Nick Hamm knew that any approach to the legend of William Tell would require a new angle. Although many around the world over know the name, thanks to the Gioachino Rossini’s spirited opera about the Swiss marksman who stirred rebellion against Austrian rule that’s overture was adopted for the theme of “The Lone Ranger,” among many other films and TV shows that needed an instant reference to calling in the calvary, or the most repeated part of the lore around him – that he was able to shoot an apple off his son’s head with his crossbow, few knew about his actual life, a task made more difficult when his story was passed along around campfires rather than in textbooks, only put down on paper for the first time two centuries after his exploits and given new life two centuries after that when Friedrich von Schiller wrote the play “Wilhem Tell,” which became a sensation in part because of the apple scene.
Hamm would devote an entire week during the production of his epic retelling “William Tell” futzing over the apple scene, but just as its main character tugs at the strings of his crossbow, the director pulls back to take a sharper view of the circumstances than has been seen before, having made Tell a world-weary soldier whose return from the Crusades has made him loathe to pick up a weapon again and pressed into showing off his skills not to impress but rather as a last resort against tyranny the an Austrian soldier assumes he’ll back down from the challenge when he’s outnumbered. The film set in the 14th century feels refreshingly modern from this opening scene on, even without taking into account the overhead shot of the apple on the boy’s head that simply wouldn’t have been possible even a decade ago as it seamlessly pivots to Claes Bang’s Tell taking aim, and from a tale that’s veracity has been questioned over the years, Hamm finds a striking mirror to our current political reality where the battle-fatigued need to stand up for the greater good when part of the tyranny is to eliminate all hope.
While “William Tell” would project as a Cecil B. DeMille-style extravaganza with a starry ensemble and a sweeping scope, set high up in the Swiss Alps (though Italy’s side of the mountains had to stand in for practical purposes), Hamm adds an unexpected bit of substance to the swordplay when embedding in its DNA a similar ethos as the story it tells where everyone can have a juicy part in building something better as Bang is joined by an international cast that includes Emily Beecham (“Little Joe”), Jonathan Pryce, Jonah Hauer-King (“The Little Mermaid”), Golshifteh Farahani, and a particularly delicious Ben Kingsley as the eye-patch wearing Austrian authoritarian that Tell eventually leads a crew to conquer. The filmmaker, who has long defied easy categorization as a filmmaker when moving from tearjerkers such as his previous film “Gigi & Nate” about a quadriplegic who begins to reengage with the world with the help of a monkey to political dramas such as “The Journey” in which peace in Northern Ireland wasn’t solely negotiated over a bargaining table but during a far more casual car ride there, may be trying his hand at a proper action film for the first time, but each set-piece is made more dynamic by the larger ideas he’s engaging in.
After helping to get the Toronto Film Festival off to a rousing start last fall, the film is making its way into U.S. theaters and recently Hamm generously took the time to talk about why he was moved to write the script for one of his features for the first time in his 35 years behind the camera, finding Tell a uniquely relevant figure to the 21st century and mounting a production in the Alps.
You know what’s strange? I was actually thinking because I’m writing something else now and I was trying to work out whether I always liked to do something based on people [in general] or on people who’s status has become legendary. There’s something in the work, even when you look at William Tell — whether he was a real figure or not a real figure, no one really knows — he was a figure of the culture and I think that’s the same with “The Journey” and with “Driven” and DeLorean. I want to unpack characters from history that you don’t know a lot about, so you get a chance to write them or work on them and imagine them in different ways. But you know Hollywood very well, and what happens to you in this business is very simple. You do one genre very well, and all you get is that genre as a director. So I’ve always changed genres and just keep moving because I’m enjoying the process of working in different genres.
It was surprising to me to see this actually is your first credited script. What led you to put pen to paper in all respects?
I’ve known about this story since I was a theater director years and years ago. I based the story on this play by Friedrich Schiller, a very famous German playwright, the equivalent of Shakespeare, and the story of William Tell has been around for hundreds of years in European history. [Most] know it through the apple on the head, and that scene is the beating heart of the movie, but I thought to myself, what is that scene about and why did it happen? And then I really looked at the Schiller [play] — had it translated, then broke it down, got all the characters and started to work on that scene almost first because it forms the centerpiece of the movie. That scene to me fascinates me because it’s about political terrorism. It’s about a bullying, fascistic, bully culture of repression being exercised in the most gruesome way that you can possibly imagine.
I was fascinated by all this stuff and I wasn’t [initially] going to write it, but all the brilliant [writers] were around or couldn’t write for large, so I just started writing it myself about two, three years ago, and just carried on. And it was interesting because when you’re the writer and the director, you get to be much more organic about the process. During the middle of shooting, you can change stuff, like with Ben Kingsley, I just wrote him more scenes. He was booked for three or four days on the movie, and I saw he was doing brilliant work, so I thought, “Okay, there’s a bit of a narrative that needs extending here,” and if you’re the writer and the director, you can do that.
Could you easily extrapolate all that you did from the original Schiller text? The film is incredibly modern and I imagine some of the contemporary political parallels were there, but how you’re able to bring a variety of different cultures and particularly the role of women into this seems like it might not have been on the page in those times.
It’s a very political play, and I never wanted to shy away from that. The Schiller has parallels because it is about the nature of freedom. What does liberty mean? How does it apply to you? What is it worth fighting for? And he was writing about this at the turn of the 19th century,
but all these questions are so rampant in America right now and across the culture in Europe. As I was writing it, the Ukraine war happened and there was dialogue and episodes from the Schiller that were directly parallel to what was happening in Russia and in Ukraine. Then as we finished shooting it, Gaza blew up and the whole of the Middle East exploded, so you thought to yourself, “My God, there are these war fires everywhere around the world right now, and they’re all about the same issue. And they’re all about exactly what Schiller’s talking about, which is oppression, liberty, human fidelity, and how that works. So it wasn’t difficult to kind of pull that out of the story and get it.
What you’re also right about is that women in the original Schiller were awful. They are an absolute classic definition of what a 19th century man would think that a 14th century woman would do. They’re wives, servants, and milkmaids. And I thought to myself, there’s no way you can put that on screen anymore and actually be interesting and good actresses are never going to play those roles because they want roles now as challenging as the men, and so they should. So I just rewrote them completely and put all of these people into the soup, if you like, and had equality. I wanted the women to be as warrior-like as the men, sometimes more so.
You seemed to cut yourself a great break as a director by broadening the international elements of this and allow yourself such a wide pool of actors to choose from around the world. Was that an exciting opportunity?
Oh my God, this acting lot are a powerful bunch of actors. But someone like Golshifteh [Farahani], for example, is almost the real deal. She lives [abroad] with a bodyguard, so she is actually someone who is living this life where her home country, Iran, has effectively put an awful sentence on her and wants to punish her and she deals with that on a daily basis. So when you bring these actors together, they’re bringing into their own performances their real life situations sometimes, and that’s what’s amazing.
We shot both in the Alps and in the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The town was all built there, but we went up to the Alps to do all of the other work — some of the battles, some of the climbing, the houses, the traveling — because the Alps themselves are such a character in the story. They’re one of the reasons that, as it’s said in the movie, Switzerland has remained neutral because it’s impenetrable. It’s very hard to conquer. You have to really want to get into it because you can’t just walk in. You have to climb over things to get into it. So it was logistically bloody difficult to move 400 people up a mountain. To get horses up there, to get cameras up there, to get lighting up there was in itself a major achievement. But the Italians are brilliant. They were really great and they knew what they were doing.
You also forget about the altitude, and it takes you a while to get used to, but your breath is very short in those places, so it’s a different energy shooting there, but I really needed it because I wanted that to be a character in the movie. I wanted those David Lean vistas to exist and to see that sense of scale and wonderment that you can see there naturally yourself as a viewer and feel that. I’ve often described the film as kind of “Sound of Music” with violence, and I wanted a language [visually where] like that old Kodachrome. What happened in period movies over the last 15 years is everybody’s washed out and everyone says, “Let’s put a blue filter across this. Let’s dilute the color. Let’s get rid of the blacks.” It’s all tonally poor, miserable and horrible. But that’s not the reality. The reality is there’s these incredibly beautiful settings and you have poverty and violence within it. That juxtaposition of the two things is a metaphor for the movie.
Jamie runs a beauty and he’s a really young cameraman coming through who is adventurous about how he’s approaching the material. There’s two qualities in the photography [for this film] — a kind of static, let the action and wide scope of the movie happen and for that, you need people in scale and battles. Then there’s a kind of immediacy, which is handheld and long lens, and it becomes almost the juxtaposition of those two styles. I had a real freedom because you asked what’s it like to shoot in the mountains? You’re holding the camera because you ain’t building track up there. You are not taking cranes up. If you can get a dolly up there, you’re lucky, but it’s the smallest dolly you’re ever going to have, so it was a lot of Steadicam and a lot of handheld.
You’ve made a movie to match the times we’re in. What’s it like to get it out into the world?
That’s what it’s about. Right now, I want all sides to see it. It’s not about individual liberty. It’s about how you organize your family and your world when that is threatened and it is taken away from you. And I think the political parallels now are getting worse. That’s the problem, mate. It’s changed even from when I made the movie and and it’s getting worse around us, certainly in Europe right now, and in America, it’s a different deal, so I hope people see those parallels and they enjoy the movie at the same time.
“William Tell” opens in theaters on April 4th.