Brian Blessed, Prince Vultan
“GORDON’S ALIVE?!” The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, queens, prime ministers – everybody who exists wants me to say that line. It’s a great celebratory exclamation. It just makes everyone happy. It’s got to be one of the most famous lines in film history.
I grew up in Goldthorpe, Yorkshire. Every Saturday, we’d go to the Empire to watch Flash Gordon with Buster Crabbe. He was a wonderful, sensitive Flash Gordon. It had marvellous music and special effects with dragons, lion men, walking bombs and the Clay People who lived on Mars and spoke backwards. You’d get one half-hour episode each week. Flash would always end up looking like he was about to die, leaving you wondering how he would escape. We’d come out of the cinema and run down the disused railway embankment to play dares. I’d jump over the bushes pretending to be Vultan. I never dreamed that one day I’d play him as a grown man in my 40s.
I was invited to Elstree to meet the producer Dino De Laurentiis and the director Mike Hodges. There were all these paintings of me on the walls. I thought: “The sods are having me on – they’ve already cast me.” So I said: “That’s me.” They said: “No.” I just happened to be the spitting image of the character from the comic. Dino said: “We can’t think of anyone else for the part.” I said: “If you offer it to anyone else, I’ll strangle the bastard.”
I’m very critical of people who say it’s a camp film. It’s not. It’s perfection. Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Stewart and Derek Jacobi all agree with me: it’s a masterpiece. It was the first time space wasn’t just a black sky. And Queen’s music is amazing, like when Flash and Dale go up in the rocket and collapse into each other’s arms to the sound of Queen’s In The Space Capsule (The Love Theme).
The sets are marvellous, too. Everyone’s perfectly cast. It’s a masterpiece of colour, design and acting, with a wonderful comic-strip style. They must never, ever entertain redoing it. There’s always some tosser who wants to repeat things, but they won’t ever better it, so they’d better keep their bloody hands off.
Mike Hodges, director
Because they were going to be building such massive sets, Dino De Laurentiis wanted to plan a sequel right at the outset, and I was offered the job of directing Flash Gordon 2. “I am the wrong director for this,” I said. “I don’t know about special effects or Flash Gordon or any other American comics.” I was brought up on the Dandy and the Beano. We left it at that, but then Dino fell out with the first director and came after me again to direct the first film. He flew me out to New York on Concorde with a bumper fun book of Flash Gordon. I met Danilo Donati, the costume designer, and with fear and trepidation, I said: “OK. I’ll do it.”
We had a problem with the skies, until the special-effects team came up with a way of forming clouds by injecting colours into saline water and slowing the footage down. We largely cast to match the looks from the 1930s strip cartoon. The acting just followed. Flash had to have a chiselled jaw, the all-American boy. Dino’s mother-in-law saw Sam J Jones on the TV show Hollywood Squares, so we flew him over. I know he’s got Rotten Tomato reviews, but Flash isn’t supposed to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’s genuinely innocent and you can believe he’s a football player.
Dale had to be the perky, New York girl. I don’t know who decided that the Hawkmen should have beards. I remember watching Wales beating the hell out of England in the rugby and the phone rang and it was Dino who said: “The team in red. Number nine. Number five. Number four. Number one. Hawkmen.” I said: “They’re not going to want to hang on wires for six months while we film them.” He hung up and the Welsh rugby team were never mentioned again. Brian Blessed comes at the beginning of the film but disappears until nearly the end. He played the role with such enormous energy that I was extremely grateful.
The film works on two levels. It’s a Saturday morning action movie for children but, on another level, I think it had a serious effect on some men’s sexual fantasies. They loved the voluptuous Princess Aura.Forty years later, the eight-year-olds who watched it as children can now watch it with their own children. The children will see the innocent side and the adults will see the sexual side and the circle will start again.
• Flash Gordon: The 40th anniversary 4K edition is out now.
