Ridley Scott's only fantasy film was made almost entirely by hand, and very little about it went to plan. This video works through twenty-five behind-the-scenes stories from the production, beginning with how an original fairy tale was written from scratch around a figure out of English folklore.

Along the way: the giant artificial woodland constructed on Pinewood's 007 Stage, the movable mirrors that made it look endless, the fire that destroyed the whole set with days of shooting left, and the five and a half hours it took to turn Tim Curry into the Lord of Darkness each morning. There are casting stories about Mia Sara and Tom Cruise, the actor Scott thought of before Curry, an abandoned plan to shrink performers optically, and the goblin whose face was based on a famous guitarist.

The music takes up much of the second half. Jerry Goldsmith wrote a full orchestral score for a longer cut, then the American distributor swapped it for electronic music, leaving two versions of the same film with completely different emotional character.