HERE BE DRAGONS

DAMSEL Millie Bobby Brown fights fire with fire in the bedtime story that’s finally being told the right way.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, a beautiful princess was captured by a terrible dragon. Many tried to fight the beast, but it was only the handsome prince who was strong enough to slay the dragon and rescue his new bride. And they all lived happily ever after.

‘I think we’re owed a new fairy tale…’ laughs director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, chatting to Total Film as he puts the last few touches on Damsel – a film that puts a new spin on the same story we’ve been hearing since the Dark Ages. ‘For a very long time, fairy tales attached so much importance to the idea of romance. This isn’t that story,’ he explains. ‘This is a fighter survivor story. A modern story. A dark fantasy adventure story that actually needs to be told – and with some urgency’.

To begin with, Damsel’s princess isn’t captured by the dragon at all: she’s thrown into its lair as a human sacrifice (and it’s the handsome prince that chucks her in…). More importantly though, she’s the one who has to save herself. Millie Bobby Brown is Princess Elodie: betrayed by her own father (Ray Winstone), stepmother (Angela Bassett), queen (Robin Wright) and new husband (Nick Robinson) before being lobbed into a pit to face a terrifying monster.

‘I’ve always been attracted to these kind of folklore stories,’ says Fresnadillo, directing his first feature since 2011’s Intruders and 2007’s 28 Weeks Later. ‘We always have a main character who is suffering some sort of transformation, or learning something that implies a coming of age, and I was obsessed with that ever since I was a young adult. With Damsel, I had the chance to adapt those ideas into a more modern tale, into something much more important.’

Needing a princess who could shoulder the whole film on her own, mostly in the dark, Fresnadillo turned to Brown as his first choice. ‘She was exceptional,’ he says, speaking to the way she approached the film’s brutality, as well as the emotional demands of the tough shoot. ‘She understood that this needed to be an extreme survival experience. And in order to make that believable, you have to convey suffering and pain. This is a movie about a transformation – about a girl becoming a woman – and you need to really feel the intensity of it. We didn’t want to cheat any of that, and that’s why we pushed all the limits to make this a huge roller coaster of an experience for the audience.’

For the cast and crew, that meant real locations, real fire and real water before the Portugal-based shoot moved into an elaborate labyrinth of cave sets that presented even more of a challenge.

‘The caves were a huge problem in terms of light, and in terms of design, because you’re dealing with an environment that’s really tight and dark,’ says Fresnadillo – mentioning Alice In Wonderland as a thematic inspiration, and shrugging off one horrifying scene he chose to light entirely with a flock of flaming sparrows.

‘It’s not always easy to shoot that kind of stuff,’ he says, ‘but it’s a much bigger challenge for Millie to go through almost half of the movie in such a difficult environment. You’re dealing with rocks, hard surfaces, cramped ceilings, fire, water, darkness… If you want to be realistic, which was the goal, you have to really believe it. And that kind of realism implies toughness. And it was absolutely tough for Millie.’

And then there’s the dragon. Keen not to reveal too much about the film’s biggest, scaliest star, Fresnadillo wants Damsel’s dragon to stay in the shadows for now – even though he does want to stress that it’s the best and most original version of the creature we’ve ever seen. ‘We did a lot of literary research to find the right look, but I think our dragon is unique in so many ways,’ he says. ‘The most important thing when you’re designing a monster is to bring through the values of the character. There’s a backstory that affects the dragon’s behaviour and movement, but that also starts with the design. This is a creature that lives in a very specific place. It has to have a sleek, agile figure in order to survive. We wanted something that moved in a very feline way, like a lion. The thinking behind that concept inspired a lot of the film, actually.’

‘This is a movie about a transformation –about a girl becoming a woman – and you need to really feel the intensity of it’

JUAN CARLOS FRESNADILLO

Shooting during the pandemic, staging a huge aerial action scenes with a river of molten lava, and having to convince Ray Winstone to hang upside-down in full medieval battle armour, Fresnadillo had his work cut out on Damsel – but the biggest challenge for him was telling a tale that everyone thinks they already know in a way that felt like it meant something.

‘It’s a special privilege to tell these kinds of stories with an original and unique take, because it lets you create a beautiful bridge to new generations,’ he says. ‘We wanted to make a really exciting, scary, adventurous dark fantasy film that felt meaningful about the position of women in society and in culture in general. If you want to push the limits of the genre, you have to go in different directions and explore places and ideas that have never been explored before. And that’s always going to be a big challenge. But I think it’s time to tell this story properly.’

DAMSEL STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM 8 MARCH.