Legend (1985 film)

There are three different versions of the film’s conclusion:

• In the Director's Cut, Lili wakes with Jack trying to convince her she was merely dreaming, but she is ultimately unconvinced. They confess their true love for each other, but realize they live in two different lifestyles, which causes Lili to request continuing a merely platonic relationship. Jack, happy with this request for the first time, accepts. Lili returns to her home to assume her responsibilities, promising to visit him again. Jack happily runs off into the sunset, hailed by the forest fairies and the revived unicorns.
• In the American theatrical version, Jack and Lili assure each other of their love and watch the unicorns reunite, and they run off into the sunset together, hailed by the forest fairies and the unicorns. Darkness watches them from the void, laughing.[7][8]
• The European version also ends with both Jack and Lili running off into the sunset, but without Darkness's final appearance.

While filming The Duellists in France, Ridley Scott conceived Legend after another planned project, Tristan and Isolde, fell through temporarily.[2] However, he believed that it would be an art film with limited audience appeal and went on to make Alien and did pre-production work on Dune, another halted project, which was eventually finished by director David Lynch. Frustrated, he came back to the idea of filming a fairy tale or mythological story.

For inspiration, Scott read all the classic fairy tales, including ones by the Brothers Grimm.[2] From that, he conceived a story about a young hermit who is transformed into a hero when he battles the Darkness in order to rescue a beautiful princess and release the world from a wintery curse.[12]

Scott wanted Legend to have an original screenplay because he believed that "it was far easier to design a story to fit the medium of cinema than bend the medium for an established story".[2] By chance, he discovered several books written by American novelist William Hjortsberg, and found that the writer had already written several scripts for some unmade lower-budgeted films. Scott asked him if he was interested in writing a fairy tale. He was already writing some and agreed.[12] Scott remembers, "The first notion was to actually make a classical fairy story, but if you actually analyze a classical fairy story, most are either very short, or very complex".[13] The two men bonded over Jean Cocteau's 1946 film of Beauty and the Beast. In January 1981, just before beginning principal photography on Blade Runner, Scott spent five weeks with Hjortsberg working out a rough storyline for what was then called Legend of Darkness.

Originally, Scott "only had the vague notion of something in pursuit of the swiftest steed alive which, of course, was the unicorn".[2] Scott felt that they should have a quest and wanted unicorns as well as magic armor and a sword. Hjortsberg suggested plunging the world into wintery darkness.[12] Hjortsberg's first draft of Legend of Darkness also had Princess Lili slowly transform into a clawed and fur-covered beast who is whipped and sexually seduced by the antagonist (called Baron Couer De Noir in this draft).[14][15] Scott wanted to show the outside world as little as possible and they settled on the clockmaker's cottage.

Initially, the quest was longer, but it was eventually substantially reduced. Scott wanted to avoid too many subplots that departed from the main story and go for a "more contemporary movement rather than get bogged down in too classical a format".[2] By the time Scott had finished Blade Runner, he and Hjortsberg had a script that was "lengthy, hugely expensive, and impractical in its size and scope".[13] They went through it and took out large sections that were secondary to the story. The two men went through 15 script revisions.[12][16]

The look Scott envisioned for Legend was influenced by the style of Disney animation. He had even offered the project to Disney, but they were intimidated by the film's dark tone at a time when Disney still focused on family-friendly material.[2] Visually, he referenced films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Pinocchio.[17] Early on, Scott worked with Alan Lee as a visual consultant who drew some characters and sketched environments. However, Scott eventually replaced Lee with Assheton Gorton, a production designer whom he had wanted for both Alien and Blade Runner. Scott hired Gorton because he knew "all the pitfalls of shooting exteriors on a soundstage. We both knew that whatever we did would never look absolutely real, but would very quickly gain its own reality and dispense with any feeling of theatricality".[17]

Scott also consulted with effects expert Richard Edlund because the director did not want to limit major character roles to the number of smaller people who could act.[17] At one point, the director considered Mickey Rooney to play one of the major characters but he did not look small enough next to Tom Cruise. Edlund considered shooting on 70 mm film stock, taking the negative, and reducing the actors to any size they wanted—but this was deemed too expensive. Thus, Scott was tasked with finding an ensemble of small actors.[17] Legend would be financed with a budget of $24.5 million,[2] and would be distributed by Universal Pictures in North America and by 20th Century Fox in all other territories.[18]

Scott was inspired by the Sequoias of Yosemite National Park

In order to achieve the look of Legend that he wanted, Scott scouted locations in the Sequoias of Yosemite National Park to see the grand scale of trees there. "The whole environment is so stunning ... It was so impressive, but I didn't know how you would control it".[13] However, it would cost too much to shoot on location and he decided to build a forest set on the 007 Stage, named after and used for many James Bond films, at Pinewood Studios. The crew spent 14 weeks constructing the forest set, and Scott was worried that it would not look real enough. It was only days before the start of principal photography that it looked good enough to film. The trees were 60 feet high with trunks 30 feet in diameter and were sculpted out of polystyrene built onto tubular scaffolding frames.[13] In addition, other sets were constructed on five huge soundstages.[12]

Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey and Robert Downey Jr. were considered for the role of Jack. While Scott was considering Richard O'Brien to play Meg Mucklebones, he watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and saw Tim Curry. He thought the actor would be ideal to play Darkness because the actor had film and theatrical experience. Tim Curry's makeup as Darkness in Legend is considered to be one of the most iconic images in all of fantasy cinema.[19] Scott discovered Mia Sara in a casting session and was impressed by her "good theatrical instincts".[20]

Scott contacted Rob Bottin, who designed the special makeup effects for The Howling, about working on Blade Runner, but Bottin was already committed to John Carpenter's The Thing.[21] Scott told him about Legend, and toward the end of production on The Thing, Bottin read a script for the film and saw an excellent opportunity to create characters in starring roles.

After wrapping his work with Carpenter, Bottin met with Scott to reduce the thousands of creatures suggested by the script to a manageable quantity. The process would involve complicated prosthetic makeup that would be worn for up to 60 days with some full body prosthetics.[21] According to Bottin, at the time, Legend had the largest makeup crew ever dedicated to one project. Bottin divided his facility into different shops in order to cover the immense workload. As actors were cast, Bottin and his crew began making life casts and designed characters on drafting paper laid over sketches of the actors' faces.[21] He designed the prosthetics in his Los Angeles studio and spent some time in England occasionally helping with the application of makeup.[22]

Curry's makeup for the film took five and a half hours to apply.

With the exception of Cruise and Sara, all the principal actors spent hours every morning having extensive makeup applied.[17] Between 8 and 12 prosthetic pieces were applied individually to each face, then made up, molded and grafted into the actor's face so that the prosthetics moved with their muscles.[22] Each person needed three makeup artists working on them for an average time of three and a half hours spent applying prosthetics. Actor Tim Curry took five and a half hours because his entire body was encased in makeup,[17] the film's most challenging character design.[23]

Curry had to wear a large, bull-like structure atop his head with three-foot fiberglass horns supported by a harness underneath the makeup.[24] The initial design of the horns placed a strain on the back of the actor's neck because they extended forward and not straight up but Bottin and his crew eventually reduced the weight of the horns.[24] At the end of the day, he spent an hour in a bath in order to liquefy the soluble spirit gum. At one point, Curry became claustrophobic, got too impatient, and pulled the makeup off too quickly, tearing off his own skin in the process. Scott had to shoot around the actor for a week as a result.[17]

Principal photography began on March 26, 1984 on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios.[2] On June 27, 1984, with ten days filming left on this stage, the entire set burned down during a lunch break. Reportedly, flames from the set fire leapt more than 100 feet into the air and the clouds of smoke could be seen five miles away.[12] It occurred during lunchtime, and no one was hurt.[13] Scott quickly made changes to the shooting schedule and only lost three days moving to another soundstage.[17] Meanwhile, the art department rebuilt the section of the forest set that was needed to complete filming.[12] Due to the fire, the scenes of Lili meeting the unicorns for the first time and finding the cottages in the snow were filmed in the garden of the main house behind Shepperton Studios.[25] The underwater scenes were filmed in Silver Springs, Florida for the "purity" of the water. Cruise did all his own diving and swimming in waters that, according to Scott, had real alligators 25 feet from where they were filming.

Scott's first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes long.[26] He then believed there were minor plot points that could be trimmed and cut the film down to 113 minutes, so he tested this version for an audience in Orange County. However, it was decided that the audience had to work too much to be entertained, and another 20 minutes was cut.[26] The 95-minute version was shown in Great Britain and then the film was cut down even further to 89 minutes for North America.

At the time, Scott said, "European audiences are more sophisticated. They accepted preambles and subtleties whereas the U.S. goes for a much broader stroke."[26] He and Universal delayed the North American theatrical release until 1986 so that they could replace Jerry Goldsmith's score with music by Tangerine Dream, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and Bryan Ferry.[2]

Scott allowed Goldsmith's score to remain on European prints and the composer said, "that this dreamy, bucolic setting is suddenly to be scored by a techno-pop group seems sort of strange to me".[27] Normally, Goldsmith would spend 6–10 weeks on a film score, but for Legend, he spent six months writing songs and dance sequences ahead of time.[27]

In 2000, Universal unearthed an answer print of the 113-minute preview cut with Jerry Goldsmith's score. This print had minor visual anomalies that were eventually digitally replaced, occasionally with finished shots from the 89-minute U.S. version. This edition is Scott's preferred 2002 "Director's Cut", with the restored Jerry Goldsmith soundtracks. The Director's Cut's source is one of only two prints of this extended version known to exist, used for Universal's 2002 DVD (and eventual Blu-ray) "Ultimate Edition."[28]