Director Chad Stahelski recently opened up about his upcoming Highlander reboot and shared some new details about the movie’s plot. He also talked about how he convinced Henry Cavill to join the project.
While a lot of people don’t like it when Hollywood remakes classic movies, there’s a lot of excitement for this one because of the talent involved.
During an interview with The Direct, Stahelski said: “We’re bringing it forward from the early 1500s in the Highlands to the beyond present-day New York and Hong Kong, and seeing how it goes.
“There’s big opportunity for action. There’s a chance to play a character that not a lot of people get to play. And it’s a bit of a love story, but not how you think. On John Wick, I learned a lot on how to bend the storytelling a little.”
As for how he convinced Cavill to star in the film, he explained: “My selling point was, to [Cavill], look, you’ve got a guy that’s been alive for over 500 years. He’s the last person in the world that wanted to be in this situation.
“So you get to cover quite a broad spread of a character arc there. And you get to experience someone that’s trained over 500 years and sort of played [with many types of] martial arts.”
Yeah, I’d sign up for the project too! That sounds like an incredibly cool character to play! The filmmaker also teased the action in the film and explained that it will be inspired by the action in the John Wick films.
He said: “I’ll keep it to the core. Most audiences, I’ll use the gun analogy, most of what you know about gunfights or car chases because most of us don’t get involved in gun fights, or car chases, or sword fights, we learn through movies.
“And what those movies show you is about 95% bullshit. You don’t fight 50 guys with your bare hands and then walk away, but it’s fun. It’s wish fulfillment.
“So John Wick, we know it’s a cartoon – I know it’s not – but we also have fun with it. But we do tactical reloads, we try to do fire manipulations, stuff like the professionals do, the military do. But then we have fun with it, you know? Sword work is very much the same.”
Cavill previously shared that the script for the film is “extraordinary” and that the movie will take some “big swings.” He said: “I am a Highlander fan, they’re great fun movies. Obviously I watched them when I was a lot younger and have since rewatched, but also the TV show.
“I really enjoyed the lore behind it, that sense of a tragic warrior with more of a story to tell than a cool guy with a sword, doing cool things, and this goes even deeper into that.
“What they’ve done so far and we’re doing with the development of the script is extraordinary, I think people are going to be really, really pleased.
“Big swings are important, you play it safe, you’re going to just go, ‘Eh, I suppose it’s fine?” but if you take a big swing, people love it or they hate it.”
Stahelski also previously revealed that the movie will include both familiar characters and “elements” taken from the ‘90s TV series.
He said: “We’re looking to do our story [and it] engages a lot of the same characters and stuff like that. But we’ve also brought in elements of all the TV shows. We’re trying to do a bit of a prequel setup to The Gathering.”
The Gathering refers to the culmination of the near-eternal battle among immortals. He went on to explain they are setting this whole thing up to expand and grow the story: “So, we have room to grow the property.”
“We have ideas for days about how to make the coolest characters and to make that an epic TV show. I just think that’s a rich, rich mythology.”
Stahelski also explained: “I think the TV series hit on a lot of great stuff wasn’t in the feature, between the watchers and all the different types of immortals. How do we get this into a feature mode before we dribble it into the TV world?
“Well, let’s restructure it in parts, let’s look at it like it was a TV show, let’s look at it like it was a high-end trilogy. How to we tell the story of The Gathering, The Quickenings, The Immortals and how do we really build this world out even more so than the original project?
“That’s what we’re restructuring right now. It’s taking all the good stuff that we had before I was involved in the project from the script; redeveloping the script to give us really good chapters one, two and three; and expanding the world.”
The original 1986 Highlander movie starred Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, and Clancy Brown as immortal beings, who are hunting down one another and collecting more power. The classic tagline for the film was: “There can be only one.”
He also talked about his vision for the film, saying: “The vision we’re trying to get across and what we’re trying to develop, I equate very close to Star Wars. The first one is a very satisfying ending but it does leave the door open and that’s kind of how I see this.
“I would really like to expand it over three. I see The Gathering happening over three. It’s tricky, don’t get me wrong, that’s why we’re still developing it. We want to be able to tell three complete stories that all kind of fit.
“I think the Star Wars trilogy, at least up to The Empire Strikes Back, is a good example of how we want to process it.”
It was revealed that the film is aiming for a 2026 release date.
