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“We became very close partners in post-production,” Mulcahy says. “It was the perfect marriage. When a song finished, the score would take off with an orchestration of it. Kamen has just done Brazil, and Queen and Freddie in particular had this operatic quality. It just worked.” Mulcahy has a particular appreciation for the track “Who Wants to Live Forever,” the song that plays as our immortal protagonist Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) watches his beloved wife, Heather (Beatie Edney), die of old age.
“It conveys the epic, tragic, romance of the film,” says Mulcahy. “It’s a very sad story in a way and that song encapsulates that emotion so well.”
Originally written by Gregory Widen as a class assignment on a UCLA undergraduate screenwriting program, Highlander was initially titled The Dark Knight and, perhaps unsurprisingly given its title, featured a much darker tone. By the time Mulcahy had begun work on the movie, it had undergone significant rewrites, yet the director was immediately drawn to the original germ of an idea for the project.
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“It’s just a wonderful story,” Mulcahy says. “The script just grabbed me when I first read it; the romance, the tragedy, the action, the wonderful villain. Great characters, great story.” The tale of how Lambert landed the role of MacLeod is also the stuff of Hollywood legend in its own right.
“I was in the office at Gower Studios, and we were still casting,” Mulcahy recalls. “I was flipping through a magazine and, bang, there’s Christopher Lambert in Greystoke with these burning eyes, and I just said, ‘Guys, this is him.’” Up until that point, Lambert was known for the Luc Besson film Subway and the aforementioned Greystoke, an ‘80s reimagining of the Tarzan stories. That would soon change though. “He couldn’t speak a word of English but he was just perfect, his whole persona, everything was just right. He looked timeless. He had this haunting quality about him.”
The Highlander director confirms other notable names were considered for the part but, once he locked eyes with Lambert, there was no going back.
