William Tell (Claes Bang) takes aim;
A long-shot of son Walter (Tobias Jowett);
A FULL-SCALE facsimile of a 14th-century Swiss village is not where Empire expected to end up an hour on from landing at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. Yet here we are, amid gatehouses, battlements and market stalls groaning with fabricated victuals, on the set of action-heavy saga William Tell. The film stars Claes Bang as the Swiss folk hero, who, according to legend, shot an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow, a stunt that will be the focus of today’s shoot. Bang and director Nick Hamm tell us about pulling off the legacy-defining act.
APPROACH THE MARK
“It’s a massive choice Tell has to make,” Bang says of the legendary marksman. “How do you go about making sense of something like that?” The actor had heard of Friedrich Schiller’s play about the marksman’s alleged role in the Swiss fight for independence, but wasn’t certain on its specifics. “I thought he was like a travelling circus, shooting apples for money,” he admits. “It turns out [he’s] a much bigger deal.” In Hamm’s film, Tell’s dilemma comes about after he refuses to bend the knee to his country’s Austrian overlords. As punishment, vicious viceroy Gessler (Connor Swindells) forces him to demonstrate his shooting prowess on son Walter (Tobias Jowett): a brutal show of authority that Hamm describes as “terrorism in its purest form”.