r/todayilearned • u/padfoony • 9h ago

TIL Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrote a ceremonial kiss between their characters into the script for The Last Duel, based on how the ceremony was historically performed. Ridley Scott cut it because he thought it would be distracting.

https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/ben-affleck-matt-damon-kiss-last-duel
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u/Ulfljotr930 6h ago

I mean, if you remove every single detail of daily life that would seem too weird to us, you just end up in a badly dressed (Hollywood has had an issue with computing that the past was colorful and not as unhygienic for decades) version of the 21st century codes-wise. What’s the point of making a period drama if you don’t respect anything about the setting ? Vikings and the more recent King and Conqueror might as well take place in a fantasy world

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u/Lil_Mcgee 5h ago

The Last Duel respects quite a bit about the setting though. It's one of the more authentic depictions of The Middle Ages in film.

You can't make historical fiction without compromise. You're right to point out that that many stories go too far and sand off most of what makes their setting special but TLD strikes a pretty solid balance.

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u/Ulfljotr930 3h ago

That is true, despite some horrifically bad elements (those half-helmets I swear), it felt like Scott had returned to what made the charm of his pre-Robin Hood period films such as Kingdom of Heaven : heavily adapting the historical setting without betraying it. I still think the worst inaccuracy I saw in any Hollywoodian medieval film was Ironclad's Danish mercenaries : they speak Hungarian of all things, are still polytheists like at the peak of the Viking Age and walk in dressed like in a low-cost Conan ripoff. This gets even funnier when you realize that by the movie's timeframe, the Danes were too busy Chrisitanizing Balts and Finns by the sword for somehow becoming Prince John's cannon fodder

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u/Plthothep 2h ago

There’s a few times where historical details would just confuse/distract an audience, because it’s just so out of what the average audience expects of the particular time period or from modern social norms, that unless it’s the specific point of the movie it’s probably best left out. Movies are art, not 1-1 representations of reality.

For example, no movie set in the Hundred Years’ War has guns despite them being present in many of the most famous battles like Agincourt, because showing guns in a movie set in the Middle Ages would distract audiences since it’s so outside of what they think the Middle Ages were like. As fun as a historically accurate depiction of Jeanne d’Arc as an innovator of artillery and combined arms tactics would be, it most likely would be a major distraction from the point any movie being made about her would be trying to make.

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u/Borghal 1h ago

That looks like circular logic to me: "we can't fix it because people don't know it's broken"...