Antoine Fuqua Interview 5 by Martyn Palmer Previous Q How does it compare as a film making experience to your other movies? A It was a great experience  but it was tougher physically. The other movies had their own challenges but not like this.  I mean I had guys with swords fighting, thousands of people every day in costume, I had the weather problems and I had horses! And let me tell you, if somebody tells you to do a movie with horses, children and snow, run! You had better love it, man. Q What is it that makes the horses so difficult? A With the horses you never know what they are going to do, they are powerful and unpredictable and basically they're bigger than you so they will do whatever they want to do anyway. If they decide to start kicking and bucking and running around you can't do anything about it, you exchange it for another horse and hope that one is in a good mood. Q Horses and bad weather, that must have been fun.. A (laughs) Tell me about it. And you have the snow! We had the snow all over the place and if they are supposed to be on virgin terrain, I have to re snow it. Or if the sun came out at a certain time it would start to melt or if it starts to rain. So we would spend the day before preparing this whole area, snowing it up and doing this whole thing and then the next day or that night it would rain so we would show up on set and it would just be mud. So you would have to wait, which would take hours and hours, to re snow and then prepare it and then it has to be clean so it has to look like they had never been there before. And this was half the movie, virtually every day! After a while you go into that zone where you are prepared whatever they throw at you, you just get the job done no matter what they stress may be, just get it done. And you know, outside of all the complications and everything, when you step back and look  at the opportunity to make an epic like this, about King Arthur, you just smile and go `bring it on man! What have you got? Let's just do it...' Q I guess making a film on that scale doesn't happen every day so you know you are going to face a lot of challenges... A Absolutely.. And that's what you say to yourself and you realise that this is what film making really is, you have to roll up your sleeves and get in the mud, which I've done before, but you really do on these type of things, you really do. You are in a different world every day, it's the Dark Ages and there's not a lot of jokes about. Except for your actors. Actually those guys kept me alive every day. Ray, Clive, Hugh Dancy, every day they would come to me and they knew what I was dealing with because they are very observant and they would come to me and crack some jokes and play around and play around a little bit. They were great. Q Safety has to be on your mind as much as much as anything else... A Big time. It was scary. I mean you've got all these people, you've got fire everywhere and guys riding horses, sometimes in the rain, all these different elements, and some of them have never done it before and you worry about them falling off and getting trampled by the horse or running someone else over with the horse, people getting hit by the swords, anything like that. Every day was a big concern. But I've got to say the stunt guys on this movie were amazing and I told them that at the end of the movie. Next		Home Interviews Antoine Fuqua Interview King Arthur Interview Arv Grewal Interview Asia Argento Interview Behind the Scenes of "War of the Worlds" Bernie Goldmann Interview Clive Owen Interview Dakota Fanning Interview Dennis Hopper Interview George A Romero Interview Greg Nicotero Interview The Hulk Press Conference Ang Lee Press Conference Ioan Gruffudd Interview John Leguizamo Interview Kathleen Kennedy Interview Keira Knightley Interview