What are Dragons?
From the interview “100 Questions for Roland Joffe” by Zenit.org
Why, the title: There Be Dragons?
We decided to call the film There Be Dragons because I liked the title and I wanted the title to have a kind of luminous quality. I didn’t want it to say, exactly, what it was about and yet, at the same time, I did want to convey what it was about.
The movie is about us, finding our own dragons. Where are our dragons? They reside in those parts of ourselves we are worried about voyaging into. And, of course, I liked the idea that, rumour has it, on old maps – when they didn’t know, or when they were going into unchartered territories – people, actually, said: ‘Here be dragons’. I’ve always thought that was rather interesting.
The dragon is a very extraordinary creature, because it’s both a creature of terror and a creature of hope and good luck. And that, to me, says something quite interesting about our darker sides; about what we call ‘sin’ – which maybe a gateway to something quite ‘other’. There’s no need to be frightened of sin: it may be a gateway to bliss.
