Birth of the movie

From book to script

Michael Crichton completed his novel Eaters of the Dead in 1976, and had drawn the inspiration for the story from parts of a historical account written by Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan.

"In the tenth century, Ibn Fahdlan was traveling in Central Asia and came across a group of Norse warriors," says novelist/producer Michael Crichton. "Fahdlan is well known as a historical commentator because he is one of the few who wrote detailed eyewitness accounts of these people. The manuscript he wrote showed he was an astute and, seemingly, accurate observer of these travelers who he describes with a very unblinking eye and a kind of honesty and curiosity.

"The information from Fahdlan has been filtered into an account from different pieces of the manuscript and from different translations from around the world," explains Crichton. "I assembled as much of it as I could into English and used that as the basis of the first three chapters of the story.

"Baghdad was one of the major founding centers of civilization," continues Crichton. "Even in that time period, they were probably the most cosmopolitan people around. They had extraordinary knowledge and wealth and they traded with other people, so they would also absorb information from many cultures. You can see how impressionable and fascinating it would be for a person of that background to come across these gigantic warriors who sleep with their weapons, who are laughing and humorous and also crude and rough by comparison.

"The way Fahdlan described the Norse warriors was very compelling and it led me to learn more about them," Crichton says. "They were, in fact, a very remarkable group of people. Extraordinarily courageous, doing amazing exploits. They had wonderful spirit, great humor and a profoundly developed philosophy of life. How we think about them today is, in a certain way, the result of centuries of Anglo-Saxon propaganda," notes Crichton, adding with a smile, "because you know, they sacked all our ancestors."

"Where this thousand-year-old story ends, Michael Crichton took off with it and said СWhat If?Т" says director/producer John McTiernan. "I believe he sensed that there was an entertaining and contemporary story in this very old classic.

"Essentially, the story is about a cosmopolitan yuppie, if you will, who gets into political trouble when he becomes involved with the wrong girl," explains McTiernan. "He is a young politician and so they punish him by sending him off as an ambassador to a very distant land. And, in the middle of Central Asia, he stumbles into a camp of really tough guys. Because of a prophecy, he gets kidnapped and taken all the way to the northern end of the Scandinavian peninsula. IТve always liked the story, and so I spoke to Michael [Crichton] about adapting it for film."

"I had never thought of anyone seeing this as a film," says Crichton. "From a filmmakerТs perspective, it is obscurely written and there is no effort in the book to bring any one narrative line to the surface. Yet I was entertained a lot when John McTiernan saw so clearly what the film story could be."

"I liked the notion that we could do an action film with a different background," notes McTiernan. "When I was a kid, one of the things that I always found fascinating about going to the movies was the way it could take you to a world you didnТt know, to time periods that you canТt visit in any other way. Particularly as the world becomes more homogenous, it pleases the child in me to be able to go to some genuinely different places."

"Though Ibn FahdlanТs descriptions of the warriors and their behaviors were there, the characterizations are contemporary," explains Michael Crichton, discussing the launch from the manuscript into his own story and the subsequent screenplay envisioned by McTiernan and realized by William Wisher and Warren Lewis.

"When Ibn and the warriors first meet, he is openly contemptuous," Crichton says. "He sees them as almost beneath his interest. On the other hand, they are very accepting of him and, what they would see as being his rather effete manners. He is so much smaller than they are and so, on the journey, he becomes a kind of curious mascot for them, this little man on a little horse.

"Yet this was a time when a weapon was an essential thing," notes Crichton. "If you were a trader and you went to different places, you had to be able to fight or you would die. It was also a time of a mostly agricultural lifestyle, where people had a short growing season and a difficult and precarious life. People didnТt live a long time. Even at that time, however, there was a great tradition of tolerance for other cultures. I sometimes think that contemporary people imagine that the notion of multiculturalism is something that was invented in the last ten years."

"IТve also been fascinated by the way that history helps us to understand where we are right now by seeing where we came from," McTiernan says. "It is interesting not only to see what has changed, but also what has not. For instance, if you look at the position of women in Scandinavian society today, it probably wasnТt all that different even a thousand years ago. Women were an integral part of the community and business and marriages were considered to be partnerships between two people.

"Technology certainly changes quickly, but the way that people behave within cultures does not change quickly at all," McTiernan notes. "I took an attitude with these characters that they were real people who probably didnТt think or behave much differently than most of us. Certainly IbnТs character takes a comparatively modern attitude about things.

"This is a story about a guy who is dropped into the most foreign situation he could ever imagine," says director/producer John McTiernan. "We wanted to keep the language relatively accurate and to use that communication barrier as an immediate way that Ibn and the audience feel thrown into this strange and foreign adventure."

"For a period of time in the film, Ibn doesnТt understand what is being said by the Norsemen unless he has a translator," notes novelist/producer Michael Crichton. "The film doesnТt have subtitles, so there are periods in which you simply donТt understand the dialogue. This is something that has not been done in many earlier films, and I believe it creates a kind of cone of authenticity for appreciating the adventure.

"One of the surprises of making this film was that there was so much humor," adds Crichton. "The original book, I felt, was quite solemn. But the interaction between the hero and his new-found buddies is often quite funny."

"Ironically, one of the hardest parts of creating the screenplay was not being able to use expletives and epithets," notes John McTiernan, speaking about the creation of the screenplay adaptation, penned by William Wisher and Warren Lewis. "We were using some contemporary language and involved translating language from Greek and Latin and Norwegian. But the characters really couldnТt swear. As you know, in action films, that can account for a significant portion of the dialogue.