Let “The Green Knight” Director David Lowery Take You Through A Haunting Scene

August 2, 2021

Writer/director David Lowery is here to walk you through a scene in his ravishing, critically acclaimed The Green Knight thanks to a new “Anatomy of Scene” video from the New York Times. If you’re a reader of The Credits, then you know we’ve been tracking Lowery’s film since we first heard about it last year (it was, like so many other releases, delayed due to the pandemic). Lowery adapted his script from a 14th-century poem, which follows the dangerous quest of Gawain (played by Dev Patel), a would-be knight in King Arthur’s court who takes on a deadly challenge from the titular Green Knight. In the Times video, Lowery walks us through a scene in which Gawain stops at what he believes to be an abandoned cottage to rest, only to discover it’s home to a spirit named Saint Winifred (played by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s Erin Kellyman).

Lowery also explains his inspirations for the film, which travel far afield from the original poem and include Hammer horror films (made by the British production company Hammer Films), and, incredibly, a scene from Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure that terrified him as a child.

Saint Winifred is a character in Welsh history and Catholic lore, “a martyr from the 7th century who was decapitated by her suitor when she decided to become a nun, and her head was thrown into a spring, but later a saint came and took her head from the spring and rejoined it to her body and she came back to life,” Lowery explains.

Such is the wonder of The Green Knight that it can meld Welsh and Catholic lore, Arthurian poems, British horror films, and, yes, Ewoks, all to spectacular, haunting effect. Check out the video below. The Green Knight is in theaters now.