George Lucas is not known for writing the best romances. The Star Wars prequels ruined his reputation for that.
But would you be surprised to know that Lucas has pondered love from the beginning of his career all the way to its unofficial end? Both Willow (1988) and Strange Magic (2015) use enchantments to explore the nature of love — and both may very well take inspiration from William Shakespeare.
Lucas conceived of fantasy epic Willow (1988) in 1972, between the release of THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973). Although the movie took 16 years to come together and Lucas ended up having Bob Dolman write it and Ron Howard direct it, he was very involved in its creation.
Dolman told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022: “George was really hands-on, wanting to go page by page through each draft, talk about everything we were doing and then send me back to do another draft.”
And Willow is a movie with a small but pivotal subplot revolving around a love charm.
Willow sees Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis), of a little people known as Nelwyns, take Elora Danan (Kate and Ruth Greenfield and Rebecca Bearman), a baby prophesized to one day be a benevolent empress, on a journey across a medieval fantasy world. The evil queen and sorceress Bavmorda of Nockmaar (Jean Marsh) sends her daughter Sorsha (Joanne Whalley) and General Kael (Pat Roach) to hunt down the baby. Along the way Willow meets rogueish warrior Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), pint-sized “Brownies” and comic relief Rool (Kevin Pollak) and Franjean (Rick Overton), and good sorceress Fin Raziel (Patricia Hayes) who becomes a magical mentor to the titular Nelwyn. They band together to push back an onslaught of evil and a few of them even fall in love.
Except the courtship between Sorsha and Madmartigan requires a little bit of persuasion. Although the two start the movie on opposing sides, and hate one another, Madmartigan is pierced by Cupid’s arrow, figuratively, when Franjean hits the Daikini (what Brownies call humans) with the Dust of Broken Hearts. The former knight finds himself enthralled by the malicious princess, which nearly sabotages his saving Elora Danan.
Although the fairy dust’s mystical effects seemingly wear off eventually, Madmartigan’s love for Sorsha appears to organically grow. His caring for her even brings about a change in her heart.
But is what Madmartigan feels of his own will, or the byproduct of magical brainwashing?
Almost three decades after Willow, Lucas returned to this philosophical question with the animated jukebox musical Strange Magic, the last film Lucasfilm was working on during the Disney acquisition. Much like with Willow he handed off the screenwriting task — this time to David Berenbaum, Irene Mecchi and director Gary Rydstrom — but served as a guiding creative force behind the project.
Strange Magic starts with fairy princess Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood) set to marry the handsome Roland (Sam Palladio), but she catches him cheating. She vows never to love again, which leads to Roland teaming with lowly elf Sunny (Elijah Kelley), who has an unrequited love for Marianne’s sister Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull). Sunny seeks the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth) to create love potions so he and Roland can woo Dawn and Marianne, much to the chagrin of the Bog King (Alan Cumming). He wants to destroy all love potions and fairies, and retaliates by kidnapping Dawn. Marianne goes to save her and a bizarre comedy of errors results. One sister falls in love with the villain via love potion while the other does so naturally.
Lucasfilm acknowledges the obvious inspiration for Strange Magic is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The comedy play, written around 1595, takes place in Athens and follows lovers and actors at the mercy of fairy whims. Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen Titania are estranged, so he instructs the mischievous Puck to create a magical juice derived from a flower called “love-in-idleness.” Applying the concoction to the eyelids of a sleeping person causes them to fall in love with the first person they see. Although Oberon hopes to use the juice to shame Titania, many hijinks ensue with the human characters falling in love left and right. Fortunately, the fairies eventually restore everything to normal, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Willow and Strange Magic follow the rules of the love juice in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a certain point. They do deviate, however, in ways that provide fascinating insights into movie productions and an artist’s inner life.
Willow first introduces the Dust of Broken Hearts about halfway through the movie. Willow enters into a human bar looking for milk for Elora, and Rool spies an attractive young woman. “Ooh, look at her! l could use a loνe potion on her!” he proclaims, and tries to take the Dust of Broken Hearts from Franjean. He ends up with a face full of the stuff. Rool does indeed fall in love with the first being he sees. The problem is the first thing he sees is a cat — with love almost leading to his death.
All we find out about the Dust of Broken Hearts is, as Franjean protests, it’s very dangerous and “It belongs to the fairies.” This charm certainly matches up with the effects of juice from the love-in-idleness flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when it comes to Rool. Madmartigan’s encounter with the Dust of Broken Hearts is a different story.
Madmartigan does not fall in love with the first being he sees. He, in fact, lays eyes on the Brownies, Willow and Elora Danan before being overwhelmed with affection at the sight of Sorsha.
Now, there are certainly a few factors we could infer that would not bend plausibility. Perhaps an unspoken rule of the Dust of Broken Hearts is not falling in love outside of your sexuality. We know Madmartigan is into women because we see his post-coitus escape from a cheating wife’s husband. Who knows what Rool is into — female cats, male cats, I’m not kinkshaming! And as for Elora, well, falling in love with a baby is weird (unless you’re a werewolf).
But rather than the Dust of Broken Hearts having consistent rules, I think it’s more likely the love potion resulted from post-production story retooling.
Looking at the first draft, third revision of Willow from November 14, 1986, the Dust of Broken Hearts is absent. The dynamic between Madmartigan and Sorsha develops in a similar way, but he falls for her naturally.
There is a bit more work put in to sell their love. When Madmartigan first sees Sorsha without her helmet he blurts out “You’re beautiful,” the only pre-Dust of Broken Hearts hint left in the movie of his attraction to her. After he and Willow escape from the Nockmaar, there’s an extended bit of dialogue around the camp fire in which Madmartigan confesses he was hurt by a woman he loved:
MADMARTIGAN
I was in love once, Willow. She had a hold on my heart. I could barely function. (a pause) I was a great swordsman! I was knighted! I could have been king!
WILLOW
You?
MADMARTIGAN
Yeah me. King! But she betrayed me. She robbed me of my dream.
Madmartigan gently rocks the baby and stares at the fire. Willow watches him curiously.
MADMARTIGAN
I’ll never fall in love again…
Later, when captured by the Nockmaar, the Madmartigan of the script continually flirts with Sorsha, telling her “Nice horse…nice hair…real nice hair…I’d say you’ve got the most beautiful hair I’ve ever–.” This dialogue kicks off a back-and-forth, as Sorsha has Willow brought into her tent, to help with Elora, and asks about Madmartigan. The next day as they’re trudging along again, Madmartigan asks Willow if Sorsha asked about him. It’s all very high school! So when Madmartigan poetically proclaims his love to Sorsha in her tent, it is of his own volition.
The movie reduces this sequence of travel and camping to a montage in which Sorsha refuses Willow’s help, and Madmartigan tells her he’d like to break her leg and that he hates her. While the development of their relationship is mostly frontloaded in the earlier script, the theatrically-released final product moves most of their interactions to the second half of the story. Madmartigan takes Sorsha hostage in the movie (but not in the 11-14-86 script), and they get a bit of back-and-forth in which she asks about his passionate words the night before, and he claims the feelings went away. She escapes and they don’t see each other again until the battle at Tir Asleen. There she switches to his side seemingly just because no one in her life had shown her affection until him.
Sorsha’s behavior is far-fetched and shallow (even if Whalley and Kilmer had such natural chemistry they got married), and the blame can be placed on leaving her driving motivation on the cutting room floor. In the earlier script, General Kael is married to Bavmorda and is Sorsha’s abusive stepfather. A key bit of dialogue has Raziel insist that Sorsha’s father was a great king, but the younger woman won’t have it. She dismisses him, saying “My father was a weakling.” But during the battle at Tir Asleen the tipping point for her is seeing Madmartigan wearing her father’s armor. Look, she’s got daddy issues!
This subplot was retained in the shooting script and even expanded upon:
Sorsha finds her father, along with the rest of the population of Tir Asleen, trapped in stone. While the 11-14-86 draft has Willow free a dozen knights from the pillars and they take Madmartigan to the king’s armor, one can assume the implication would still be there in a longer movie that included the above scenes.
So you get a cut in which moving most of the interactions between Madmartigan and Sorsha to later in the movie hurts the credibility of his love for her, and her falling for him loses a critical element minus her father. How to salvage this underdeveloped plotline? Magically compel Madmartigan to love Sorsha!
I cannot say with 100% confidence that the Dust of Broken Hearts was added with reshoots. But Marcus Hearn’s 2005 book The Cinema of George Lucas says Dolman worked on the script from the spring to fall of 1986, suggesting the 11-14-86 draft is close to a final draft.
If you watch the Dust of Broken Hearts scenes closely, you notice how isolated they feel from the rest of the movie. The introduction of the fairy dust is just closeups on Rool and Franjean. When Franjean hits Madmartigan, Kevin Pollak’s dialogue is clearly ADRed. And Kilmer in the minutes that follow oscillates between hamming it up “under the influence” and a straightforward performance.
Regardless of what happened behind the scenes with Willow, Strange Magic feels like Lucas’ attempt to get this conceit right. The plot relies on the love potion making sense. At first it seems to abide by A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the magic having an absolute effect, but a mid-movie twist reveals an “antidote.” The Bog King has hated love for years because he once tried to use it on a girl and she ran away screaming. The Sugar Plum Fairy shatters his entire worldview when she explains the potion has no effect if you’re already in love with someone!
This messaging feels pretty optimistic compared to the lazy cynicism of Madmartigan and Sorsha’s pairing. The filmmakers behind Willow had collaborated on great romances before (The Empire Strikes Back [1980] and Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981] for Lucas, Splash [1984] for Howard), but seem to think they can coast on audiences filling in the gaps between the familiar beats of a love story.
There’s also the likelihood that Lucas’ feelings about romantic love had evolved between Willow and Strange Magic. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) is usually considered the most divorce-fueled movie of all time, because both he and Steven Spielberg were bitter about recent breakups and it shows. But the hesitance to embrace “real love” in Willow could also be a reflection of Lucas’ acrimonious 1983 divorce from Marcia Griffin that was, according to Jay Jones in the 2016 biography George Lucas: A Life, “one of the most miserable experiences of his life.”
Except Lucas was dating folk singer Linda Ronstadt from 1983 to 1988, when Willow was well into production. Madmartigan is certainly not a self-insert character for Lucas like Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), Milner (Paul Le Mat) and Terry the Toad (Charles Martin Smith) in American Graffiti and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). At the same time, his pain over a past love and falling for a “bad girl” feels very much like Lucas with Ronstadt, who was known for being a wild woman and serial dater.
Strange Magic stands apart from Willow in that it believes in love — and that may very well be because Lucas finally found love. In 2005 he met businesswoman Mellody Hobson and even though they seemingly had nothing in common, they fell in love and married in 2013. As Lucas told the New York Times in 2012:
When I asked about Hobson, Lucas said, “I’m a ’60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing.” (He was referring to his upbringing rather than his reported $3.2 billion net worth.) “And she’s an East Coast, Princeton grad, Wall Street fund manager, knows all the big players, works in the big world. You would never think that we would get together, have anything in common. But when we did, we realized we had everything in common. It was the most unlikely coupling.”
Opposites attract, which is the heart of Strange Magic. The Bog King’s reluctance to believe Marianne could really love him echoes the quiet and meek Lucas never seeming to be comfortable with his companions. But Marianne does love the Bog King and proves so when resists the love potion Roland tries to use on her during the movie’s climax.
Love is a complicated and bewildering thing. Poets have puzzled over it. Wars have been fought over it. Who can really say that the Dust of Broken Hearts wasn’t bringing out something Madmartigan was denying in himself?
I can! It’s bad and incoherent writing, a bandaid on a hemorrhaging plot. But hey, Kilmer and Whalley look great together.
The Bartcave 