Way back on June 26, 1981, Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions released the original fantasy film Dragonslayer. A rare two-studio co-production, it was directed by Matthew Robbins, who co-wrote the script with Hal Barwood. A dark, epic fantasy starring Peter MacNicol, Sir Ralph Richardson and Caitlin Clarke, Dragonslayer told a story about the decline of magic and the rise of Christianity, and also managed to live up to its name by featuring, arguably, the best live-action representation of a dragon ever committed to screen – Vermithrax Pejorative.
But Dragonslayer’s release was squished in the same month as the much lighter Greek mythology-centric Clash of the Titans and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not surprisingly, it got hammered at the box office because of poor marketing and audiences not quite understanding a PG-rated Disney movie featuring virgin sacrifices, some brief nudity and gore. Like many future classics, Dragonslayer was ahead of its time.
A bit heartbroken at his second directorial effort not landing well, Robbins didn’t really look back at the film after that and moved forward in his career, directing The Legend of Billie Jean, Batteries Not Included and, starting with Mimic, becoming Guillermo del Toro’s frequent screenwriting partner. But in the ensuing four decades, Dragonslayer grew to be a stealth influencer amongst filmmakers and writers including del Toro, George R.R. Martin and even the dragon designers on Game of Thrones. It’s also the film that pushed forward the art and technology of VFX into the era of computers, as Dragonslayer was Industrial Light & Magic’s first non-Star Wars project and utilized visual effects legend Phil Tippett’s Go Motion process to move Vermithrax in frame.
With Dragonslayer now available in a brand-new, restored 4K and Blu-ray release from Paramount, Matthew Robbins, Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett reminisce with IGN about the trials and tribulations of bringing Dragonslayer to life – and its surprising legacy.
Making the Dragon Vermithrax Pejorative
The new Dragonslayer special features detail the challenges Robbins faced making the movie, which was filmed on location in England at Pinewood Studios and in Wales and the Isle of Wight. “We climbed all these mountains to get this thing done,” he remembers. “It was only my second feature and it was a very, very steep learning curve.”
In the feature-length commentary, Robbins is joined by del Toro who waxes poetic about many aspects of Dragonslayer that influenced his choices with his own film Pan’s Labyrinth. Robbins says it was humbling to hear del Toro’s take on the handcrafted elements of the film, but he still remembers the toll it took to get to the finished film.
“I appreciate exactly what he’s talking about, but the truth is that the most difficult passages in that movie, bringing that creature to life, was the fact that it was largely impossible,” he says with candor. “We had various [built] sizes of the dragons. We had full scale pieces that were built by Disney, sent to Pinewood Studios in England. But they were almost unusable.
“They were huge, heavy, clunky and inoperable,” Robbins laments. “I had carefully drawn all these things I was going to do with them. I will never forget them saying, ‘Oh, we’re really sorry Mr. Robbins, but the tail… I know you wanted it to curl and bring her back into shot but we can’t do it. The cable is going to show.’ I said, ‘I thought there was a hydraulic that you would pull?’ ‘Well, it didn’t really work out.’ Here we are shooting and there’s 120 people waiting and looking at me. I felt like I was Steven Spielberg in The Fablemans with a video camera. I couldn’t believe a movie of this size would be left in a predicament like that. The flop sweat that day – I will never forget that.”
As such, Robbins had to do many last minute tricks with the dragon parts to pull off key scenes, like the human sacrifices. And that meant he had to lean even harder on ILM. Dennis Muren was supervisor of special visual effects on Dragonslayer and he remembers being tickled by the array of creative challenges asked of their team. “There were so many different types of effects to do. And that movie was one that allowed a lot of things to be more precise,” he explains. “And it let Phil, or the animators, put what they had in their head more on the screen, but with a lot of constraints. It was really neat doing that.”
It was really a pain in the ass to do. People out there still regard it as, some say, the best dragon ever.
Phil Tippett counters, “It was really a pain in the ass to do. People out there still regard it as, some say, the best dragon ever.”
He expands by saying Vermithrax Pejorative was his opportunity to further test the “finicky” technique of Go Motion, which is stop-motion animation which incorporates motion blur. He first tried it with the tauntaun in The Empire Strikes Back.
“Stop-motion animators had been trying to put blurs on things since Ladislas Starevich and they didn’t look so good,” Tippett explains. “Some people tried to paint blurs with vaseline on glass and nothing really worked that well. On Empire, we hooked up the tauntaun and it was just one axis. Ken Ralston and I shot a test in one afternoon and we got it back and it was like, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what we expected to see.’ It was like, ‘Okay, there’s the future.’”
On Dragonslayer, the Go Motion Vermithrax team included Stuart Ziff, who was the overall creative engineer, Gary Leo and Bess Wiley as the assistant camera. Tippett explains that with traditional stop-motion, animators are sculpting in space and in time, doing all the manipulations. “It’s just like a moving sculpture,” he says. “With [Go Motion], I had to break everything down into axes, so I had to have a really strong conceptual image in my mind of what the movement needed to be. The first thing we would do is move the body, and then move it back, then have one leg raise, and then run it back. I’d do that to all the legs, for every movement.
“It required really rethinking the animation process,” he continues. “But what you can do very easily is change the speed on it. We had one of the very first, little tiny Mac computers attached to something like 16 stopper motors. And the way that the stepper motors work is they have pulses that go out. And so Bess figured out what the relationship was between the pulses and the frames. When I’m animating the thing, it’s happening in real time. You would count out 6, 12, 18, 24 so I knew where I was in time, I could see where I was in space. And that’s how we did it.”
In its still rudimentary form, Go Motion would become the bridge to some of the seminal VFX films of all time, including titles Tippett worked on. “It was a precursor to [computer VFX],” Tippett says. “And it really helped me once I was on Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers because I was very secure in my visualization of how things should be.”
Of the finished sequences on Dragonslayer, Tippett says, “It worked so we were all very happy with the results.”
Dragonslayer was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards. They lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but winner Richard Edlund to this day says, “Dragonslayer probably should have won Best Visual Effects.”
Tippett was disappointed by the loss, but something wonderful did come of it. “When we lost, we were there at the Academy. I was pissed off and I went up to get a drink,” he shares.”I was going to the bar and this older, tall gentleman came to the bar at the same time. And he said, ‘After you…’ and it was Gregory Peck.”
The Magic of Second Chances
Some films that initially “flop” at release take the long road, eventually finding their audience and creators of note who champion a title as a hidden gem. But Matthew Robbins says Dragonslayer never really got there in his eyes.
“We were passed off to a group of people we didn’t know at the studio, who were entirely devoted to Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the director remembers about the initial theatrical marketing. “I didn’t understand it at the time, but we didn’t really have a chance. Paramount had the U.S. and Canada, and Disney had the rest of the world, so Disney took their lead. The film didn’t perform at the box office. And so on that level, I didn’t take a lot of pleasure in thinking about it as it was better to move on, think about other things and take on other projects and have more adventures. Dragonslayer played a very background role in my life. I was happy I made the movie. Many, many parts of that experience was a very formative thing. But I was totally unprepared for the fact that it would ever see the light of day in a form that I wouldn’t have to apologize for.”
As he continued his Hollywood career, Robbins says the only effusive response about Dragonslayer that made it to his ears was from Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson. “I met del Toro in Guadalajara at a workshop,” he says. “The Sundance Institute sent a few of us down there and he was a passionate Dragonslayer fan. That was very gratifying and was the basis of when we became friends and then colleagues over the years.”
And there was a screening of the first Lord of the Rings movie at ILM, where Robbins met Peter Jackson.
“There was a big mob in the lobby afterwards, and I got to speak to him for like, all of 30 seconds. I introduced myself and he said, ‘Oh, Dragonslayer? Great dragon! Great dragon!’ But that was it,” Robbins laughs.
From that, Robbins says it’s only been in the last few months with the restoration and 4K release that any more chatter of note about Dragonslayer has reached him. He says the prior videotape and DVD transfers were so bad that he was often embarrassed to even accept screening invites from festivals and workshops. “I would go to the Q&A afterwards but then apologize for what they had just seen because of the matte lines and the garbage mattes which were terrible. It was so painful. The truth is, I never anticipated anything like the seminal role the film would play in terms of design, or in terms of the warped imaginations of all the fans who have come to embrace it some years later,” he chuckles.
Robbins says he only heard about the restoration of Dragonslayer when he got a call from the Paramount restoration team. “I was astonished,” he remembers. “They invited me to take part and I leapt at it. I found out that the core group of these artists and technicians who were in charge of the video and audio restoration were devotees of the movie, and had agitated for it to happen. They had been doing other films happily in the Paramount library. But they were waiting on when they were going to pull the trigger to do Dragonslayer. When they got the green light, that’s when they contacted me.”
He reiterates, “I was very rarely asked about it. And then I heard the sales of these DVDs turned out to be remarkable with the pre-orders. I still find it almost unbelievable. Is this really happening?”
In fact, Robbins says his first real rewatch of the film was on the huge restoration monitors with the technicians. “When I saw what they were doing. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what a beautiful location. What a beautiful matte painting!’ I was really gobsmacked at the elegance. And then the sound of it.”
With fresh eyes and ears, Robbin says, “I was proud of it because I had been out of touch with it for so long. It reminded me that whenever it was operating at its best, it was a very classy, very accomplished film. And I thought some of the work with the actors was good. It was an interesting story. It had a lot of odd [things] like this whole gender thing that [Caitlin Clarke’s character Valerian] goes through; I was very proud of that. It’s a very odd experience, because it’s been over 40 years. [At the time], Sir Ralph was this doddering senior. Well, I’m 79… the exact age he was! There’s a lot of Through the Looking Glass/Lewis Carroll stuff going on here.”
Dragonslayer’s Legacy
With Dragonslayer finally restored to its release quality, ready to be seen and appreciated by a new generation, Robbins says he’s been able to assess the piece with new appreciation too.
“I bank a lot as a screenwriter on my work with Hal and on the fact that we had set up a dramatic situation with pretty vivid characters,” he says of his co-writer on the Dragonslayer script. “The issue of special effects was not seen in the same context of these big CG movies now where it’s almost all about their effects. The thematic elements are very much front and center for me. This was a human story with a lot of human drama going on. There’s a lot of sociology and the mythology of the disappearance of magic from the world with the rise of Christianity at the same time. I was challenging ILM, sometimes maybe excessively. But they loved that. We pulled it off. I was always proud of that.”
