Neil Marshall and Axelle Carolyn had a bloody good time making Centurion

Jason Bene: Can you talk about the genesis of the project?

Neil Marshall: It originated as such an organic process. My education about Roman history began in the U.K. I grew up in New Castle in the North East of England, which is at one end of Hadrian's Wall. As such, when I was at school we took a lot of trips to the wall and the Roman forts and all of these kind of ruins. You have to ask yourself the question, what was so horrendous up there that the Romans built a sixty mile long, thirty-five foot high stone wall across a country? It's kind of a big deal. It took them years to build. What was it for? Who was it to keep out? These guys must have been pretty terrified up there. Then I heard the legend about the Ninth Legion, about this entire legion of Romans that marched into what was Caledonia. I just immediately became hooked with that story, and so let's try to figure out what might have actually happened to them. Why the legend exists.

Jason Bene: How did you get the part as Aeron in Centurion?

Axelle Carolyn: I originally auditioned for the part of the Roman woman that you see at the end. It was a slightly bigger part than what it ended up being in the film. Somehow I was offered the part of the warrior. I absolutely loved it. I loved the idea. I was going through the script and seeing what I was going to get to do. I was like okay, this is pretty cool. To go back to the blood, when I saw the death that I was going to get I was like, alright, I can totally do that. It gets such a big cheer from people, I loved it. It was the attraction to do something really physical. A lot of action. A lot of stunts. A lot of fights. A lot of horse riding.

Jason Bene: Did you need any kind of special training to ride the horse?

Axelle Carolyn: I have some horseback riding training. I was reasonably confident on a horse before that. I was going to spend six weeks on a horse everyday so I just had to go through that. I had done horseriding when I was a kid. I had three or four seasons and I was fine. I had some stunt training for the one-on-one fight. And some archery training to make it believable that I knew how to handle a bow and arrow.

Jason Bene: Wars are always visceral battles. Was it important to show just how bloody they can be, or was it an easy transition because your previous films have been violent anyway?

Neil Marshall: [Laughs] It was easy because I like doing that kind of stuff. It's a lot of fun doing the blood and guts. I had a lot of fun doing that on Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and Doomsday. It's great to hear the audiences reaction to it as well. It's one of the big kind of kicks to it. But also, with this kind of subject matter, I wanted to be honest about how brutal those times were and show these guys charging each other with sharp sticks or big blades and show the blood and guts that would flow from that. I didn't want to have a soft touch.

Jason Bene: How did you go about casting the film?

Neil Marshall: With any project it's very important to get the best possible cast. I'm inherently more interested in high quality actors than necessarily big names. I'm sure there were maybe more commercial names out there who could have been brought into a budget like this, but they wouldn't necessarily have the acting chops to pull off what we needed. I knew I was going to put the cast through physical hell, and it was going to be a really tough shoot. I needed people that were going to be two hundred percent dedicated to getting through it all. I was aware of Michael Fassbender and Dominic [West] having worked with them before on different movies and I was a big fan of their work. It was a great opportunity to get them in there. They have done three or four films together now. They had a great kind of repoire as well, which was really great to get together on screen. Getting the likes of Olga and David Morrissey and some really, really strong actors in there. It just brought a richness and texture to that ensemble and they were a joy to work with.

Jason Bene: At the Los Angeles Film Festival screening Neil joked about if you took a drink of alcohol every time your character nailed somebody in the back with an arrow you be drunk off of your feet. Was that your character's specialty, or was there an invisible bullseye on everybody's back.

Axelle Carolyn: It just happened. It was really weird. It was something we didn't realize when we were shooting. Most of the time when you shoot you have the target on the person you are shooting obviously. We didn't put it together. When we started editing when I first saw the film, it was eight or nine different people. It ended up being a joke. The whole thing for how my character was fighting was trying to find what was realistic and worked for a woman. There's a lot of people when they saw that Olga Kurylenko, a Ukranian model was cast as a warrior woman, and thought how scary can that be. It was a lot about that it looked realistic and that we knew where to hit. That we knew how to use full advantage of our strengths and the weapons that we had.

Neil Marshall: It wasn't so much about being strong physically, it was about being brutal and cunning.

Jason Bene: You always cast very strong women in your movies. James Cameron is a pioneer in that department. Do you think that the meek female character is the thing of the past?

Neil Marshall: Not entirely. You can look at something like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and having this screaming, hysterical woman that was done more as a parody in that film. But you can never get away with doing that now. I don't know if audiences would want to see that. I don’t think women in the audience want to see themselves depicted that way. I think its changed. I don't necessarily think it's a good thing all women in movies should be butch and basically trying to be like men. I don't think that is their best strength.

Axelle Carolyn: 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' is a perfect example.

Neil Marshall: 'Raiders' is a perfect example of having a feisty woman but she's not trying to be a guy. I think that's the big difference. They can be strong but as soon as you start turning them into guys in a dress you kind of miss the point.

Axelle Carolyn: I think it all depends on the context too. The lucky thing here was the 'Picts' historically had women fighting within their ranks, so it was just great you could use that. One of my dreams is to be in a Western someday because I love the whole horseriding thing. I can do all kinds of tricks on the horse. I just wish I could do that, but it's just never going to work out because historically that would make no sense.

Neil Marshall: This was good because it was the age before sexism. This was before sexism was invented. In a weird way there was more equality then.

Jason Bene: The tribal attire looks like an extension of the apocalyptic clans in Doomsday. Was it a conscious decision that they were similiar in a warrior kind of way or was it a coincidence?

Neil Marshall: I think it's more coincidence. A lot of warrior tribes do similiar kind of stuff with war paint and tattoos. They utitilize visual ways of making themselves look more fierce. From everybody to the Comanches to Aztecs to the jungles of South America or the Middle East. They utitlized those techniques. I guess it was an unvoidable coincidence that in order to do it authentically it was going to have similarities. When I did Doomsday I didn't necessarily know I was going to do this film next. But this film really required that it be authentic, so I couldn't avoid that.

Jason Bene: How is your working relationship on set? The director has a lot of pressure to get the film done and finish on time and not go over budget.

Axelle Carolyn: To be quite honest, with being the wife of the director, I didn't want people to know that so they wouldn't judge me. There are so many assumptions. I actually had to audition. I had to go through the entire thing just like everyone else. I kind of made a point to not go and speak to Neil too much. Most of the time he would set up the shot and tell me what was going on then I would do my thing. If there was something he didn't like he would tell me quite quickly. He tried to focus on other actors too. Just try to make sure that we don't spend too much time together. Neil is quiet and relaxed.

Neil Marshall: It was very much a case of when we were on set together we both had our jobs to do. On set, Axelle was the actor and I was the director. The relationship didn't get in the way of that at all.

Axelle Carolyn: I had to spent twelve hours in that wig. It took a hour and a half to put on.

Jason Bene: What is up next for you?

Neil Marshall: I don't know exactly what is going to be next. I have a few things in the pipeline, one is a project called Burst, which Sam Raimi is producing. It's a 3D horror movie. It should be a lot of fun.

Jason Bene: Is it a spontaneous combustion film?

Neil Marshall: Not really. People burst but there's no combustion. It's like a pressure burst. I can't give away anymore about the storyline. I will tell you there's aliens involved, but beyond that I say no more.