Trivia for
A Knight's Tale (2001) More at IMDbPro »

• Heath Ledger knocked out one of director Brian Helgeland's front teeth with a broomstick when the two were demonstrating a jousting move. It was several months before Helgeland's mouth had healed enough to repair the damage. He says it was the only jousting injury during filming.
  
  
• Plenty of effort was expended creating lances that would splinter convincingly without taking out the stunt riders as well. The body of each lance was scored so it would break easily, and the tips were made of balsa wood. Each was also hollowed out, and the hole filled with balsa chips and (obviously uncooked) linguini to make convincing splinters.
  
  
• The actor playing the younger version of William has different colored eyes but Brian Helgeland didn't feel it would be fair to make the young actor wear contact lenses.
  
  
• A medieval version of The London Eye (a large Ferris wheel) can be seen in the aerial shot of London. The shot is not computer generated but is of a model which cost $500,000.
  
  
• Once again the shot of the Mercury astronauts walking in slow motion in The Right Stuff (1983) makes an appearance, this time when Will and his team march out for the championship.
  
  
• Newsweek revealed in June 2001 that print ads for at least four movies released by Columbia Pictures, including this film and The Animal (2001), contained glowing comments from a film reviewer who did not actually exist. The fake critic, "David Manning," was created by a Columbia employee who worked in the advertising department. "Manning" was misrepresented as a reviewer for a newspaper in a small Connecticut town.
  
  
• The video version of the film, released prior to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, was recalled because it contained a Spider-Man (2002) preview that included a shot of the World Trade Center.
  
  
• Olivia Williams made a brief appearance as Chaucer's wife, but her scenes were deleted. They can be seen on the special edition DVD.
  
  
• Two of the characters in the film, Peter The Pardoner and Simon The Summoner, are characters from Geoffrey Chaucer's work, "The Canterbury Tales".
  
  
• Paul Bettany (Geoffrey Chaucer) developed laryngitis because of all the yelling he had to do as William's herald.
  
  
• When Chaucer first introduces "Sir Ulrich" in his speech, the crowd does not react at first because the Czech extras could not understand the speech. This reaction, or lack of it, was left in.
  
  
• During the first award ceremony with William and Adhemar, Chaucer kisses Count Adhemar's herald twice. This was the response to a request from director Brian Helgeland to "surprise him", though he never specified how.
  
  
• The phrase that Chaucer tells Will when they get to the first tournament, "I've got to go see a man about a dog," is an archaic reference for going to the bathroom. Although unlikely to have seen use in Chaucer's day, it was in use in the early-1900s.
  
  
• Some of the extras were homeless people from Prague.
  
  
• For the scene when William follows Jocelyn into the cathedral, the sounds of his horse's hooves were produced using coconuts on Charles Maynes' garage floor.
  
  
• The initial scene of the two knights jousting in the first scene of the movie is actually footage of Heath Ledger's stunt double in an accident. During filming of a later scene in the movie, the lance of the stunt double's opponent moved off target and hit him in the head. The double fell to the ground unconscious. The entire footage was used for the introduction.
  
  
• The terrific crunching sound heard whenever a lance shatters in the film is largely made up of the sound of a howitzer being fired. In order to produce the long crunching impact, the sound of the howitzer was slowed down by half.
  
  
• Director Brian Helgeland once said in an interview that he had a simple explanation for the use of modern music in the movie. He said that he felt it would show people today what people then felt about their music. When true Renaissance music is used in movies today it fails to convey the emotional response that people back then had to such music. Helgeland used modern music to try to elicit an emotional response in the movie audience akin to what medieval people would have felt when hearing the music of that time.
  
  
• Gelderland is a real region covering a part of Germany and the Netherlands. Therefore Sir Ulrich’s name caused many unplanned laughs in the cinemas there.
  
  
• The scene in which Chaucer declaims the wonders of Sir Ulrich following his win of the sword competition features a large number of extras who did not speak English. Therefore, when Paul Bettany finished his speech, they remained silent. Mark Addy's loud prompt was what tipped them off to start cheering.
  
  
• When first introducing Sir Ulrich at the joust we hear Chaucer (Bettany) make a point of including the lower classes attending the tournament by saying "And everyone else here not sitting on a cushion". This is a reference to The Beatles' Royal Commend performance in 1963 when John Lennon introduced the last song by saying "The people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you'd just rattle your jewelry".
  
  

Related Links