Star Wars companion film Black Angel to become full-length feature
Rutger Hauer will star in the adaptation of the short film that screened alongside The Empire Strikes Back
A short film that was screened in cinemas alongside Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, is to be adapted into a feature-length fantasy film, after having been lost for decades.
Black Angel, a medieval fantasy about a knight attempting to free an imprisoned maiden, was never released on VHS or DVD. The footage was believed to have been lost until 2011, when negatives were recovered by a Universal Studios archivist. The original short was made available on YouTube earlier this year, with commentary from its director, Roger Christian.
Christian now plans to resurrect the film, inspired by more recent fantasy blockbusters such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games. While the original was produced on a shoestring budget, and filmed in the Scottish Highlands, Christian plans to film the new movie in settings as far afield as Hungary, Morocco and Belgium, as well as Scotland.
A crowdfunding project has been launched on the website Indiegogo to raise money for the production. Within a few hours of setting up the Black Angel page, the team was almost a third of the way to its $100,000 target.
According to the page, Christian and his team are aiming to recreate the feel of the original Star Wars films, relying on CGI technology only when absolutely necessary. The film is described as “a powerful tale of ancient Celtic magic and Nordic Paganism... gritty, dirty and heroic”
Actors attached to the project include Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who starred alongside Harrison Ford as the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner. He also took the titular role in Jason Eisner’s 2011 action comedy Hobo With A Shotgun. John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, will play King Aeolus.
Star Wars director George Lucas commissioned the original short. Christian is also the inventor of the original lightsaber. However, both the original film and its planned feature version share no storylines or characters with George Lucas’s films.
