Blood and Guts...

One thing is certain – Centurion is a trademark Neil Marshall film. That means strongly defined characters, fast-paced action and, in the words of producer Robert Jones, "Gore, a bit more gore, then a sprinkling of blood on top."

The technical challenges of recreating the deaths and injuries of battle fell to Prosthetic Designer Paul Hyett. Hyett was thrilled to receive the script and to find it peppered with elements that would require a considerable amount of support from him and his special effect team.

"It seemed like in every other scene there was something for me," laughs Hyett. "...Slashed throats, arm chops, decapitations, head slicing, arrows in necks, axes in necks, people being burnt and squashed, heads being crushed. A whole array of full-on violence, really."

Hyett illustrates the level of gore in the film by calculating the total amount of take blood used on set. "We started with about 200 litres of blood and about half way through the shoot I think we'd had about 20 or 25 litres left." The use of pumps fed through prosthetic limbs and sections of torso meant there was rarely a day when Hyett, his team and his "wagon of death" weren't parked right next to the set, loaded with fake heads, full torched bodies and buckets of blood.

"Each pump you're doing is like a litre here, a litre there, so afterwards I look at the blood and think, 'Oh God, that's about F500 worth of blood,'" says Hyett. "But I knew it was going to be a 'Neil Marshall War Movie' – so there's going to be loads of blood." Marshall admits he's not one to hold back when it comes to bloodletting on screen and certainly, he says, where it involves people hacking at each other, "I figure, let's depict it as it probably was, which ic kind of brutal and nasty," he says.

The logistics of managing an effects-heavy production up the side of mountain in the darkest Scottish winter was no by any means straightforward. Transporting and setting up complicated technical effects against the elements required resilience and in some cases just sheer determination. "Paul knows that sensibility and brings it to the shoot, says Marshall of Hyett unwavering determination provide the best effects possible in the mist unforgiving conditions. "I think for him, it was a really tough job; trying to do stuff that would normally be done in the studio, half way up a mountain where he has to drag all these corpses and blood pumps and God-knows-what-else up to the top of a hill to do a shot here of somebody getting their head hacked off. It was tough for him but he delivered goods."

Hyett describes a typically complicated scene to capture: the Pictish warrior Etain, played by Olga Kurilenko, decapitating a Roman soldier. "When Etain chops the head off a guy in a river, we talked about doing it in one shot. So we had a whole body rig, we had an actress copping the head, we had all our blood rigs and blood pumps and we were in freezing cold Scotland, in about two feet of water, with a current."

Hyett had to combine meticulous preparation before filming, with flexibility on set. For the main actors and cast, Hyett and his team had already created tailor-made silicon dummies and fake heads, and decided how to create their injuries. With these replicas, the team could shoot the actor right up to the character's death; then replace them with the fake head or dummy. For lesser characters, it was impossible to match the dummy to the person as carefully. "We never quite knew who the victim was going to be until a couple of days before," says Hyett. "It was usually a stunt man or an extra, so we had all these generic head forms and basically we picked one guy and said, 'Right, you'. We quickly got a dummy and asked the make up department to get them looking the same."

When he was unable to achieve the full effect hesought from make-up alone, Marshall turned to computerized special effects, bringing in new technique the director had not used before.

"There's one particular scene where somebody gets executed and we uxed one of Paul's dummies for them getting their head hacked off," says Marshall with unnerving glee. "But the face of the dummy is replaced on-screen by the face of one of the stunt guys, who basically re-enacted the whole scene and did all the expressions. So we took his face, stuck it on the dummy, and now you can't see the joins in it. It looks like he's getting his head hacked off. I haven't done that before in a film and so it was interesting to take it down that route."