Zack Snyder's All-Time Favorite Film Is an Early Liam Neeson Classic

If you know anything about Zack Snyder, you can probably guess his taste in films runs to the grand and the graphic. And sure enough, his personal favourite is John Boorman's 1981 Arthurian epic, Excalibur—a film that's essentially a fever dream of swords, blood-spattered knights, and some distinctly dodgy medieval goings-on. Think sex, violence, and a style so heightened it could only have come from the eighties. Let’s get into exactly why Snyder’s so obsessed, and while we’re at it, look at how this genre-defining cult classic quietly shaped the careers of some now-familiar faces.

Snyder’s Sword-in-the-Stone Obsession

Excalibur isn’t a fairy tale where everyone rides off into the sunset. No, Boorman’s take on the King Arthur legend draws a clear line from myth to outright nightmare, never shying away from the grubbier aspects—incest, backstabbing, rotting corpses flung about in the mud, you name it. It's a good deal grittier and more grown-up than most sword-and-sorcery fare, even today. Snyder calls it ‘incredibly poignant’ and reckons it’s ‘the perfect meeting between movies and mythology.’ Compare bits of his own work and you can see the influence everywhere, from those wound-up, painterly visuals to scenes of operatic violence ripped straight from Boorman’s playbook.

A Look That Sticks in the Mind

The whole film was shot on location in the Irish countryside. So many scenes are drenched in this atmospheric greenish light (thanks to Boorman slapping gel filters over the cameras) that you could mistake the entire place for some enchanted version of England—or, frankly, another planet. As Cinephilia & Beyond puts it: ‘a luminous, dream-like quality, especially any time the magical blade Excalibur is drawn.’ Lovely stuff, but there’s no hiding from the buckets of fake blood—every emerald vista gets contrasted by combat scenes so explicit they’d give your mum palpitations.

The result: one Oscar nomination for cinematography and, perhaps, the ultimate endorsement from Snyder himself, who says,

‘There are a lot of cool parallels in this film, and the lighting helps establish the two realities [of life and death]. It’s awesome how surreal all this stuff is. This is like the stylised other England you want the Middle Ages to be. It’s as if it takes place in no particular time in history. Like it’s another planet in some ways.’

Sounds Like Wagner

The musical choices are bold ones, too. Although composer Trevor Jones turned in an original score, Boorman made the call to use classical heavyweights Richard Wagner and Carl Orff for the big emotional moments. When Arthur nabs the sword from its stony prison and corrals his knights, the soundtrack blares out with a rather ominous touch: ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’ from Wagner—hardly subtle, but certainly effective. Come the finale, with Arthur calling his battered troops to arms against his own power-mad son Mordred, there’s ‘O Fortuna’ from Orff’s Carmina Burana, which all but insists you get goosebumps whether you like it or not.

Before Westeros Was Cool

Boorman made the fantasy genre ‘serious’ a good three decades before Game of Thrones took over Sunday nights. Snyder singles out Excalibur for refusing to sugar-coat medieval violence—‘It’s violent because that’s what it was like,’ he says, openly comparing it to his own sensibilities in Watchmen. Put simply: people get killed, and it matters. The darkness and high-art visuals became a blueprint for Snyder’s films like 300—he literally borrows the image of a hero hauling himself along a spear to take out his nemesis, nicking the same visual in both 300 and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. You could call that an homage, or just a bit on the nose, but there’s no denying it’s a pretty riveting way to go out.

Excalibur: Cast Roster

• Nigel Terry as Arthur
• Nicol Williamson as Merlin
• Helen Mirren as Morgana
• Ciarán Hinds (early career)
• Patrick Stewart (pre-Star Trek)
• Gabriel Byrne
• Liam Neeson as Sir Gawain
• Robert Addie as Mordred

If some of those names look familiar, that’s because Excalibur was a sort of unofficial launchpad for a lot of them—Liam Neeson, in particular, gives the kind of shouty, bombastic performance you’d expect from someone who would much later threaten kidnappers over the phone. Neeson himself admitted he had barely stepped in front of a camera before Boorman signed him up, but recalls:

‘John [Boorman] was a wonderful mentor… He’d bring us behind the camera and say, "Look. Here’s what I’m seeing…" It was a wonderful experience.’