EXCLUSIVE TEASERS
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 de
