Monty Python and the Holy Grail - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Monty Python and the Holy Grail

[kylie]

Early drafts of the script had the action take place in 787, 1167, or 1282. The setting chosen was 932. Since the film is not remotely historically accurate, it makes no difference which date was chosen.

[violet]

As part of their stained glass and interior decoration, several medieval cathedrals included illustrations of virtues and vices. The vice of cowardice was depicted as a knight running away from a rabbit. Notre Dame in Paris has no fewer than three such medallions of the "Killer Rabbit".

[cameron]

The Intermission Song appears to be an excerpt from Fats Waller's "Alligator Crawl".

[norma]

According to Sir Michael Palin, "casting was largely determined mainly by who'd written what. Castle Anthrax was a Galahad thing and I'd written that with Terry, so I was cast as Galahad; Terry Jones had written Bedevere; Launcelot was a mixture of stuff we'd written, but John Cleese seemed to fit that well; Eric Idle had written Brave Sir Robin, so he got the Sir Robin parts, and the rest were subsidiary parts, which again I think were probably largely to do originally with who wrote what."

[janice]

When this movie screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the audience laughed at the opening credits. However, the projector stopped and the audience just roared with laughter, thinking it was all part of this movie. It turned out there was a bomb scare, and firemen came in and made everyone in the cinema go outside.

[chad]

The major knights all have appropriate artwork on their shields and armor. The cowardly Sir Robin has a chicken for his emblem. Bedevere, a man of science and nature, has a tree. Launcelot, an overzealous knight that often kills without thought, has a rampant gryphon emblem. King Arthur, who receives a vision from God in the sky/sun for his quest, has a symbol depicting the sun. Sir Galahad, a pure knight who has his purity tested with a visit to a castle filled with temptresses, has a holy cross. And the Black Knight has a wild boar, which is quite representative of his stubborn personality and refusing to admit defeat.

[addison]

The Dead Collector's line "Because he hasn't got shit all over him" was ad-libbed by Eric Idle.

[janice]

This movie contains no end credits.

[edgar]

Though he was renowned as the most restrained and unflappable of the Pythons, when Sir Michael Palin was asked to do a seventh take of the scene where he crawls through mud, he had, in his own words, "A jolly good blow-up." John Cleese and Graham Chapman were so astonished that they gave him a round of applause.

[caroline]

At the start of the Tale of Sir Robin, there is a slow camera zoom in on rocky scenery (that in the voice-over is described as "the dark forest of Ewing"). This is actually a still photograph of The Gorge at Mount Buffalo National Park in Victoria, Australia. Production manager Julian Doyle stated in 2000 during an interview with Hotdog Magazine that it was a still image filmed with candles underneath the frame (to give a heat haze). This was a low-cost method of achieving a convincing location effect.

[kim]

Scenes such as Arthur approaching the first castle and Launcelot's running dash to Swamp Castle were filmed on Hampstead Heath, a London park beside one of the city's busiest road junctions.

[jeffrey]

On the DVD audio commentary, John Cleese expresses irritation at a scene set in Castle Anthrax, where he says the focus was on technical aspects rather than comedy.

[clayton]

According to Terry Gilliam, on his first shot, the camera broke.

[kyle]

The establishing shot showing the "forest of Ewing" was actually stock footage of Yosemite Valley.

[kenzi]

Arthur's army at the end of the movie was made up entirely of one hundred seventy-five students (shot from various angles to make it seem as if there was double that number) from Scotland's University of Stirling. According to a casting call sent to the school by the production, each student was paid two pounds sterling, and got free transportation, food, and "an abundance of crazy antics" for a single day's work.

[bernard]

Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones spent two weeks scouting locations in Britain. On the Special Edition DVD and Blu-ray editions of this movie, there is a bonus documentary about the location scouting with Sir Michael Palin and Terry Jones revisiting several of the locations they used in this movie and several more that were considered, but never used.