Director Nick Hamm’s “William Tell” is a retrospective. It’s a big-budget action film—about $45 million—inspired by folklore, filled with thrilling action sequences, inspiring speeches from the front lines, and a brilliant mix of digital and practical effects. The film will premiere on September 10 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Set in 1307, the film tells the story of the famous Swiss hero William Tell, who leads a revolt against the oppressive Austrian king who occupies a stretch of land along the modern border between the two countries. A former crusader, Tell would rather use his blade to till his fields than fight injustice, but he is driven to violence after the king's unscrupulous men force him to shoot an apple off his son's head from a seemingly impossible distance.
“I’ve always been fascinated by this story and wanted to know more about it,” Hamm says of his desire to give Tell some of the screen time usually reserved for his English contemporary Robin Hood. To learn more about the character, Hamm read Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play about Tell, which was one of the only written versions of the epic for nearly 500 years.
“Yet this tale has been used and misused as a cultural cornerstone for centuries,” the director notes. “For the Swiss, Tell was always a hero. The French used him as a liberating figure during the revolution. Hitler loved William Tell and incorporated some of Schiller’s language into his speeches, even though they were burning his books by the end of World War II. So the character and the story have always been an inspiration to people, even though most people didn’t know much about him except that he shot an apple at someone’s head.”
Since the primary source for the film's screenplay was a 200-year-old play, Hamm had to do a lot of hard work to make the story relatable to modern audiences. In an unfortunate twist, geopolitical events have helped make Tell's story more relatable to modern audiences.
“As I was writing, all these wars started happening, and Russia invaded Ukraine. Everything I was thinking about became very relevant,” he recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I’m basing this on a 500-year-old myth, and the things they’re talking about are exactly what we hear on the radio today.’”
While Hamm always saw Till's story as an anti-war tale, he says his main goal was to deliver something fun for audiences to enjoy, which could fill a gap he believed existed at the box office.
“The studios stopped making these movies, and I don't know why,” he says. “They're just entertainment, and people like to enjoy watching movies. Yes, there are some political connotations, but the goal was to entertain and create interesting characters and stories.”
In adapting Till’s story, Hamm had to invent almost all of the action scenes himself. Before Hollywood’s big budgets and virtual effects, writers weren’t so ambitious about detailing battlefield action. He dropped about 60 percent of the characters from Schiller’s play and completely rewrote all of the remaining women, adding a few more women to create a more believable story.
“Schiller’s women were not useful at all given the way women were written about 200 years ago. These women were nothing more than scenery, and that didn’t work for me,” Hamm says.
One of the most significant differences between Schiller's and Hamm's versions is that the 1804 story essentially ends after Tell shoots the legendary apple over his son's head. Hamm, on the other hand, uses the iconic scene to begin a revolutionary epic about Tell and the interconnected Swiss army that sets the stage for a possible sequel by the end of the film.
