What King Einon should have been like


Some of you might already be familiar with the fact that orginally the script of Dragonheart had much more class and style, but the studio wanted a more funny movie suitable for family entertainment.

The orginal idea came from Patrick Read Johnson who got then the aid of Charles Edward Pogue who was also soon fire and flames for the project. Pogue's book is pretty much close to where they wanted to go with the movie.

There is a nice long interview with Patrick Read Johnson if you care to read it in full, this expert about King Einon came from it:

All this cheesy crap that just juvenilized the picture. They also made another very critical error; the part of Einon was always intended to be a quiet villain. This was a guy who had been given immortality. He knows it, or at least believes it. He's been saved by a dragon; he's blessed, and unstoppable. An unstoppable guy doesn't go around raging, he's supremely confident and quiet. He kills with a whisper, and not with a scream. My idea was Kenneth Branagh, or someone of that ilk.

They made Einon into this character who had nowhere to go. Throughout the whole first act of the movie was just screaming and yelling and throwing things around! He was just being a whiny brat. Where do you go from there? You can't get bigger, and you can't get smaller because the movie is supposed to build. My idea was for him to just be so quiet and you just wouldn't know what he was going to do next.

He had half of a dragon's heart inside of him. And it isn't until you see this dragon return to come for him, and he realizes that if the dragon dies he's dead, that he really begins to panic, and then he starts to go crazy. That's what you want, but you don't start there!

I love David Thewlis. I think he's a phenomenal actor, but from what I understand he didn't want to play the role that way. They also cast this boy to play the very young king with this thick Northern accent and they went and shot the kid's scenes FIRST! Then Thewlis comes along and sees this and says, "What? I've gotta play with this Northern English accent?"

So you basically had this great actor having to ape the work of this young thespian with this accent.


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