I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.
There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
What's wonderful about Into The Woods is that you have a combination of all the most famous fairytales in this one story.
My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince, and a soldier.
The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.
I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology.
I always wanted to be Robin Hood or John the Baptist when I was growing up.
Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon... these were the kinds of characters I was thinking about as I was developing Jonas Quantum because there aren't that many brand new characters being introduced anymore.
Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.
I don't have any specific plans to return to the 'Age of the Five.' If I do, it won't be a sequel.
Without Merlin, there would be no Gandalf, so I see them as the same thing, one a continuation of the other.
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp... Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.
How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?
'The Grace of Kings' was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.
History is filled with fictional people.
