richard had.
So one day, I decided to play truant and I got on a plane, came to London
and I was trying out a powerboat in Poole Harbour, of all places.
I thought, "I'm safe here. Nobody's going to know.
"They're not going to find me here."
And as I brought the boat back in to the quay, there were a lot
of little men saying, "Hey! Hi! Hi! Quickly, here!"
And of course, Fox had found me. God knows how!
They said, "Now, get on a plane quickly, get to Rome."
I said, "I can't do that immediately."
In Poole! I'd better get a car up, and I'd get the first plane over.
They were very angry with me.
But they couldn't do anything very much.
I'd done too much of the film for them to sack me then.
It promoted, of course, or provoked the great one-liner, didn't it,
allegedly made by a film extra?
"Who do you have to sleep with to get OFF this movie?"
When Cleopatra flopped dismally at the box office,
the age of the epic seemed to be coming to an end.
The 1965 film, The Greatest Story Ever Told
felt like the final nail in the coffin.
For more than four hours, it depicted the life of Christ...
..and - who else? - Charlton Heston as John the Baptist.
The film is now chiefly remembered for the ridicule prompted
by John Wayne's brief cameo...
..as the most un-Roman-sounding centurion,
witnessing the crucifixion.
THUNDER CRASHES
HE DRAWLS: Truly, this man was the Son of God.
Of course, despite John Wayne's efforts,
the epic WOULD rise again over the years
in various styles and lengths.
And then in 1998, came a film that seemed to promise a disaster
of Cleopatra-style proportions...
..Titanic.
It was the first film
to cost a budget-busting $200 million.
The director, James Cameron,
had a reputation as the scariest man in Hollywood.
The cast and crew got sick
from spending so much time filming in water.
But somehow Titanic defied all expectations,
becoming a phenomenon
and then the most successful film ever made!
Its success was down not just to the effects and spectacle
but also the romantic story of its two central characters,
played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
To me, it was an extraordinary love story and
remains to be that.
And when I read the treatment, I think it is very rare that
as an actor and an individual, you can be genuinely moved by a novel
or a script.
I was on an aeroplane when I read it and was just in floods of tears
at the end. And a treatment is very different to a script,
it's more a sort of a precis version of what will eventually be said
and has more description, as opposed to dialogue,
but nevertheless, floods of tears. And I thought, "I've got to do this.
"I've really got to do this."
All right. Open your eyes.
I'm flying!
Now, while the film was being made and the budget was getting bigger
and bigger and bigger
and the cynics around the place were saying, "This is going to be
"the biggest turkey of all time," did you get at all discouraged?
Did you at any point think, "What the hell am I doing?!"?
No, I never got discouraged, because I had so much sort of belief in it.
Leo and I... Well, we all did.
But Leo and I particularly were adamant that this love story
was going to be the thing that made people connect with this film.
You know, to us it was never about a sinking ship, it was
never another Titanic movie.
And we believed that if we really stuck together, we could make people
forget that it was, you know, the Titanic.
Now it's opened,
and of course, I mean, all those critics and cynics have been totally
refuted, because it's a huge success in America, isn't it? Yes!
Yeah, yeah, right.
Were you at all surprised by that, that it opened so big in America
with not only popular acclaim but critical acclaim?
Jim Cameron doesn't do things half-heartedly,
so I always knew that he was adamant that this was going to be right
across the board and a big, epic thing.
I think part of me was sort of slightly afraid of connecting
with that, because I didn't really want to think about what it might do
in terms of my career, because I so want to kind of be
at home and see my family and work because I love my job,
not for any other kind of commercial reason.
So I never entertained much thought in that direction.
But now that that is happening, it's incredibly exciting.
The new technology that helped sink the Titanic
was used in equally stunning effect in another modern epic...
..Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott...
..and with echoes of Spartacus.
The film had crowds cheering in cinemas as well as
in its own CGI-created arenas.
When he comes out, that shot is not just 360 degrees, it's about
420 degrees, because it keeps on going.
They painted that in with sampling shots of the existing arena
that I'd built, sampling crowd that I had,
though I never had more than 3,000 people.
And then they put in 56,000 people, five tiers,
and the whole giant arena plus the velarium.
Graphics were also used to create scenes featuring Oliver Reed,
who died during the film's production.
I too want to stand in front of the emperor...
..as you did.
Then listen to me. Learn from me.
I wasn't the best because I killed quickly.
I was the best because the crowd loved me.
I will give them something they've never seen before.
CHEERING
But something that was very real were the tigers,
bringing a true sense of danger to the fight scenes.
The thing about those tigers is they won't do as they're told.
They're basically about 11 feet from the tip of their tail
to the tip of their nose, and they're about 600 pounds.
The worst thing about them is that when you say, "Action," they never
follow through on what they've been trained to do, they tend to wander
off and sit down and scratch themselves.
But then occasionally, he would be on his feet and the whole camera
crew unit would scramble, and there'd be four cameras left
like little islands, unmanned!
Another director pushing the boundaries of computer graphics
is Peter Jackson,
the man who turned JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings saga
into an epic film trilogy and somehow repeated the trick
with Tolkien's much shorter story, The Hobbit.
Right from the very beginning, back in the Rings, back, you know,
probably 15 years ago now,
we set about making them feel as historical as possible, giving them
an authentic feel, which is what
the languages and the subtitles are great for.
They're languages that Tolkien created himself.
The king has never let Orc filth roam our lands,
yet he would let this Orc pack cross our borders and kill our prisoners.
It is not our fight.
It IS our fight.
Once you have somebody talking in a language you don't understand, with subtitles,
you get a sort of a sense of authenticity about it, no matter
how fantastical the story is.
I do mourn the fact that cinema is becoming...
..harder to attract young people to go and, you know, spend their money
and sit down and plump themselves in a cinema.
God, when I was a kid, I used to... Every weekend, I'd go to the movies.
Sometimes I watched three movies in a row.
Your parents thought, "He's wasting his life away," did they?
Yeah, they did, they did, to some degree.
The tales and songs fall utterly short of your enormity,
O Smaug the Stupendous.
The one thing I don't want to think about is the fact that most people...
Probably more people will end up seeing this movie of ours
on an iPad or an iPhone than what's going to see it on the big screen.
Don't be shy.
Step into the light.
It's the entertainment business. That's what it's called.
And that's what we are in. We're in the entertainment business.
So do smaller screens and cinema-averse audiences
mean the epic is facing extinction?
Perhaps.
But consider this,
Peter Jackson's final episode of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy -
The Return Of The King,
James Cameron's Titanic...
..and Ben-Hur
all share the record for the most Academy Awards won by a single film.
Each of them grabbed an epic-sounding 11 Oscars.
So when it comes to cinema's ultimate indicator of success...
..the epic is still reigning supreme,
even in the 21st century.