Taglines: You will believe.
DragonHeart movie storyline. The young, sickly King Einon was wounded in a battle. In order for him to survive, he is healed by Draco, a dragon. Some years later, Bowen, a dragon slayer, encounters Draco.
The two team up to form a traveling duo that perform an act, but the act is only known by themselves. Bowen supposedly “slays” Draco and then collects a reward from the town or village that he protects by killing the dragon who had been “terrorizing” them. From there, Bowen and Draco must save the entire kingdom from the rule of the now evil King Einon, who is part of Draco and Draco a part of him.
Dragonheart is a 1996 American fantasy adventure film directed by Rob Cohen. It stars Dennis Quaid, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite, Dina Meyer, Julie Christie, Brian Thompson, Lee Oakes, Eva Vejmelková, Milan Bahúl, and the voice of Sean Connery. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and various other awards in 1996 and 1997.
Actual filming began in July 1994 in Slovakia. During sequences with Draco and Bowen in them, visual effects supervisor Scott Squires and his teams used what they called a “monster stick”—a pole with a bar and two red circles at the top—as an indicator for where Draco’s eyes would be for Quaid’s reference. They also set up speakers through which Cohen would read Draco’s lines for Quaid, which Quaid said “helped [him] out a lot.”
While filming the scenes involving Draco in flight, the crew used a microlight as reference, and then edited the footage to “put Draco over the top of that and remove any traces of the aircraft.” Although Draco is fully rendered in CGI, full-sized models of some of Draco’s body parts were used for some of the scenes. One of them was Draco’s foot, which was used to pin Bowen to the ground, and the other was Draco’s jaw during the scene where Bowen gets trapped inside it. While the foot was a non-moving prop, the jaw had moving parts and was operated by a puppeteer.
According to Cohen, they spent an additional thirteen months working on the film after making the final cut of the film. He was in Rome to shoot Daylight on-location during this period, and had to review animation sequences with ILM and give them his comments and instructions through a satellite hookup.
DragonHeart (1996)
Directed by: Rob Cohen
Starring: Dennis Quaid, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite, Dina Meyer, Julie Christie, Sean Connery, Brian Thompson, Lee Oakes, Eva Vejmelková, Milan Bahúl
Screenplay by: Charles Edward Pogue
Production Design by: Benjamín Fernández
Cinematography by: David Eggby
Film Editing by: Peter Amundson
Costume Design by: Thomas Casterline, Anna B. Sheppard
Set Decoration by: Giorgio Desideri
Art Direction by: Maria-Teresa Barbasso, Ján Svoboda
Music by: Randy Edelman
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for action / violence.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: May 31, 1996
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