‘The lances were made of balsa wood and filled with uncooked spaghetti – so that when they broke, there’d be an explosion of what looked like splinters’
I wrote and directed the Mel Gibson film Payback but got fired during post-production. It was my first film as director and I thought my career was over. It was during this downtime that I wrote A Knight’s Tale. I loved the idea that jousting tournaments were medieval sports, but I had never figured out what to do with it. I thought about the ideas underpinning it: a peasant who wants to be a noble was like a screenwriter wanting to be a director. It’s a guy trying to be something he has no right to be.
The studio had a shortlist of actors for William/Sir Ulrich, at the top of which was Paul Walker. I met him but he seemed too contemporary, like a guy who should be driving race cars – which he did so well in The Fast and the Furious. I just thought: “You’re not going to pull this off.” Heath Ledger was a rising star at the time. I met him at a restaurant in LAX airport and he had this long, leather case with him. “What’s in the case?” I asked. He said: “It’s my didgeridoo.” “Can you play it?” I asked. He said: “Of course I can.” And he started wailing on it like a white Australian Miles Davis. Everyone was looking. I fell in love with him in that moment and offered him the part.
