"Your Highness" Director David Gordon Green's 10 Favorite Fantasy Movies

David Gordon Green’s filmography can’t be stuffed into one genre. The critically acclaimed auteur has written and directed films about youngsters hiding a dead body (George Washington), small-town romance (All The Real Girls), depression leading to suicide (Snow Angels), and, yes, even a stoner action-comedy (Pineapple Express).

So what’s the next logical step? An R-rated sword-and-sorcery romp, naturally. This Friday, Your Highness, Green’s collaboration with longtime friend Danny McBride, hits theaters, complete with scenes centered upon CGI wizards requesting handjobs and a dude wearing a Minotaur penis as a necklace. McBride and James Franco star as sibling princes on a quest to rescue Franco’s fiancé (Zooey Deschanel) from an evil wizard (Justin Theroux) who wants to have sex with her and birth a dragon. It’s a far cry from Green’s independent and serious George Washington days.

For the fun-loving director, the subversive and dirty comedy is an exercise in self-indulgence without any pretension. “Your Highness comes from my childhood,” says Green. “Danny [McBride] and I just had this common obsession when we were kids of watching these movies, so it’s just us getting the opportunity to be 11-years-old, but instead of cardboard swords in the backyard, we’re getting to pull it off at a pretty crazy level. I think our whole careers, Danny and I, are really just us trying to make the 10-year-old, youthful versions of ourselves proud.”

Always down to watch some mythical creatures and fantastical adventure, we asked Green to run through his 10 favorite fantasy movies, the films that he loved as a kid and most inspired Your Highness.

Director: Jim Henson and Frank Oz

David Gordon Green says: One of our wizard characters in Your Highness is a puppet, and for that we looked heavily at The Dark Crystal. That’s a movie that used to scare the shit out of me; it was really creepy and gave me tons of nightmares, and I really liked that, strangely enough. [Laughs.]



They tried to present a world that wasn’t just necessarily fantastical and full of magic, but also grim and Gothic. With Your Highness, we were making a comedy movie, and the goal was definitely to make an adventure movie that people will laugh their asses off while watching, but we did want to make sure that we covered a lot of creative ground. A lot of that was in the creatures and the more magical elements of the movie, so The Dark Crystal was a movie we looked at a lot. I’ve always loved it.

Director: Jim Henson

David Gordon Green says: Labyrinth is an easy one that sort of became influential to us, because we talked so much about it and worked with a lot of designers who were very influenced by it. We wanted that same hands-on world. We have a labyrinth sequence and we have puppets and people in suits. We tried to have somewhat of that Jim Henson workshop feel to Your Highness, but we also tried to have that innocence, beauty, and dreamlike nature of Labyrinth that I’ve always really been affected by; I’ve always thought that was kind of cool.



There’s the strange David Bowie character that keeps popping up, and we really wanted to have an over-the-top villain like that in our movie. At one point, we actually talked about how awesome it’d be if we could get David Bowie to be the villain in the movie. But, at the same time, we did still emulate that rock star quality for the bad guy in our film.

Director: Richard Donner

David Gordon Green says: Ladyhawke was a little bit more of a classier version of this kind of movie. It’s weird, because you watch it and Matthew Broderick’s accent goes in and out, so that’s one that helped us decide to have all of our actors in Your Highness should shoot for British accents. [Laughs.] Or at least semi-British accents; maybe I don’t want to be insulting enough to say that they’re exactly British accents, but it’s an affected Middle Earth kind of way of speaking that’s a little bit more of an elegant high-speak. That comes from watching Matthew Broderick pull off what he did in Ladyhawke.



Ladyhawke felt grounded, but it also had all these magical elements; it felt elegant yet it had these absurdities in it. When we were designing Your Highness, we wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a spoof, that it was an adventure movie, so it was nice to see a movie that had ambition in what it was doing. Ladyhawke wasn’t just based off a movie poster; it really tried to add storytelling and performance, and we really tried to capitalize on that sort of approach.

Director: Antonio Margheriti

David Gordon Green says: Yor, The Hunter From The Future was kind of this mish-mash between science fiction and barbarian exploitation movies. It’s got dinosaurs and pterodactyls and shit in it, and cavemen—it’s just a little bit of everything. But it’s got these really cheesy creature effects that I’ve always liked.

Director: Peter Yates

David Gordon Green says: To me, Krull is a “sword and sorcery” movie. It does kind of blur the line between science fiction, which I like a lot, actually. We have this actor Toby Jones in Your Highness, and his father, Freddie Jones, was the “seer” in Krull, and that’s pretty cool.



I think Krull was trying to be the next Star Wars type of francise, with this big budget, and it didn’t necessarily turn into that. But it did turn into a big cult movie and a movie I watched a lot as a kid, because that was one that was constantly on television, so I got to know Krull really well as a kid.



There are a lot of things from Krull, like the two moons or a woman stolen at a wedding, that we make some pretty liberal salutes and homages to in Your Highness. That’s one of the biggest influences. There’s also a Cyclops character in our movie, like in Krull; we have a beheading of a Cyclops, in a kind of nod to Krull.

Director: Terry Marcel

David Gordon Green says: I wasn’t super familiar with Hawk The Slayer as a kid, though I knew of it. But then I watched it once I was older and it became a very influential movie. It’s just great to see movies of that time and type that got a little bit dirty.



I would categorize this and the Deathstalker movies in the same low-budget, almost like sword-and-sorcery exploitation. Deathstalker II has one of the hottest nude chicks I’ve ever seen in a movie. [Laughs.] I forget who it is, but she’s incredible.



The Deathstalker movies and Hawk The Slayer are cool because they take themselves very seriously but you can tell that they were trying to maximize a five-dollar movie and make it look like ten dollars. I really admire that kind of ambition from the late ’70s and early ’80s, when Roger Corman would literally design movies based on just the poster and a title. If you could come up with a poster that had a girl with great cleavage and a guy with huge muscles swinging a sword and some sort of Boris Vallejo-type artwork, you could sell your movie on that and play it at a drive-in.

Director: Albert Pyun

David Gordon Green says: I actually got in trouble over this one; The Sword And The Sorcerer was pretty harsh, violent, and vulgar. That was definitely a big influence on Your Highness. There are a lot of parallels; The Sword And The Sorcerer is a movie that we made everyone watch before we started shooting. There are some pretty badass things going on in that movie.



Your Highness actually felt a lot more like The Sword And The Sorcerer in an earlier draft of the script. There’s a sword in The Sword And The Sorcerer that’s this three-bladed sword, and one of the blades can launch and you can shoot your blade at people. So we had this thing called the “Hoop of Doom”; it was somewhere in between that and the blade from Krull. We ended up lessening that and coming up with the “Blade of Unicorn,” which people will see in Your Highness, and which is our spectacular weapon of choice.



Also, in The Sword And The Sorcerer, the heroes get laid, and it gets a little rowdier than your typical, more mainstream movie of the time.

Director: Ralph Bakshi

David Gordon Green says: Frank Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi collaborated on this, and it actually had a lot of similar elements to Your Highness, in particular with the opening of the movie. It’s got a narrator that kind of sets up a world that’s seen through some spectacular but natural occurrence. I think it’s a big avalanche, or a big glacier has just sent everybody to live underground.



Obviously it was animated because they couldn’t afford to make it. This came after they animated The Hobbit, and I think they were trying to capitalize on that, and there’s a little bit of Heavy Metal. Ralph Bakshi was doing some pretty weird shit at that time.



It’s got a badass soundtrack, and the animation is definitely rotoscope, and looks a lot like the G.I. Joe cartoon, which is something I really like. So, as far as the animation quality, it depends on what you think is good; I’d rather watch that than Hop. [Laughs.] But whatever.



Fire And Ice is one that I could convince people to let me see [as a kid], even though it had tits and creatures and violence in it. Since it was a cartoon, people thought it wasn’t a big deal, so I got away with that one.

Director: Richard Fleischer

David Gordon Green says: This one doesn’t have as much class, I don’t think, but I liked it a lot because I wasn’t allowed to see it and I snuck my way into watching it. There was something a little bit more supernatural about that one than the first one [1982's Conan The Barbarian], and it had hotter girls. It was more violent.



That movie really hit on a lot of taboos. My parents were really strict about movies, so I had to sneak over to my friends’ houses and watch them or catch them late at night on cable or whatever I could do to get into that. It was a pretty disturbing and intense movie for a young kid to watch.



We looked at that a good bit for some of the character designs and the attitude in Your Highness. It was something we referenced to a lot of the actors. The cast was familiar with it enough, and then we had to show it to them so they could really experience it. Everyone has a concept of what it is in their heads, based off the title alone, but I think it’s a pretty different experience 25 or so years later.

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

David Gordon Green says: This is one that I was really affected by as a kid; I saw it when I was in the fourth grade. It was the first movie that I ever saw on opening day, and it was a movie that I was really excited about. That hit me on a lot of creative levels. The kids were my age; I could identify with the characters in the movie.



I was always big into Star Wars and Indiana Jones and those kinds of movies, but The NeverEnding Story was the first movie, I think, where I had this weird, fantastic identification. It wasn’t just this king and a prince and a dude swinging swords—it was from a kid’s point-of-view. Barret Oliver’s character in the beginning, down to Atreyu, the warrior who fights through The Nothing—all of that stuff really appealed to me.



It was a German movie, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, so it was kind of low-rent, but still a very passionate and thoroughly executed fantasy movie, and I really like that one.