Original subtitles

Yah!

Highlander is one of a kind,

a strange and arousing fantasy epic

about immortality and sword fights.

Rediscovered again and again since its release in 1986,

it has the soul of a true cult classic.

I think that Highlander lives up to the status

of being a cult classic because it is...

I mean, it's very much in the eye of the beholder with these films,

but it is about enjoyment.

It's about the kind of thing that you get from having home video,

versus in a cinema, where you can watch something with friends

and laugh about little things,

and it doesn't take away from your enjoyment of the film.

It doesn't mean that you're completely not taking the film seriously.

Something happened to Highlander that actually made people

who'd actually seen it in the cinema and perhaps dismissed it,

suddenly want to reassess it

because the cult was growing fairly steadily.

So how would you say Highlander lives up to its billing

as a true cult classic?

I think a true cult film has to be...

they will never, ever, ever become truly mainstream,

and they mustn't because they must be loved by those who love it.

This thing we love, this thing that is ours,

that we cherish and nurture,

and we will pass it very carefully on to select people

but we can't let everybody into this.

It needs to have its secrecy.

The plot tumbles back and forth in time,

from contemporary New York, to 16th-century Scotland.

The tale of deathless warriors who must fight one another

until only one remains to receive a magical gift from the universe.

There is only one way these living gods can perish -

by losing their head.

Now!

Get out! No!

Help! Help!

Help!

Help!

Help me, I'm drowning!

You can't drown, you fool! You're immortal!

I'm drowning!

You cannot die, MacLeod.

Accept it.

I hate you. Good.

That is a perfect way to start.

The enigmatic French actor Christopher Lambert

stars as Connor MacLeod,

the Highland clansman who learns he will never grow old,

while an ebullient Sean Connery almost steals the show

as his mentor Ramirez.

Few films can boast a Frenchman playing a Scot,

and a Scot playing a Spaniard who is actually an ancient Egyptian.

The following around Highlander, which came out in 1986,

has only grown over the decades.

It was one of the early VHS sensations

and has kind of gained this cult status

where people rewatch the movie again and again,

they quote it at length, they know all the dialogue.

And you know, I think there's like a sense

of older people who are fans of it

then introducing it to a younger generation, like,

"You've never seen Highlander? It's so much fun."

I remember it at the time when it came out,

and it got very badly reviewed.

I probably reviewed it not very well myself,

but at the same time, there are elements in it

that are very praiseworthy, you know,

and it has great people in it.

It just didn't seem to sort of come together as a film.

However, over a period of time,

people have basically started to see different things in it.

They have been viewing it with different eyes,

to the point where it has become a very successful cult movie

and in fact, changed people's minds.

Add to the exotic mix... hyperactive action,

a set of songs by the ever-enthusiastic Queen,

and Clancy Brown playing an ice-cold Barbarian known as The Kurgan,

whose blade is almost as tall as he is.

At last... the gathering.

Hi. I'm Candy.

Of course you are.

For better or for worse,

the myth of the Highlander is never really fully explored in the film.

This is a film which has heard of the concept of exposition,

but decided to abandon it completely.

There is no... We're not told why these immortals exist,

and we're not told why they're fighting for this prize.

What we do is we accept this concept as just being there.

It's a little bit, if you like...

fairies, you know, running alongside us.

This community of people who live amongst human beings

and aren't of them.

And the final goal is really

the fate of humanity is in the balance.

These people are fighting. There is a good side and a bad side.

If the bad side win the prize,

then we will fall under the dominion

of this absolutely just outrageous character called The Kurgan,

who is just terrifying,

or we could fall under the aegis

of the decent, strangely-accented Highlander.

And that's sort of...

They are fighting for our souls, but we don't know that.

This is a blockbuster fuelled by anachronism.

Where else would you see a duel to the death in a Manhattan car park?

It's a film about a man who is ostensibly an antiques dealer

living in '80s New York,

who we learn, through a series of flashbacks,

that his real identity is that he is a warrior

who is set on a mission to fight other immortal warriors

and to sort of battle for the future of the Earth.

There is going to be a time at some stage in the future,

according to the mythology of their kind,

that they will have to reduce their numbers down to one.

That one will be the sort of master of the universe.

But in order to do so, they have to, over the centuries,

basically eliminate their competitors.

It's almost in the nature of a kind of mythical game.

And it has, of course, you know,

certain undertones of seeking nirvana.

I mean, you know, once you're down to one, it becomes,

and you are all knowing, whenever you kill an opponent -

and the only way to do that is to decapitate them -

you absorb their power

through something which is kind of lightning that comes out...

It's almost like the soul of the person who's dead pours into them,

which increases the power of the victor.

The concept of Highlander is, there is a young Scottish...

well, he's not quite a warrior,

because the clans don't go to war full time,

but he's about to go into his first battle.

And this is 16th-century Scotland? 16th-century Scotland. Kilts and claymores and so forth.

And he's marching out of the castle with his clan,

off to the first battle, and they're asking if he's scared.

He goes into battle and no-one will fight him,

and he can't work out why this is until he discovers

that there is a knight who is after just him.

This turns out to be the baddie of the piece.

The Kurgan. Yes.

And the...

So when he's stabbed, but not beheaded -

and this is the critical part about the Highlander -

the immortal characters in Highlander,

have to be beheaded to die, otherwise they cannot die.

So he is stabbed but not beheaded, gets better,

and everyone in the town says, "This is a bit spooky, you're"-

The devil's work. Clearly the devil's work.

And they hurled him out of town.

And he is then visited by Sean Connery,

who plays a Spaniard who's really Egyptian,

who then educates him.

And what he says is all across this world

there are immortals just like you and me,

who have to wander the world fighting each other,

cutting off each other's heads,

until there comes a time, the end,

and then we gather together at an unspecified location

and there will be only one.

Only one of us will survive

and that will be the determining point in this story.

Directed by the Australian, Russell Mulcahy,

it is a film of contrasting locations and contrasting styles.

New York is enveloped in a neo-noir cool.

The breathtaking Scottish mountains and lochs

are resonant with historical realism.

The film pulls together motifs and myths

from King Arthur to Count Dracula, from Jung to Bladerunner,

while beneath the dashing surface, it ponders life and loss.

Who wants to live forever?

Highlander has become its own metaphor,

the striking adventure story that will never die.

There is one called Connor among them.

Aye.

Remember our agreement, Murdoch.

The boy is mine.

It's begun.

Death to the MacLeods!

Fight me, damn you!

Connor! No!

Come on! Quick!

There can be only one.

Another time, MacLeod!

It all started when a former firefighter from California

named Gregory Widen

took a tour of the Royal Armouries in the Tower Of London.

He imagined what it would have been like

to have owned all these weapons

and somehow to still be alive to tell the stories.

Those daydreams took shape in a class assignment

while on a screenwriting programme at UCLA.

It was not always as easy as it is today.

Sometimes in our modern journey, we see a reminder of a past

when it took many days or sometimes weeks to cross this countryside.

This is the old road,

which was built in an attempt to pacify the Highlands

by General Wade after the rising of 1715.

Today a new road capable of carrying

tens of thousands of buses and motorcars a year,

leaps and stretches across the moor of Rannoch

and into the dark defile of Glencoe, the glen of weeping.

Beside it, and like a ghost from the past,

the old road meanders and turns its ancient way.

This is about myths, isn't it? Yeah.

They're playing around with big concepts.

King Arthur, Count Dracula, you know, the major myths.

Yes, absolutely. These warriors that are fighting great fights.

I mean, there are the concepts of the swords that they all have,

the sword that's passed on -

Sean Connery's amazing Japanese Samurai sword,

which then MacLeod takes on after Sean Connery's character dies.

These sort of... almost Excalibur-style swords

that they're carrying around,

it's very, very epic in its backroom conceit,

even though the scenes and the moments are actually oddly domestic

and oddly incredibly normal, incredibly...

well hyper-real perhaps, in certain scenarios.

But when we're dealing with the day to day life of people, very real.

And then just all around it there are these quite insane

spark-filled clashes between these warriors with mighty swords.

The sword, the sword.

Known at first as Shadow Clan,

a key inspiration was Ridley Scott's gorgeous Joseph Conrad adaptation,

The Duellists, about two Napoleonic soldiers

trapped in a series of ever-escalating duels.

Widen had also read Joseph Campbell's

seminal study of mythical archetypes,

The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

Renaming his script Highlander,

agents began to take notice.

In '80s Hollywood, fantasy with a twist was bankable.

So Gregory Widen was actually a student at UCLA

when he was working on the screenplay

for what would become Highlander.

And partly he was inspired by a trip to the Tower Of London,

where he was on a tour and he was looking at all the medieval armour and swords and so forth,

and he wondered what would it be like

if there was simply one person who owned all of these different items

and had worn them all throughout these various periods of history,

a sort of a time traveller, who was then taking someone through

as though it was his personal wardrobe and saying,

"These are all the different times and situations I wore this armour in."

And so that was a big part of his inspiration for Highlander,

along with the film - the first film of Ridley Scott - The Duellists,

which also features two characters who are kind of locked in

a lifelong battle duelling one another.

So he presented this to his professor

and his professor said, "You should sell this screenplay.

It deserves an agent."

And he went on and did so.

He had also taken a trip to Scotland

and was very impressed with the Scottish Highlands.

There's a wonderful scale on the Highlands

and that sort of stuck in his mind.

And all these things sort of came together in his head.

I think he said, "What would happen, you know,

if you had someone in a suit of armour

who actually sort of had to live in that, you know, create...

"What would happen if they went across time in that?"

And he created the idea of an immortal,

or a race of immortals.

The film also has a very unusual, almost anachronistic structure

and it makes a benefit of it because it's set in two...

or along two timelines. A number of timelines, yeah.

But principally contemporary New York,

and the 16th-century story you've been talking about,

the back story of MacLeod.

How do those two timelines kind of relate?

I mean I suppose the back story in the Highland era

sets up the tragedy of the film,

which is that if you are immortal and born to live forever,

then you will lose everyone who you love.

And so we see him discover that he's immortal, train,

but lose Sean Connery,

and then the woman he falls in love with,

who gradually grows old and dies.

And they have this very, very sad final sequence

where he says, you know... She doesn't want him to see her die,

she wants him to light a candle on her birthday every year,

and he promises he will.

But that sort of ends off this... bites off that story.

Then, in New York, we see the burgeoning of a romance.

The love of a woman, I suppose,

is the two kind of contrasting themes.

One love which is doomed and one love which is the purpose

that will in fact give him a meaning and a reason to fight.

Because otherwise, really,

if you do win - we discover at the end -

you are finally given the power of fertility,

which means that you can have children.

But of course, if you don't have... if you're entirely single,

then it's a fairly wasted gift because...

So he has this love affair, which develops in contemporary New York.

So they sort of... they run parallel

but in opposite directions in terms of that love.

By the time we get to New York, he's very skilled,

he's very knowing, he's very world-weary,

and there are a couple of very rapid -

and quite funny in one case, quite dark in another case -

flashbacks to other periods.

We see him fight a duel in 16th century France,

where he's drunk,

and the guy who he's fighting keeps stabbing him

and he keeps falling over and he keeps getting up

and going back into the combat.

And another time he's in the Second World War

and he finds a young girl hiding from the Nazis.

And so, you know, he sort of dots around the history of combat really.

He's always fighting, always involved in combat.

We never see him chilling by the pool.

Backed by Thorn EMI, the script gained emotional depth

through the input of writers Larry Ferguson and Peter Bellwood.

The character of Ramirez became crucial,

mentoring Connor MacLeod in the ways of the immortals.

The idea of the gathering was added,

a final showdown destined to happen in New York.

So when Thorn EMI got involved

and it was clear that the film was going to be made,

Widen was asked to sort of collaborate

and change the concept a bit with other screenwriters

because, frankly, it was already a very ambitious project

with a big scope, big historical settings, a lot of extras.

And he was interested in it from an historical perspective,

where he wanted to give it a real kind of sense

of crunchy, dark reality, and back history for these characters.

And ultimately, some of that kind of had to go

because the film is an action movie, a fantasy movie,

and it is sort of a good versus evil narrative in many ways.

So some of the complexity, I think, probably went by the wayside.

Thorn EMI had put up the money for the film,

and then got Larry Ferguson

and Peter Bellwood, as writers, on board,

to basically shape the script,

which was, you know, in an interesting form,

but needed to sort of be fine-tuned

into an actually working script, shooting script.

So, between the three of them, including Widen,

they hammered it out.

A lot of the things from Widen's original script went.

His original script was much darker, much more violent.

I mean it was a pretty gloomy prospect,

according to everybody else.

And they injected... They toned it down.

They brought in female characters -

Hannah wasn't in the original screenplay -

and basically made it more sort of, I suppose,

palatable, audience-friendly, more...

something that would actually make a film that, you know,

might be considered commercial.

The producers decided that Highlander needed a director

who could boldly mythologise reality.

While inspired by Ken Russell and Fellini,

Mulcahy had gained a reputation for his stylised music videos on MTV...

...a realm infused with the retro futuristic palate of Ridley Scott.

Mulcahy was responsible for the iconic imagery

of Ultravox's Vienna,

and Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out For A Hero,

and had stepped up into feature films

with giant boar horror Razorback.

So Russell Mulcahy was perfectly placed to make a film

so synonymous with 1980's kind of pop culture

because he was in on the ground floor at MTV and the rise of MTV.

He was a music video director who had worked with Elton John

and Duran Duran, and countless other...

sort of heavy-hitters in the music industry at that time.

And he adapted that style to his filmmaking.

He made films that were quickly edited,

that had a lot of kind of visual information in each moment,

that were often about imagery and about look

as much as they were about content.

And it spoke to people.

People were interested in seeing that

because they were becoming acclimated to MTV culture.

The search for the ideal Connor MacLeod had led to Kurt Russell...

but myth has Goldie Hawn talking him out of it.

Then Mulcahy saw a picture of Christopher Lambert

as the hero of revisionist Tarzan epic Greystoke.

The director claimed that these were the eyes of an immortal.

Lambert's quirky intensity in Luc Besson's thriller Subway,

added to his appeal.

He was both heroic and not exactly of this world.

Whoa!

Greetings.

I am Juan Sanchez-Villalobos Ramirez,

chief metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain,

and I'm at your service.

Tonight, he's due to be made a Freeman of the city,

joining distinguished ranks that have included Winston Churchill,

but excluded the Prince of Wales.

Every time I come back, I always get a terrific charge

coming back to Scotland, and...

But the reality is that as long as I am still enthusiastic

about what I do in work... I don't live anywhere, really.

The mature Sean Connery was cast as much for his mythological heft

as his fit for the character.

He was already immortal.

The droll Ramirez might be a 2,437-year-old Egyptian,

by way of Spain,

but here was the former 007 with a van Dyck beard

and a lightness of touch, for which he is rarely given credit.

So Sean Connery was a great get for the filmmakers of Highlander,

and was, by all accounts, only on set for seven days,

and that was for a million pounds.

But he brings such a lot to this film.

It's kind of like the key scenes in the film

in which our hero learns his destiny

and becomes equipped to fight for his destiny

because he's been trained in sword fighting and so forth

by this mentor character.

And he's having a bit of a laugh with his accent and his costuming

and it's all very flamboyant

and all very kind of maximalist and very high 1980s style.

But it's also kind of... it's quite a lovely role.

Like, he's this paternal presence

and the loss of his character is another huge part of the tension.

And the one who, in a sense, brings the fun

and brings a sense of entertainment and says, "This is nonsense

but you've got to kind of live up to it," is Sean Connery.

It's one of his most pleasurable roles, isn't it?

For me - and I know this is a controversial statement -

this is my favourite Sean Connery role.

I just... I think he is superb in this.

He doesn't... In his career,

Sean Connery does not play light comedy, really, as a rule.

He doesn't play mischievous and impish as a rule.

He plays hard and dark, you know.

And so the idea of him in eyeliner,

running barefoot across a Scottish beach,

whooping and cheering and having clearly the time of his life,

it's an absolute joy.

He's smiling throughout the film.

Sean Connery doesn't smile enough in his career.

When he smiles in this film, he's so charming.

And he lifts the film.

I mean, this absolutely effervescent character.

Now this is Sean Connery who has been

out of Scotland for a long time, invited back into Scotland to shoot.

He's only in the film for... They've got seven days to shoot

and they're gonna pay him a million pounds for seven days.

He's clearly having a good time with that.

The crew, legendarily, would turn up to work with whisky

and they would, you know, hand it out during filming.

So it is possible that he was a little tipsy in some scenes.

And it just looks like an enormous ball of fun

that they're all having, particularly in the Scottish scenes,

when Sean Connery is sort of lifting up the whole vibe of it.

And he kind of picks up the swash and the buckle of the film.

There's a way in which this film could be quite Terminator-y,

which it does have those elements to it,

but what Sean Connery adds is the Errol Flynn

and he adds the Inigo Montoya.

He's got that kind of charm and suave and debonair

that I think the film really needs

otherwise it becomes a bit mechanistic in its destruction.

Get out! What's wrong?

Get out!

Kurgan!

Ramirez.

An approach had been made to Arnold Schwarzenegger

for sadistic immortal, the Kurgan,

but he was getting out of the villain business.

Sting, of all people, recommended Clancy Brown.

The singer had played opposite the Ohio-born actor's monster

in Frankenstein adaptation, The Bride.

As with Connery, Brown adds a dose of irony

to Highlander's potentially deadpan conceit.

It's very important in a movie like Highlander,

where the stakes are very good-versus-evil,

that the villain is scary and fun to watch

and that we believe that he is, you know,

this kind of cackling psycho.

And Clancy Brown brings that.

He brings a real sadism to this part.

You know, you believe this person is a ruthless,

ancient warrior who is dead set on power,

and does not care who gets in his way,

and will behead anybody.

And, you know, there is not a lot of shading to that.

And apparently Clancy Brown -

and the original writer, Gregory Widen -

both wanted a little bit more to the idea of the character.

You know, they wanted more psychological complexity,

they wanted it to be more about the darkness of a person

who had lived across centuries being in this kind of, you know,

within this kind of role,

but ultimately, the character is, you know,

I think, a fairly cartoonish depiction of evil.

Still good fun though.

Now I think there's something about Brown's performance also

that he, rather like Connery,

thinks, "I've got to send this stuff up a bit

otherwise it's gonna become deadpan."

You've got to give it a bit of - as you say - comic-book energy.

Yes, he is... I mean, it's almost as if he's seen Terminator

and he thinks, you know,

"I've seen the moments that this film gets laughs,

and it's when the Terminator does the odd funny line.

I'm gonna push those funny lines." So he does.

He checks into a deadbeat hotel in New York for the gathering,

which... surely he's had time over the countless years to do some long-term investments,

he could stay somewhere more expensive, but he doesn't.

He chooses to stay in the deadbeat place.

And he just generally throws people around.

He really does enjoy being awful.

And he's also helped a lot by the director,

who just gives him these sequences where he's fighting in sparks.

I mean, every time he fights, there's sparks all around him,

so he's almost like a 1980s pop video version of a villain.

And he really rises to that.

And he's not taking it seriously in any way at all.

He uses his tongue quite a lot,

you know, in a kind of way to show his depravity.

And I think that he's just incredibly dark, beautifully dark.

It's as if Arnold Schwarzenegger was, as The Terminator, going...

Oh, please, put it away!

What do you want?

Your head.

And the prize.

For a series of inventive transitions,

the film flashes back from New York

to tell MacLeod's origin story in Scotland.

Filmed in the remains of Eilean Donan Castle

in the Western Highlands,

and such scenic treasures as Glencoe,

the emphasis is on battle-torn authenticity.

It is in the autumnal highlands that MacLeod meets Ramirez.

Connery looks thrilled to be home,

running barefoot on the chilly beach of Loch Duich, his grin a mile wide.

Mulcahy consciously leaned into his MTV skill set

for a New York all dry ice, neon and silhouettes.

His cutting was faster and more expressionistic.

Not only does the location change,

but the genre - from epic to neo-noir -

as the cops investigate a headless corpse

and close in on an antiques dealer with a haunted look.

It is as if the ageless hero now perceives reality as a dream.

Mulcahy is very clever in the way he actually frames both eras -

16th-century Scotland and 20th-century New York.

He's very, very good at the contrast,

but he's also very good at the similarities.

And the first similarity is that in Scotland,

which are of course huge vistas, huge vistas of the landscape,

whatever, but it always seems to be covered in mist.

There is always a mist going across the screen somehow or other.

In the urban centres of New York in the 20th century,

yes, it's more confined, everything is sort of covered -

it's usually shot at night, most of those scenes -

but there's a tremendous amount of steam

that's all coming out of the vents.

That steam and that mist is the common element.

And it's something that he can easily sort of negotiate

when he makes his extraordinary transitions.

For the titanic sword fights, they were trained by the best -

Bob Anderson, a former Olympic fencer.

Anderson had staged lightsaber duels in Star Wars,

and would choreograph flashing blades in everything

from Barry Lyndon to the Lord Of The Rings.

His perfectionism could drive directors mad,

but the sword fights in Highlander were the whole point.

They mix brute force and weird flares of special effects

with the climactic showdown on the rooftop

of the Silvercup Bakery in Queens.

How important was the contribution of Bob Anderson,

who was the sword-fight trainer?

I mean Bob Anderson is... I think it's safe to say,

the greatest sword-fight trainer in the history of Hollywood.

Someone who had... I mean, he did the Princess Bride.

He did the Lord Of The Rings films. He did Star Wars films.

If you've seen a sword fight in the last what, 50-odd years,

he will have choreographed it.

And he choreographed these to the extreme.

I mean this is... Possibly one of the Princess Bride fights

is a little bit more extreme than that, but I don't think so.

I think this is where he's just put every single one of his skills

and just all the things that he wanted to play with.

And he's so playful in this.

I mean, he was a stickler, as a trainer,

and frustrated a lot of directors

because of the time he took over the fight choreography

and the perfection he demanded.

Lambert had been practising with the sword master, Bob Anderson,

for four hours a day for weeks, in order to get the fights right.

Connery arrived and of course thought he knew everything

and said I don't need to practise, I know how to use a sword.

And so in the first rehearsal of the first battle

of the sword fight that they were going to have,

Lambert nearly decapitated Connery

cos he was... he couldn't defend himself properly.

And Connery realised that he's gonna have to practise.

I know all this because Russell Mulcahy told me it.

And he said, you know, he went away and he practised and practised

and practised at every available moment that he had

in order to be able to not look a fool.

He realised that he was being a little bit sort of blase about it,

that this... whatever else you do in this film,

you take the sword fighting seriously.

I think that that gave Lambert...

It gave Connery a huge respect for Lambert,

and they became very firm friends during it.

Amazingly enough, Connery also rather liked Russell Mulcahy

because Connery doesn't waste time.

He doesn't like to hang about and he doesn't like multiple takes.

He had seven days for filming only

and he made a bet with Russell Mulcahy

that they would never get all his scenes done in that time.

Mulcahy won that bet,

and he won it because he knew how to work fast.

He was very prepared, he never overshot.

He knew... All he needed was the pieces of the jigsaw.

The film would be made in the editing suite,

but as long as he got what he wanted for that jigsaw, then he was happy.

Yargh!

Yargh!

The film dwells on themes such as heroism, power,

and mankind's eternal yearning for battle.

But the heart of the story is the idea of immortality,

and therefore mortality.

In the vein of vampire films,

the price of eternal life is seeing those you love grow old and die.

Lambert captures the poignancy of a man who never chose to be a god.

There is something of the Anne Rice,

certainly if in no other way than in Christopher Lambert's hair.

He's quite like a hunky Anne Rice type.

You can imagine him playing a vampire.

But the film, the concept, is very interested in the idea of -

in a quite like a high concept fantasy way -

age and loss and death.

And so immortality fundamentally might seem like quite a silly thing

to have as a plot point in a film,

but when you're dealing in these kind of metaphorical genres,

like horror with vampires

or this kind of fantasy thing with Highlander,

you're also using it to talk about the sadness of loss,

the sadness of outliving others.

Neglected on its release in 1986,

it was the rise of VHS that brought Highlander to life...

and it is the perfect fit for a cult film.

Be it the pleasure of Connery's company,

the obscure mythology, the songs, the silliness,

or its ecstatic celebration of the tradition of the sword fight,

a huge following has grown up

around the film's unconventional brand of escapism.

Now the film didn't succeed on its initial box office release,

but it was rediscovered as sort of VHS became a big thing.

Tell me a little bit about the journey the film took

subsequent to coming out.

Well, I think it missed its time

because it was just between the big peaks in fantasy.

But it was also a very difficult film to follow,

partly because of its refusal to give you any exposition.

There was a sequel, Highlander II,

which then did create an exposition, which fans of the first film hated.

They said the immortals came from space,

which everyone hoped they would pretend didn't happen and tried to erase it.

But it was... Just there was something about it.

It was a perfect Friday night VHS movie.

I mean, in the UK and in America,

Subway - the Luc Besson film that Christopher Lambert had been in -

was also one of those films. It was passed around.

You would go around to friends' houses in the '80s,

on a Friday night watching videos,

and it would be one of those films that you would watch.

Films like The Terminator, films like this,

are films that I didn't see in the cinema.

I saw them on video at people's houses afterwards

because they were absolute word-of-mouth must see.

Not because anyone would say this is the greatest film ever made,

but they were just perfect for Friday night entertainment.

They were absolutely over-the-top enjoyable.

And it just grew and grew from there.

It was the kind of film that needed to be rediscovered

and the way to rediscover a film was to find it in a VHS hire store,

or whatever, and have the guys behind the counter -

who were kind of film geeks...

who would love niche films and cult films -

you would go in and talk to them and say, "What can we see?"

And it was almost like a club.

It was like a sort of fraternity of people

who didn't really care for the mainstream product

that was coming up, but they wanted something a bit different.

Highlander fit right into this very, very well,

and so basically the...

it became a kind of...

It grew as a cult, the more people started to take it out, watch it,

share it amongst their friends, talk about it and then pass it on.

It was almost like a sort of secret that you could pass on to other...

other film geeks, cult people,

people who actually enjoyed defying the conventional sort of wisdom

of what makes a successful film.

The rise of home video, I think, is completely concurrent

with the way we look at fandom today,

which is to say that when people can physically own a VHS or a Blu-ray,

it means that they have a sort of curator's,

or a collector's mentality,

and that means that they are likely to rewatch the film again and again,

something which wasn't possible prior to that,

and that means that their familiarity with that thing

makes them notice new things about it,

makes them see themselves in it,

makes them have little kind of in-jokes about it,

watch it with friends again and again.

And so that gave people something personal to hold onto about movies.

Attempting to build a franchise out of Highlander

has only served as proof that it remains a true original.

As the script makes clear, there can be only one.

There is no source novel or comic book.

Highlander was brewed out of wildly varied ingredients

to create a strange and enchanting personality.

The sequels to Highlander are completely unnecessary

and also they're illogical.

At the end of Highlander, he wins.

He is the only one left.

And the irony of that is that he knows everything.

He says I can hear, I can understand everybody in the whole world,

but he has become mortal.

So he's going to die.

He actually is going to die of old age eventually.

And I love that.

I love that sort of... of seeming...

you know, the fact...

OK, you get to this stage where you know everything and then...

but also you're no longer immortal.

So that is the logical sense of the film.

And if there's one thing about this film -

considering it's created mythology out of nowhere -

it obeys the logic of that mythology.

To have a sequel is nonsense. It's nonsensical.

Amazingly enough, Connery agreed to be in the sequel, Highlander II,

along with Lambert, and it wasn't...

I don't think really that it was completed in any way, shape or form

that made any sense at all,

and of course, was pretty well a disaster.

However, it didn't stop those who owned the rights to Highlander

to actually then creating a Highlander franchise for TV.

There was a TV series.

So somebody was still making money out of it.

But these are all fairly redundant exercises.

They're nothing more than sort of just a way of extending it.

The true ownership of a film can only come from a film

that not everybody knows about, or they don't...

nobody ever really has a take on.

Highlander is one of the very first of those.

The fandom, the horror fandom, they are genre fans

and this is not a genre fandom.

It's a hard genre to place. Yeah.

What would you say it was? I don't know what its genre is.

I mean, it has got elements of horror.

It has got elements of sci-fi, elements of fantasy.

You know, actually, I mean, it's got everything, it really does.

It samples in a very eclectic way from every form.

And this is, you know, the MTV video director's skill,

to go, "I'll put a bit of that in. I'll put a bit of that in."

And it plays with all of them. You discover it, it's mad.

You share it with people, everyone loves it

and you start to find your little community.

This is even pre-internet.

People found it and found each other

before you could use, you know, online chat groups.

And it had built up a head of speed

by the time that the internet came around.

And it is without doubt one of the very early devotees' films.

Highlander also endures

because it taps into the roots of story-telling -

tropes that go back to the Iliad

and Jungian ideas about the universal monomyth,

the lone hero, the call of destiny,

the apocalyptic battle with evil.

These are the heroic features that unite King Arthur,

the Man With No Name, James Bond,

Luke Skywalker, Mad Max, and Connor MacLeod.

In every sense, Highlander is timeless.

♪ QUEEN: A Kind Of Magic

♪ One dream

♪ One soul

♪ One prize

♪ One goal

♪ One golden glance

♪ Of what should be... ♪

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