"I deliberately put everybody through hell."
Neil Marshall

Q: Centurion is a new direction for you. You've done horror with Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and post-apocalypse with Doomsday, but this is a period piece. Why did you decide to go in that direction?

NEIL MARSHALL: It's the kind of film that I've always wanted to make. I love watching that kind of movie, so... it's just another genre that I wanted to tackle. And I guess it's kind of a mix-and-match as well. It's very much in the model of a Western, with an ancient history sensibility as well.

Q: Westerns are obviously tied into the American mythos. Is the history here — the focus on an ancient British tribe like the Picts — tied to a kind of British mythos?

MARSHALL: Well that particular frontier of Rome was the farthest frontier, and it was, to them, the Wild West; it was untamed... And so I treated it very much like that. I modeled it in some ways on the old John Ford cavalry movies, and it has a similar sensibility in that it's very un-PC: telling the story from the invader's point of view and the gray areas that result from that. There are heroes and villains on both sides. The Picts are like the Comanches, and there are a lot of similarities, like the fact that they wear the war paint. And yet, that's not fabricated, that is what the Picts did. So the parallels already exist, I just put them on film.

Q: In that sense it's obliquely political not only because you're conflicting sympathies between the Picts and the Romans, but also because it's bound up in the idea of the individual being forsaken by the society to which he or she has been so patriotic.

MARSHALL: There was the general overview that emerged as I was writing it that it is about the superpower of the time going into this country and having to deal with guerrilla warfare, and the results of that. And obviously that's going to have comparisons with events in the world over the past 40 years, as well as what's going on now in Afghanistan.

But once I came to that comparison, I didn't want to ram it down the audience's throats. People will see it if they want to see it. But at heart I'm making a historical adventure movie, and I don't want to turn it into some kind of gratuitous allegory.

AXELLE CAROLYN: I think that Neil is the least political person you could possibly find... I think that very often that makes the most interesting and personal films, when you don't set out to ram a message down the throats of people.

NEIL MARSHALL: ...My dad was in the army, my granddad was in the army. So I definitely have an affinity for soldiers and the like. And so my film is about the individual. It's about the fact that, regardless of what you may think about these campaigns, be it Rome, be it what's going on in Afghanistan, whatever — I, for one, totally support the soldiers and want them to come home. And that's primarily what the story's about — this bunch of guys who are betrayed and become disillusioned by the job that they're doing and just want to get home.

Q: It seems like there's a bit of tension here. Centurion is very heavily genre-influenced. In a lot of ways, it's just kind of a history thriller. But at the same time, there's something more intimate and melancholy about it than the average period piece. How do you want your audience to react to the film?

NEIL MARSHALL: I think that, at first, I want it to be a thrill ride. But they will hopefully carry something else away from it. It's not necessarily a film of happy endings. There's a resolution, but in this situation I don't know what a happy ending would be. My endings are always a big ambiguous anyway... this was no different. But is it melancholy?

Q: I guess maybe more doleful...

MARSHALL: I always knew that the visual tone of the movie was going to be very downbeat; I set out to make a bleak movie in every sense. It was going to be about these people getting massacred, and it was in a bleak environment with bleak conditions, and I wanted that. I deliberately filmed it in winter and deliberately put everybody through hell. I graded it so it would feel even colder and bleaker. You know, this was inspired by me standing up on Hadrian's Wall as a child in the pouring rain in the bleak Northeast of England and thinking, God, what must have it been like for these people to come from the Mediterranean and face this enemy that is so terrifying that they built this 60-mile long wall to keep them out?

Q: It was shot in seven weeks, right? Which is five weeks under the normal length for such a movie.

MARSHALL: Yes, we worked very fast. I like to work fast anyway, but with this one, a part of it was that I got a lot of criticism on Doomsday for overcutting the movie, for making it really frenetic and fast. So with this one, I was making kind of an older style movie, I watched a lot of older movies as well and noticed how they were perfectly happy to just sit back and watch a scene play and not have to cut in or do any of that. So it was a conscious effort to try to shoot more of that style and let the actors move and not try and mess around with it so much — just let the scene play out.

AXELLE CAROLYN: I think that for most people, seven weeks sounds like a lot of time, if they don't work in film. But at the same time, The Wolfman was doing reshoots, and their reshoots took longer than the entire shoot for Centurion.

MARSHALL: The comparison I use is The Battle of Sterling in Braveheart. [Mel Gibson] had six weeks to shoot that entire battle. We did our entire film in seven.

Q: Well I guess Mel Gibson isn't one to do something on a small scale if he doesn't have to. But it does have, despite being kind of an epic, a more intimate feel than a lot of others, and I assume that was intentional.

MARSHALL: I'm sure I would have loved to do a huge Braveheart-style battle, but we simply couldn't afford the extras or visual effects to do that, so I had to plan around the money that we had at the time, the time that we had, and make it feel bigger than it actually was. The bigger scenes with the crowds, literally if you turned the camera that way or that way, there was nobody there. Everybody that we had was in the shot. And we just tried to plan it so that there were a few shots within that scale; the rest was into the nitty-gritty of the individuals hacking and slashing.

Q: I wanted to ask you a question or two about the language in the film. There were obviously certain things you wanted to keep historically accurate, but why did you decide to make the Romans speak English and leave the Picts speaking Pictish.

MARSHALL: It was always the case that I wanted the Picts to speak something other than the Romans did... But obviously the problem that we had was that there is no recorded language of the Picts, so we had to come up with the most ancient language that would fit the profile. The experts will tell you that Welsh is the most ancient language that we have in the U.K., but it just seemed inappropriate to have these Scots speaking Welsh. However authentic it might be, it's still not the right language. So what we actually had them speak was Scots-Gaelic, which is a very ancient language; maybe not as old as Welsh, but old enough.

AXELLE CAROLYN: I think the problem is that there've been talks of making the film in Latin. The thing is, not only is that very impractical, especially when you shoot on a reasonably low budget where you cast your actors a few weeks before they start shooting — they don't really have the time to learn the language. But also, commercially you can't really get away with it. Mel Gibson can get away with it because he made the most profitable independent film of all time; he's got his own following.

MARSHALL: You come under fire from people online saying things like they wouldn't have been swearing like that. And yeah, but they wouldn't have been speaking in English either. If they're going to speak English, they might as well swear in English. But I wanted to get a sense of this kind of banter between the guys that represented what I think the soldiers would have been like then: just as they are now.

AXELLE CAROLYN: I do see your point though, that it's not so much about trying to make it historically accurate as it is about depicting the Picts as being the ones that you don't necessarily straight away identify with, because they have this other language... It wasn't so much to show one side as being more foreign or more remote.

MARSHALL: It was also a part with Etain, who can't speak any language. Which is all about that lack of communication.

Q: You just want her to be more of a force.

MARSHALL: Yeah. A lot of people have asked if I made her mute because I cast Olga Kurylenko in the role, and a Ukrainian actor wouldn't have fit the part, and that's absolutely not the case. The character was mute from the very first draft of the script. I wanted her to be a force of nature who expressed herself purely through violence and action and aggression. I thought that was really interesting for a character. I also thought it would be really interesting for an actor to play a totally mute character. It's a real challenge for them... Even Olga was like, "Just let me say a few lines." And the answer was, "No, you get to scream, and that's it." And ultimately she embraced that.


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