Guy Ritchie filmed King Arthur movie in Wales

The production team built three key sets at Leavesden Studios near London to create the run-down city of Londinium, the kingdom of Camelot and an enormous cave setting beneath it.

These key sets were altered and adapted to form around a dozen separate story spaces.

Snowdonia in north-west Wales became the wild expansive landscapes that surround Camelot, following scouting across the UK by location manager Amanda Stevens and production designer Gemma Jackson.

“Gemma and I felt that the landscape should be one with dramatic, barren vistas that wouldn’t have changed for centuries, so the challenge was finding that in today’s [British] countryside, which has had centuries of partitioning and farming,” says Stevens.

Six months of negotiations with environmental advisor National Resources Wales resulted in permissions to build sets in Snowdonia, which is designated as a site of special scientific interest.

Scenes were also shot in the Forest of Dean on the Welsh-English border and on the Isle of Skye to the west of mainland Scotland.

Wales’ national park locations are regularly used by big-budget Hollywood productions as they offer wilderness visuals within just a few hours of London’s major studio facilities, while still qualifying for the UK’s generous tax credit support.

Several warehouse facilities have already been adapted into studio facilities near Cardiff and Newport. Production company Bad Wolf, based between Cardiff and Los Angeles, has also announced plans to develop a studio facility spanning some 253,000 sq ft at a business park near Cardiff city centre, which will comprise a pair of linked buildings.

Wolf Studios Wales will host production for Bad Wolf’s upcoming high-end dramas A Discovery of Witches and His Dark Materials.

Images: Daniel Smith/Warner Bros. Entertainment/Village Roadshow Films/Ratpac-Dune Entertainment