Dragonslayer is a 1981 American dark fantasy film directed by Matthew Robbins from a screenplay he co-wrote with Hal Barwood. It stars Peter MacNicol, Ralph Richardson, John Hallam, and Caitlin Clarke. It was a co-production between Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions, where Paramount handled North American distribution and Disney handled international distribution through Buena Vista International. The story is set in a fictional medieval kingdom where a young wizard encounters challenges as he hunts a dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative.
About 25% of the film’s budget went into the dragon’s special effects. Graphic artist David Bunnett was assigned to design the look, and was fed ideas on the movement mechanics, and then rendered the concepts on paper. They decided early to emphasize flying, because the most important sequence is the final battle. Bunnett gave it a degree of personality, deliberately trying to avoid the creature from Alien, which he believed was “too hideous to look at.”
After Bunnett handed his storyboard panels to the film crew, the dragon design used a wide variety of techniques. The final creature is a composite of several different models. Phil Tippett of ILM finalized the design, and sculpted a reference model, which Danny Lee of Disney Studios closely followed in constructing the larger dragon props for close-up shots. Two months later, Lee's team finished a 16-foot head and neck assembly, a 30-foot tail, thighs, legs, claws capable of grabbing a man, and a 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) wing section. The parts were flown to Pinewood Studios outside London in the cargo hold of a Boeing 747.
Brian Johnson was hired to supervise the special effects, and began planning on- and off-set effects with various specialists. Dennis Muren, the effects cameraman, stated, “We knew the dragon had a lot more importance to this film than some of the incidental things that appeared in only a few shots in Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back. The dragon had to be presented in a way that the audience would be absolutely stunned.”
After the completion of principal shooting, a special-effects team of 80 people at ILM studios in northern California worked eight months in producing 160 composite shots of the dragon. Chris Walas sculpted and operated the dragon head used for close-up shots. The head measured 8 ft in length. The model was animated by a combination of radio controls, cable controls, air bladders, levers, and by hand—thus giving the illusion of a fully coordinated face with a wide range of expressions. Real World War II-era flamethrowers were used for the dragon’s fire-breathing effects. The animals used for the dragon’s vocalizations included lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, alligators, pigs, camels, and elephants.
Phil Tippett built a model for the dragon’s walking scenes. He did not want to use standard stop-motion animation techniques, and had his team build a dragon model that would move during each exposure, rather than in between, as was once the standard. This process, named “go motion” by Tippett, was tested with motion control in The Empire Strikes Back. To make the motion even smoother, they decided to use a motorized rod puppet with a computer program that recorded the creature's movements in motion as a real animal would move, which added motion blur and removed the jerkiness common in prior stop-motion films.
Ken Ralston was assigned to the flying scenes. He built a model with an articulated aluminum skeleton for a wide range of motion. Ralston shot films of birds flying to incorporate their movements into the model. As with the walking dragon, the flying model was filmed using go-motion techniques. The camera was programmed to tilt and move at various angles to convey the sensation of flight.
Elliot Scott was hired to design the sets of the film’s sixth-century world. He temporarily converted the 13th-century Dolwyddelan Castle into Ulrich’s ramshackle sixth-century fortress, to the surprise of the locals. He built the entire village of Swanscombe on a farm outside London. Although Scott extensively researched medieval architecture in the British Museum and his own library, he took some artistic liberties in creating the thatched-roof houses, the granary, Simon’s house and smithy, and Casiodorus’s castle, because he was unable to find enough information on their exact look. He built the interior of the dragon’s lair, using 25,000 cubic feet (710 m3) of polystyrene and 40 tons of Welsh slate and shale. The shots of the Welsh and Scottish landscapes were extended through the use of over three dozen matte paintings.
Nearly all of the outdoor scenes were shot in North Wales. The final scene was shot in Skye, Scotland.
The costumes were designed by Anthony Mendelson, who consulted the British Museum, the London Library, and his own reference files to evoke the designs of the early Middle Ages. They are roughly stitched and use colors that would have been possible with the vegetable dyes of the time. The costumes of Casiodorus and his court were designed of fine silk, as opposed to the coarsely woven clothes of the Urlanders.
The film received generally positive reviews from critics, but it performed poorly at the box office, grossing $14.1 million worldwide against a production budget of $18 million. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, which went to Chariots of Fire. It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, again given to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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