‘The Green Knight’: David Lowery Added 60 VFX Shots During Delays

Director David Lowery‘s new mature Arthurian tale “The Green Knight” is getting some serious buzz ahead of the domestic release on July 30, and the United Kingdom is still waiting on a new date after the film got pulled there over rising cases of COVID. The filmmaker is now detailing the additions and improvements he could make with the film after it was pulled from SXSW back in 2020. 

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Speaking with Movie Maker, David Lowery reveals he extended the film’s runtime after realizing that cutting it down wasn’t going to make it more audience-friendly suddenly. 

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“One of the things that happened was the movie got longer. I realized I’d been trying so hard to make it more palatable and make it more fast-paced. I realized there’s no world in which this movie is ever going to be particularly audience-friendly. It’s not a rip-roaring adventure, so I might as well just let it breathe a little. So I put a bunch of scenes back in that I cut out and put a lot of little grace notes back in that I had cut out,” Lowery said of his reasoning for pivoting to cut longer. 

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It wasn’t just a longer cut as Lowery mentioned they added around 60 visual effects shots (some tackled by filmmaker Nick Bateman), “We kept finding more visual effects to work on and added probably about 60 visual effects shots, which was fun because I love visual effects. We added a shot with the giants, and there’s a sequence where Gawain hallucinates and sees Alicia Vikander in front of him. We redid that sequence completely and made it much bigger than it was in the initial cut.”

This kind of tweaking of a film normally doesn’t happen that far into the post-production process; however, those changes made on the heels of the pandemic seem to have made enough improvements that have led to a lot of the movie’s positive reactions and reviews.

Lowery is busy with Disney’s “Peter & Wendy,” a live-action incarnation of their classic animated film for modern audiences, and will be heading directly to Disney+ sometime in 2022. It’ll be interesting to see if the director can bring the same kind of visionary take to that fantasy tale as he did with “The Green Knight.”

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Here is the official synopsis for “The Green Knight” from A24:

“An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men. Gawain contends with ghosts, giants, thieves, and schemers in what becomes a deeper journey to define his character and prove his worth in the eyes of his family and kingdom by facing the ultimate challenger. From visionary filmmaker David Lowery comes a fresh and bold spin on a classic tale from the knights of the round table.”