At this point, a lot of people have read the script for Spectre, and many more (such as you who are reading this) have read at least a summary. Several people have asked if I “got the idea” from ______(insert fantasy book)_____. The answer is, yes and no.
I was about 13 years old when I really got into fantasy-genre novels. I started out with the Prydain novels, and graduated to Dragonlance and then after that anything by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. After them, I moved onto David Eddings, and eventually to Robert Jordan.
The Prydain novels featured a powerful black sword that much of the story focused around. Weis and Hickman had an entire series called The Darksword Trilogy (which they also released a supplemental book for at the time, and a follow-up sequel over a decade later). I have not, however, as some people asked, read anything by Michael Moorcock. Apparently he has a series about a magical soul-eating blade. 
In addition to those fantasy books and many others, I was also really into fantasy computer games. Back then I poured myself into games like Pool of Radiance (the first of the popular “Gold Box” style games), Might & Magic, Wizardry, King’s Quest, and Ultima. My favorite game, and the one to which I lovingly dedicate the name of this movie, was The Bard’s Tale.
I played the Bard’s Tale on a black-and-white Mac Plus (with a whopping 1 MB of RAM and 20 MB hard drive). The graphics were great, and the black and white design actually made it more appealing than the PC version that most people are probably familiar with. It was one of those games that only allowed you to save the game if you made it back to the guild hall where you started. Yes, kids, that means if you died while you were out in the dangerous dungeons, you died. None of this weak “Load Saved Game” crap. There was no auto-mapping, no auto-saving, and I swear the monsters hit faster and harder than they do today. (God, I’m turning into an old geek now!)
Anyway, two things came from The Bard’s Tale that were directly translated into Spectre. The first, is Garin, the main character. In the Bard’s Tale, you created a group of up to six characters to adventure together. Because the game was so hard for new characters to survive, I often lost many of them before they got very far. Gold was scarce in those early levels, so it was cheaper to make a new character rather than resurrect him. So when some characters would actually manage to live to become level 2 or 3, I’d get exicted and become a little attached. Eventually, once all of my heroes had grown up and were really powerful, I went and wrote some elaborate back-stories for them. I would use the same character names for each character between games, and that led to the invention of these elaborate but goofy story-lines for them that attempted to explain how all their adventures in all these games linked together.
The leader of my standard adventuring party was always a Paladin named Sir Gary. (Don’t laugh, give me a break, I was 13). 
The name Gary was probably some weak derivative from “Graham” which was the name of the main character in the King’s Quest series. (No offense to all the Gary’s out there). And for those of you nodding your head because you know the name “Graham” came from King’s Quest… you have even less cause to laugh.
Sir Gary was always at the head of my adventuring party. He wasn’t necessarily the most powerful warrior in the group, but he was always my go-to guy. Mr. Reliable. I envisioned him as being older than all the rest of the young twenty-something’s in the party; a grizzled veteran leading a young team. He was the patriarch in the group whom everyone respected and loved.
On one memorable adventure in the Bard’s Tale, I was trying to get into a well-defended castle. A stone golem was blocking the gate. This creature was well beyond the party’s skill at the time, and it managed to wipe out almost everyone. The one person that made it through and finally killed the monster was good ol’ Sir Gary. So excited was I by that success that I daydreamed and probably wrote all about it. To this day I can still see how the battle played out in my head. Keep in mind that battles in those old games were text-based! Because I was so into the game, I would dream up what the action and sword-strikes looked like. Now-a-days, you see the battle pretty clearly with all the high-end graphics. Which is cool too, of course.
Eventually, as high school, sports, and later college caught up to me, I had less time for these computer RPG’s. My thirst for fantasy was satiated by (ahem…) Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Sir Gary and the others became just an archived save-game on a floppy somewhere, and I moved onto other things.
But those characters have lived with me for so long now. About 4 years ago I decided I wanted to try and make a movie featuring one of them. I chose one of the characters I especially liked (Norell, a wizard character I had made) and developed an elaborate plot for him. But that story proved to be a little too big for what I was ready to handle. Instead I found myself drawn to Sir Gary and some of the stories I had written around him. One in particular… about his encounter with the “Spectre Blade” … stood out to me.
Thus, the initial spark for the first draft of our script showed up.
At first the main character of this movie was simply referred to as “The Lone Warrior” because he was the sole survivor on a battlefield. Once Brad and I fleshed out his back-story and changed the script so he wasn’t the only survivor, it was time to give him a name. “Gary” might have worked for me 17 years ago, but it clearly needed a little tweaking. So with that, Garin, the once great Paladin, was born.
Personifying Garin is a fine local actor named David Lawlor. I was drawn to David’s headshot because he had that “Sir Gary” look I remembered as a kid. He was the right age for the role, and it took only a very short time after meeting him for me to realize that he was indeed the right man for the role. I’ll talk about David and the other actors on this project soon enough. They deserve a lore more attention than this silly blog entry can do justice to.
But as for inspirations, there’s one more source I have to mention: Where Spectre itself came from.
In the Bard’s Tale (yeah, I know,… can you tell I liked that game?) the most powerful weapon in the game (and the one that was most difficult to acquire) was called the “Spectre Snare”. It gave you a fantastic armor bonus, it landed a critical hit with every attack, and it had the ability to take command of (”snare”) almost any monster in the game; anything up to the power of a spectre. Hence, the name: the spectre snare. Naturally I was fascinated by this weapon. But what the hell does a “Spectre Snare” look like? Was it a sword? An axe? A bazooka? I guess nobody really knows. Other than maybe David W. Bradley who wrote the game back in the 80’s. And since I’ve never met him or asked, I’ve taken it upon myself to answer that question.
The point of all this reminiscence is that it wasn’t just one book or game that inspired the story of Spectre. We are constantly influenced by our experiences. As artists, we pull ideas from our catalog of life events and respond to them. I’ll never fully know every little thing that inspired this particular story. Just like I’ll never know what helps David to create his interpretation of Garin.
Certain intentional inspirations will stand out: such as the name Graham becoming Gary which then became Garin. The spectre snare later became a Dungeons & Dragons style holy sword with the Vampirism ability. It was that odd combination of powers seemed contradictory to me: a “holy sword” and vampirism? I asked myself, “Wow, if only that sword could talk, what a neat story it would have to tell.” So what did I do? I made it a talking sword.
The look of the Spectre sword in the movie might have been born initially of something I imagined in the Darksword trilogy or Prydain, or maybe not. Vicky and I worked on what may have been around a hundred designs before we landed on the one you’ll see in the movie.
Rather than “copying” or just mirroring what I’ve seen elsewhere, I really like to think of all these inspirations above as “responses” to the fantasy genre I’ve come to love. Part of what drives my desire to tell stories like this is to satisfy the 13 year old still inside my heart. (I’ve got enough age now for 2 of them and a few toddlers as well) Part of it is to give a tip of the hat to Weis, Hickman, Jordan, Tolkien, Alexander, Lewis, Eddings, etc. But most of it comes from a desire to simply craft a good story. A story that might in turn inspire somebody else. Maybe some other 13 year old out there who loves fantasy books and games. Maybe my own kids.
BTW - I can’t wait to buy computer RPG’s “for my teenage son” in 10 years.
There are some who believe, as I think I do, that stories are not invented or created, but are actually found through the tools and technologies of our imagination. Perhaps every story that could ever possibly be told floats out there in some ethereal plane. Every now and then we can glimpse into that plane and those stories. Maybe when a story is just ready to be told, it finds us, like it or not.
Like the old man in a rocker that finds a cat jumping on his lap, something about me and my situation at the time is comfortable to that story and so it chooses me be the storyteller. We all have this ability. We do it every single day. Train yourself to gently reach out and see if one of those stories sticks. Don’t hunt it. Let me fall into your lap.
I’m darn happy that the story of Sir Gary and his spectre snare decided to stick around so I could tell you all about it.
Good ol’ Gary…. Leading the way for his team. Maybe one day I’ll get around to telling the stories for those other 5 adventuring heroes. If I do, it will only because he blazed a path for them with Spectre in hand.
