Birth of the movie

North land

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.