Having directed psychological thrillers (2001’s “The Hole,” which gave Keira Knightley her first major role), music comedies (2011’s “Killing Bono”) and comedy-thrillers based around the famed DeLorean car (2018’s “Driven”), Northern Irish director Nick Hamm has ventured into entirely different territories for his next feature.
“William Tell” is a historical action epic that turns the clock back more than 600 years, delving into the folk story of the Swiss hero who, according to legend, helped liberate Switzerland from the tyrannical rule of Austria’s House of Habsburg. For those with only a loose knowledge of 14th century European history, Tell is most famous for being an expert crossbowman who somehow managed to shoot an apple off the head of his son (and, crucially, without hitting him).
Led by Claes Bang in the lead role and with an all-star cast including Golshifteh Farahani, Connor Swindells, Ellie Bamber and Ben Kingsley (as an evil, eyepatch-wearing Austrian king), Hamm’s $40 million retelling of the tale explores both the famed apple shot, the precursor to it and the aftermath, with plenty of bloody sword fights, crossbow bolts in heads and flying limbs.
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Altitude is releasing “William Tell” in U.K. cinemas on Friday, with Samuel Goldwyn looking at a date in March for the U.S. release. As the film hits British theaters, Hamm discusses separating fact from fable and why he chose Bang — best known recently for playing a series of on-screen baddies — for his hero.
Given your previous types of movies, “William Tell” feels very different. What was it that drew you to this?
It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time. I spent a long time in the theater in my 20s working as a director, and was always aware of this story of William Tell by Schiller. He’s the equivalent of the German Shakespeare, a 19th century contemporary of Goethe. And the play is almost un-performable compared to a normal play, because it’s like an opera libretto. But I was constantly thinking: why has nobody done it? All the European legends get taken by Hollywood. Everything that we have gets redone by the Americans, when actually they’re our stories. And these stories have a durability which outlasts all of us.
So, in this case, you’ve got a story which is set in the early 14th century, written as a play by a man in the 1800s and put into cinemas in the 21st century. And as I started to adapt the story, I realized that it was incredibly prescient, because what Schiller wrote about is the whole notion of political liberty, how you define it, how you can keep it, what happens when you lose it, and the cost of achieving it. When I was writing it, the war in Ukraine had just erupted. And then as I was finishing it, Gaza blew up. It was really remarkable thinking that the issues that they were dealing hundreds of years ago are the same issues that we’re still fucking facing.
The story of the apple is obviously the one everyone knows. But how much of it do we know actually happened? Has the whole tale of William Tell been through several rounds of creative embellishments over the centuries?
I think the actual historical accuracy of whether something like that happened, no one knows. It’s a legend. Has something like that happened in history over time? Definitely. There is actually a story that he was a Danish character. Essentially, at that point, Switzerland was kind of on the trade route from northern Scandinavia down to Italy and Milan, which was the main thoroughfare through Europe. So they all traveled and told stories. And they would all end up in bars in valleys in Switzerland and would get drunk and would tell stories. So did he actually do that? No one actually knows, and when you talk to the Swiss about it, they don’t know either. But the Habsburgs did begin their reign of 500 years during this time, and the Austrians were an authoritarian power that tried to dominate the rest of Europe.
What brought you to casting Claes Bang as Tell?
For that part, I couldn’t write a young Tell. I didn’t want a 27-year-old swinging around like Robin Hood. I needed someone who could play damaged, and could also be silent on screen while having a brutal presence. And he needed to sit in scenes where he doesn’t dominate the actual action of the scene, but he’s put upon and then has to act. There’s very few actors who can do that. And from Claes’ point of view, he wanted to play a good person after “Bad Sisters” and “The Northman.” He told me that he’d played so many baddies that when he walks down the street in the U.K. women hate him on sight, mostly thanks to Sharon Horgan.
Did you always set out to make it this bloody and brutal?
I think when you work in the genre of princes and princesses and castles and swords and sandals, audiences are ahead of you in terms of what their expectations are. And I just wanted to have a certain reality to what I imagined would be the situation. I couldn’t sugar-coat it. But I also wanted to juxtapose that reality against the kind of bucolic beauty. So the relationship I got with the cameraman was “Sound of Music” with violence.