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About The Production
"When you approach a period film, you
have to recreate everything," explains director/producer
John McTiernan. "If we were doing an action sequence on a
street in Los Angeles, we would just pick the location and fill
in the blanks. But with this film we have to fill in every single
thing."
The filmmakers did extensive research into the time period they
were depicting and also took committed effort to use similar materials
and means of construction for the environment and clothing used
in the film. Yet they were also aware that the goal of their work
was to create the background for an action feature film and they
chose not to be enslaved strictly within the confines of their
own research findings.
"The designs for the buildings and the costumes and the weapons
used are not all exactly historically accurate," says novelist/producer
Michael Crichton. "This is, in part, a fable and so our wish
was to give it the right flavor and to capture the essence of
the time period."
"We were mostly concerned that we stayed accurate to the
geography of the imagination," relates John McTiernan. "One
of the best examples of how this concept plays out is with the
costuming for the warriors. These were twelve pretty rough guys
who made their living as mercenaries, traveling all over Europe.
Contemporary audiences bring their own connotations to interpretation
of costuming. For instance, there was no notion that these warriors
were men in tights. Even if a piece of costuming might be historically
accurate, it might have been emotionally wrong. Our aim was always
to create an authentic feel and environment for the story, and
one that supported the depiction of the characters and the action."
Principal photography for Touchstone Pictures' "The 13th
Warrior" began on location in British Columbia, Canada. However,
the search for the ideal location to shoot the film began almost
two years earlier.
Much of the action of the film takes place in the Norse kingdom
of King Hrothgar, and so McTiernan began his scout by looking
for that principal environment.
"My notion was that these people lived in a rain forest surrounded
by huge trees," begins McTiernan. "Modern day Norway
has farms everywhere and no original forests left. To me, that
looked too soft, and not raw enough. I imagined that Norway at
that time was not unlike the Pacific Northwest is now.
Serving as his own pilot, McTiernan flew over hundreds of miles
of coastline and eventually found the spot he was searching for
on the north coast of Vancouver Island, near Campbell River at
Elk Bay, overlooking the Johnson Strait. The 200 acre site included
old growth forests of cedar and fir trees, as well as a 20 acre
area that recently had been harvested by local forestry management
firms.
"The location was surrounded by 50 miles of forest in every
direction and that was the world I was trying to depict,"
explains McTiernan. "These humans' homes existed in a tiny
pocket in the middle of a vast, unknown, frightening and probably
dangerous world. There is a humorous expression in the story,
'The deeper you go in the forest, the more things there are to
eat your horse.' And it was sort of a funny way of saying that
it is scary out there.
"That kind of an isolated environment is a very different
place," continues McTiernan. "The people who lived in
that world would also think and deal with each other differently.
They would be affected by their environment in their choice of
available materials for their existence. They would build everything
out of the giant trees that surrounded them, and we imagined that
their architecture would have been not unlike the Native Americans
of the Pacific Northwest."
"John found this site that is ideal for the story and has
some spectacular scenery and vistas," says producer Ned Dowd.
"We enjoyed incredible cooperation from the provincial government,
the British Columbia Ministry of Forests and from International
Forest Products Limited Company to receive permission to film
there. But the sheer size of this project, from construction to
access for crew, presented some mammoth logistical challenges.
"From a systems standpoint, we really had to start from scratch,"
Dowd explains. "The nearest town was 30 miles away. If you
work it backwards from filming to when we started, it's extraordinary.
On one day we had 200 horsemen, 300 villagers and 50 Norse warriors
and their stunt doubles, as well as the filming crew of sometimes
three hundred people. We had to transport these people, feed them,
clothe them and figure out how it would all work. It was a wonderful
challenge.
"As part of John's concept for the action sequences, he wanted
the warriors to be able to walk in and out of the buildings, all
in the same continuing shot," relates Dowd of McTiernan's
plan for filming. "With that in mind, our production designer
Wolf Kroeger had to design almost every building on the site to
work as an interior and exterior set and not simply as a facade
of scenery.
"I think Wolf Kroeger is mercilessly energetic and tireless,"
praises McTiernan of his production designer. "He is one
of the best designers I've ever worked with."
"Building something amidst all of the elements is much more
exciting," enthuses production designer Wolf Kroeger. "If
you were to do this film in a studio, it would never have the
same quality and feel that it did being on location, out in the
mud and dirt and the miserable weather. The terrain was huge and
hard to get a hold of at first, but it also brought every thing
alive. You begin with a concept and start to carve and build things,
and the land and the materials help you to make something very
organic and real. The shapes and the colors are all based on the
trees and the surroundings.
"The Greens crew sometimes reached 50 and 60 strong, and
they played a major role in this film for almost every department,"
continues Kroeger. "Besides clearing trails and making roads
and paths safer for smaller vehicles, they recycled the brush
and debris, collecting bark, ferns, leaves and all sorts of natural
material for the design departments to work with."
Speaking about his preparation for the design of the film, Kroeger
says, "As you do research about this time period you realize
that there is surprisingly little information about it. You get
conflicting opinions and suppositions depending on the source
you seek. This is not a documentary, so in a sense one of the
strongest directives comes from the script and what the physical
requirements are from the storx~ That can be very freeing as well,
because, with hundreds of people working together using these
materials and with the purpose of creating something functional
and engaging, who is to be sure it wasn't, in fact, very
much like this?"
Construction on the Great Hall, the main log long-house building
of King Hrothgar's settlement, took thirteen weeks of work by
over 200 carpenters to complete. Towering 47 feet in the air and
encompassing 12,000 square feet of interior space on the ground
floor alone, the hall is also surrounded by numerous village dwellings.
"The scope of this film is amazing in terms of the wardrobe
and the weapons and buildings that had to be created," says
Ned Dowd. "None of these things exist. The challenge was
not only to have the articles made, but to create the workshops
for wardrobe, props, set dressing and other artisans to create
the quantities we needed."
"We even created our own sawmill in addition to having two
others that we had contracted to provide us with custom work,"
explains construction coordinator Doug Hardwick. "We needed
very wide planks with the bark still on them, and that is not
standard supply at the local lumber yard. In total, and just for
the Great Hall, we used over 500 tons of wood for set construction,
about 560,000 board feet."
"We needed three ships for the story," says director/producer
John McTiernan. "I had assumed during pre-production that
we would just take existing boats and put a scenery arrangement
around them. Yet it turned out that the simplest or at least the
most functional idea was actually to build the ships in the way
they had been built a thousand years ago.
Ned Dowd notes, "We eventually built a 95-foot ocean-going
vessel, a 95-foot river boat which had a much smaller draw in
terms of where the boat could operate, as well as a 65-foot smaller
boat. They were all built to scale in terms of the ships of that
period and with 18 oars on each side. We had a champagne-bottle
launch for them when they went into the water, and it was quite
an impressive sight to see."
Construction coordinator Doug Hardwick was also impressed and
excited with the results, saying, "I have never built anything
in the way of scenery that came close to what it felt like to
be on those ships. It was a delight. We built them to the specifications
from one thousand years ago and so we really had recreated a piece
of technology, because all a boat really is, is a shape. They
had the same shape and the same weight and they handled beautifully.
It was hard at first to convince some people that they were stable.
But my philosophy was, if the Norsemen had sailed them across
the Atlantic, they had to have had a pretty good design to begin
with."
Local carvers, including the renowned Native American carver Max
Chickite, were recruited by the production as well. Director/producer
John McTiernan notes, "When we hired artisans and carvers
to create some totem poles for Hrothgar's settlement, we asked
them to use exactly the same techniques they would normally use,
but to exchange their traditional forms with Nordic motifs. For
example, instead of a whale, they carved eagles. They had no difficulty
translating the designs, and the totem poles they created were
quite spectacular additions to the environment.
"We also found a lot of Nordic people in British Columbia
who were willing to be background players, or extras, in the film,"
notes McTiernan. "Though most of them had never been extras
before, they were quite excited about it. I was thrilled that
they were such professional, interesting and nice people. They
were a very high caliber of background players, and they made
the atmosphere on set better as well."
"We had the best group of extras on this film," notes
make-up designer Jeff Dawn. "They were so eager to work and
so excited to get dirty every day. They seemed to love it actually.
People from a thousand years ago were probably very clean, but
the notion is that everyone was dirty ... so for the big crowd
scenes we dirtied everyone up and goofed up their hair. There
are actually products, such as Clean-Dirt, to do this sort of
thing," says Dawn, adding with a smile, "Generally people
don't get as upset when you come at them with something called
Clean-Dirt."
"For some of the largest scenes, we had 200 attacking horsemen,"
notes McTiernan. "We had to train all of them. We were running
a couple of equestrian schools. For the largest scenes, we had
a whole phalanx of assistant directors just to be able to treat
the operation like an army, or at least like a battle exercise.
With filmmaking, the enemies are rising winds, dropping temperatures
or the diminishing or approaching light, as well as a variety
of other factors. "Since it is a period film, we also had to put everyone through make-up and hair and through wardrobe," continues McTiernan. "Before we were even rolling the cameras, we had various crews at work for as much as six hours simply to get everyone ready" Your Comments and Suggestions are Always Welcome. © 2010 3®, All Rights Reserved. |
