Birth of the movie

Project

"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 tough 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."

"As part of JohnТs 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 McTiernanТs 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 IТve 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 everything 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 story. 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 wasnТt, in fact, very much like this?"

Construction on the Great Hall, the main log long-house building of King HrothgarТs 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 HrothgarТs 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.