And Quaid's not the only one who has put up with a lot on Dragonheart. De Laurentiis, who teamed with Cohen on the modestly budgeted 1993 surprise hit Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, jokes that she's ''built more roads here than the [Communists] in their 45-year occupation.'' The actors have less to show for their trouble; on set, the dragon who shares almost half an hour of screen time with Quaid, Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite (as a monk), and Julie Christie (Thewlis' mother) doesn't exist. The dragon's dialogue, which Connery prerecorded with Quaid at a studio near Connery's Bahamas hideaway several weeks before shooting began, is most often read by Cohen in a dead-on Connery imitation that both the director and Quaid claim increases ''spontaneity.''
But where does spontaneity come from when Draco the dragon is represented by an empty space 43 feet long and 75 feet wide (his length and wingspan) outlined in sticks and stones? Or, for closer shots, when a pair of tennis balls on sticks stands in for him? ''You're having a conversation with a dragon that's moving, and you have to concentrate on your own head movements without looking like you're having a tic attack,'' says Dina Meyer (Johnny Mnemonic), who plays Quaid's firebrand-peasant-revolutionary love interest. ''I have to watch this and be emotionally true and think about [muffling] my New York accent.'' Quaid, who read the Bible, the Koran, and Joseph Campbell's writings on mythology to prepare for his role, is more spiritual in his approach: ''I spoke to the dragon in myself.''
The scaly star of Dragonheart does not appear in final form until 18 months later, when he makes his computer-generated debut at last, courtesy of Lucas Digital's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) division.
''This is not just creating an animal, but an actor in the machine,'' says Cohen, who did six months of preliminary Draco design work with Jurassic Park dinosaur designer Phil Tippett. ''It's like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, only the Sundance Kid is in the computer.'' He adds that the dragon's face — cued both by Connery's audio tracks and his videotaped expressions while recording them, as well as a reference file of clips from 35 Connery films — is intended to be alternately ''sardonic, angry, sweet, charming, and innocent, even a little sexy.'' (Jim Henson's Creature Shop spent $1.4 million to develop Draco in 1991, but its version of Draco was rejected in part because ''his mouth tended to flap,'' says De Laurentiis.)
Even Connery needed some fine-tuning at the beginning of his Bahamas recording sessions. ''I think Dennis felt about Sean the way I did — we were both a little in awe,'' says the 47-year-old director, who met the challenge of shooting his Bruce Lee biopic a few months after a heart attack with less anxiety. ''So Dennis was sort of underreading his lines and...it wasn't happening. Finally, I said, 'Let's pick up the pace and kind of put a little more edge on this.' So, next take, Dennis started to act and Sean started to react. I said, 'That's much better, very much better, Sean.' And he looked over his little half glasses at Dennis and said, 'And the offscreen lines are getting much better also.'''
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