Trivia
Two weeks before location shooting was scheduled to begin, the Scottish Department of the Environment withdrew permission for the Pythons to shoot within their castles, saying that the film's script would be "incompatible with the history and fabric" of the castles. The interiors of Camelot and Swamp Castle, and exteriors of Castle Anthrax, French Castle and the opening castle were all shot at Doune Castle (with various rooms redecorated and reused many times). Recently-rebuilt Castle Stalker was used for the Castle Aarrgg. Both of these were privately owned and could be used. The Constitutional Peasants' castle and Camelot are each 10ft high plywood models (hence Patsy's comment) which had a tendency to blow over in the middle of each take; hence the trailer shows another in-joke, with King Arthur knighting someone who just built a large castle but when the plywood building falls over Arthur stabs him.
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Scenes such as Arthur approaching the first castle and Lancelot's running dash to Swamp Castle were filmed on Hampstead Heath, a London park beside one of the city's busiest road junctions.
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Day one of filming was plagued with problems: after an extended trek into the Glen Coe hills the crew's only sync camera sheared its gears and the team could only shoot mute shots that involved crossing the Bridge of Death. Graham Chapman suffered from delirium tremens (a side-effect of his alcoholism) and froze when trying to cross the Bridge of Death, thus having to be doubled by the first assistant director.
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Some major scenes scripted, but never filmed:
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- additional "Knights who say Ni!" scene, they intend to call themselves "the Knights of Nicky-Nicky"
- additional police detective scenes
- several scenes where Arthur and the knights meet "King Brian, the Wild".
- After the Bridgekeeper, they come upon the Boatkeeper. "He who would cross the Sea of Fate Must answer me these questions twenty-eight!"
- Arthur and his knights end up finding the Holy Grail at Harrods' department store
The gorilla hand turning the pages was director Terry Gilliam's. The hand turning pages before that is that of Gilliam's wife.
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At the beginning of the "Bring out your dead" scene, two nuns with gigantic mallets can be seen. The original script called for them to be pounding on a man tied to a cart, but the scene was cut and that glimpse is all that remains.
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Additional cat abuse includes a cat being stepped on during the Knights of Camelot Dance scene.
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Unusually for a Monty Python feature, all the female roles (apart from Dennis's mother, played by Terry Jones) are played by women. In the TV series and the two following films, almost all the female roles are played by men.
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Among the extras is the future writer Iain Banks, who was studying at nearby Stirling University at the time.
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The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is roughly 11 meters per second, or 24 miles per hour, beating its wings 7-9 times per second rather than 43. It's true: a 5 ounce bird cannot carry a one pound coconut, but furthermore, no swallow weighs 5 ounces. The barn swallow, which is what most English people mean when they say "swallow", weighs only 20 grams (2/3 of an ounce).
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Assyria (now part of Iraq) had four capitals throughout its history: Ashur (or Qalat Sherqat), Calah (or Nimrud), the short-lived Dur Sharrukin (or Khorsabad), and Nineveh.
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Funds earned by Pink Floyd's album "The Dark Side of the Moon" went towards funding The Holy Grail. The band were such fans of the show they would halt recording sessions just to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus.
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The King of Swamp Castle says that Sir Lancelot killed "all those guards - they cost 50 pounds each", meaning that Sir Lancelot killed £300 worth of guards.
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John Cleese's young daughter was on the set during the filming of the Black Knight scene, and after seeing the "fighting", remarked to Connie Booth, "Daddy doesn't like that man, does he?"
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During production, the troupe became increasing irritated by the press, who seemed to always ask the same questions, such as "What will your next project be?" One day, Eric Idle flippantly answered, "Jesus Christ's Lust For Glory". Having discovered that this answer quickly shut up reporters, the group adopted it as their stock answer. After production completed, they did some serious thinking about it, and realized that while satirizing Christ himself was out of the question, they could create a parody of first-century life, later realized in Life of Brian.
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The establishing shot showing the "forest of Ewing" is actually stock footage of Yosemite Valley.
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As part of their stained glass and interior decoration, several medieval cathedrals included illustrations of virtues and vices. The vice of cowardice was depicted as a knight running away from a rabbit. Notre Dame in Paris has no fewer than three such medallions of the "Killer Rabbit".
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Since the armour the Knights wore was really made of wool, and the weather conditions in Scotland and England being what they normally are, the actors spent most of the shooting days being very cold and wet. To make matters worse, the hotel where they were staying only had a limited number of baths and hot water. At the end of shooting each day, there was a mad dash to see who could get back to the hotel first, and into some hot water. The Monty Python troupe all seem to agree that they did not enjoy much of the filming experience for this movie.
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John Cleese as Tim the Enchanter actually stood on the pinnacle seen at the beginning of his scene. On one side was a drop he said could have killed him, and on the other was a drop he said could have maimed him. To make matters worse, the wind kept threatening to push him over either side. Between takes, he would crouch down to avoid being pushed over by the wind. The whole experience was one he remembers as being very frightening, but he did it anyway, because he knew what kind of budget and time-lines they had to work with.
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In several scenes the monks chant in Latin: "Pie Iesu domine, dona eis requiem". The translation of this is: "Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them rest." It's part of the standard Latin funeral rite. The German heavy metal band Blind Guardian sampled this on the opening track of their album "Follow the Blind".
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When King Arthur and his knights reach Camelot,the trumpet fanfare is the identification fanfare for Rediffusion Television. Rediffusion produced Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show, two programs featuring the members of Monty Python before teaming up.
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In the elaborately illustrated pages that precede various scenes, "Lancelot" is spelled two different ways - "Launcelot" and "Lancelot".
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Many of the extras in the film are actually technicians and stagehands, including the designer and the editor playing policemen, the film's musician playing the bearer killed by the Trojan Rabbit, the costume designer playing one of the minstrels and the wife of the producer of Monty Python's Flying Circus playing the dead historian's wife.
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The Black Knight was first played by John Cleese, but when Arthur cuts off the first leg a real one-legged actor (a local silversmith) was used. On the DVD Terry Gilliam reveals that a marionette was used to film the shot of the second leg being cut off, he also jokes that using the one-legged silversmith for the shot of the knight with no legs saved work, since they only had to dig a hole for one leg (Cleese has said that it was himself standing in the hole).
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Terry Gilliam designed the boat used in the finale. When they first saw it, the rest of the Monty Python troupe were greatly impressed by it.
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During one of the first screenings of the film in front of a live audience, director Terry Jones noticed that when music was played during the jokes, there was a marked reduction of laughter from the audience. He went back and edited the music out whenever a punchline was delivered. At subsequent screenings he noticed a dramatic increase in the audiences' positive reactions to the jokes. From that point on, whenever he directed, he remembered to stop the music for the funny parts.
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In an auction of movie costumes in March 2007, the helmet worm by Sir Bedevere (Terry Jones) sold for $29,000, more than ten times the original estimate.
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Graham Chapman's alcoholism (which he tried to suppress with Antabuse) caused problems during filming, and not just through his repeatedly forgetting his lines. The first day of shooting required Chapman to cross the Bridge of Death. When working on Monty Python's Flying Circus, Chapman had been used to drinking heavily to calm his nerves. He quickly discovered to his dismay that the crew had no alcohol on the set, and the nearest town was too far away for a quick trip to purchase any. Consequently, he was visibly stressed, shaking, sweating and moving slowly throughout the scene, yet he was known to be an experienced rock climber. Not knowing about his alcoholism, the crew wondered if Chapman's heavy costume caused the stress; it was actually alcoholism-induced DTs.
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Graham Chapman (as King Arthur) was the only member of the cast to wear real chain mail armor. It weighed about 25 pounds. The rest of the cast wore knitted wool, painted to look like metal.
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Both John Cleese and Terry Gilliam performed all their stunts during the duel between Black and Green Knight. They both had to learn to manage big and heavy swords and to do some acrobatics, though never being recognizable, wearing both heavy armors and full helmets. They both avoided use of stunt-men because, as they said in commentaries, they had a lot of fun in enacting the duel.
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During the scene where the villagers are discussing how to determine whether someone is a witch, Eric Idle bares his teeth and bites down on the blade of the scythe he is holding. This was not scripted; Idle was actually about to burst out laughing and bit his scythe to stifle himself so as not to spoil the take. (If you look closely, you can see him shaking slightly, trying to keep his laughing under control.) Michael Palin can be seen hiding laughter at the same time as well, while earlier in the scene John Cleese quickly turns his head to one side just before the shot cuts, though not quickly enough to hide that he has broken character and is grinning broadly. All three comment on each others' corpsing on the DVD commentary.
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The only knights that finally get to cross the Bridge of Eternal Peril are Sir Launcelot, King Arthur and Sir Bedivere. The bridge was constructed by a Scottish mountaineer and was perfectly safe, though scary. John Cleese suffered from giddiness, so a stuntman crossed in his place. Graham Chapman (a good mountaineer when not in a crisis of abstinence from alcohol) and Terry Jones crossed the bridge by themselves.
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The major characters all have appropriate artwork on their shields and armor. The cowardly Sir Robin has a chicken for his emblem. Bedevere, a man of science and nature, has a tree. Lancelot, an overzealous knight that often kills without thought, has a vicious dragon emblem. And King Arthur, who receives a vision from God in the sky/sun for his quest, has a symbol depicting the sun.
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The musical piece that plays at the very beginning of the movie is "Ice Floe 9" composed by Pierre Arvay. Which was a musical piece borrowed from DeWolfe Music - Production Music Library.
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The famous depiction of galloping horses by using coconut shells came about from the purely practical reason that the production simply couldn't afford real horses.
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In the scene where the knights were combating the Killer Rabbit, a real white rabbit was used. He was dyed with what was assumed to be a washable red coloring liquid in the shots after the battle. When filming wrapped the rabbit's owner was dismayed to learn the dye could not be rinsed off. Gilliam described in an audio commentary that the owner of the rabbit was present and shooting was abruptly halted while the cast desperately attempted to clean the rabbit before the owner found out, an unsuccessful attempt. He also stated that he thought that, had they been more experienced in film-making, the crew would have just purchased a rabbit instead. Otherwise the rabbit himself was unharmed. Also, the rabbit-bite effects were done via special puppetry by both Terry Gilliam and SFX technician John Horton.
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In one scene, King Arthur refers to an old female peasant as an old crone. Old crone was the name given to old women who were (usually) kidnapped from a local English village by Crusading Knights to find and cook food and also wash the Knight's clothing while on a Crusade. Due to the womens' usually advanced age, lack of food and many other factors, few old crones survived the Crusades.
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The original plan for the leader of the Knights who say "Ni", was it was going to be played by John Cleese supporting Michael Palin on his shoulders, but somewhere along the lines, it ended up being played by just Palin standing on a ladder.
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Spoilers
Terry Gilliam dies more than any other actor in this movie, with a grand total of 4 deaths. His characters that die are the Green Knight (sword through the face), Sir Bors (decapitated by the Killer Rabbit), the Animator (major heart attack), and the Bridgekeeper/Soothsayer (cast into the "Gorge of Eternal Peril"). John Cleese and Terry Jones, by contrast, have no death scenes in this film at all.
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