Filmmaker David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story) is to make a serious film of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The movie industry press report he’s signed on with respected film company A24. Some reports speculate the movie will be a revival of a former Terrence Malick (The New World) project, which was quite advanced but had to be abandoned by Malick. A full-on Arthurian Malick Green Knight would have been quite something.

But now Lowery (above) is picking it up, seemingly to make it rather than just to give an old project a brush down. Hopefully he’ll steer clear of a trendy shift into the modern day or to some post-apocalyptic setting. If his take on the movie does get into production, and is authentic, then I’d hope it might even be filmed on location in Wales and the Staffordshire Moorlands.

Hey, I might even sell a few of my new Gawain book to the production team. That’s happened before, actually. I once had an order from del Toro of 12 copies of my book on Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, back when del Toro had a small team in early pre-production for his planned mega-movie adaptation of Mountains.

If you want to read Gawain before the movie then steer well clear of anything ‘Armitage’ and his modern hipster slang. Instead, for a readable introductory experience with the story go for the Brian Stone Penguin Classics translation of 1959. This is also available to borrow as an ebook for free, on Archive.org.