"CENTURION": Marshall-ing Forces

FANG: How did you get become interested in the tale of the ninth legion?

NEIL MARSHALL: It started about 10 years ago. I was sitting in a bar with a mate of mine and having a few drinks and chatting about shit and he mentioned to me this legend that he'd heard of, of the ninth legion of Rome—this entire legion of Roman soldiers that marched into Scotland in 117 AD and vanished without a trace. That’s the legend; it's pretty straightforward. There's not much to it, but I was instantly hooked. I thought, "This is going to make a great movie. There's got to be a story in there." I'd just come off the back of doing DOG SOLDIERS when I'd heard about this and initially I thought we could add some sort of fantastic element to it; they all got slaughtered by the Loch Ness monster or something. But then I quickly thought, "That's not the road that I want to go down. I'd really like to know what could've potentially happened to them if this thing was real." The thing is, the more research you do into it, you find out that historians have since disproved the whole thing. The legion did get attacked, but they didn't get wiped out, just kind of dispersed afterward, which is all a bit boring because you think, "Oh, the legend's really cool, so I'll stick with that." So I came up with this whole story based on what might have actually happened to the Romans where they’re battling these tribes in Scotland called the Picts, and how the Picts might have fought against the Romans in a kind of guerrilla war and they've beaten the Romans somehow and then actually it's the Romans that create the myth as a cover-up for their own screw-up, basically. In order to cover it all up, they create this myth and it"s a mystery that they disappeared.

FANG: Would it have been easier to go the supernatural route?

MARSHALL: It would've been easy to come up with some supernatural element or whatever, but I just felt it was too similar to DOG SOLDIERS, that being werewolves in Scotland. I set myself the challenge of—the legend states that they vanished without a trace, that there was no trace of them whatsoever, so when I was just writing the script, I was trying to figure out what the Picts could possibly do to remove all evidence that these people were ever there. So not only do they kill them, but they melt down their armor and burn all the bodies and do something with the ashes so there is literally, physically, no evidence that the Romans were ever there. And this was all in the script at an early stage. Then we realized that it was actually quite long winded and was going to distract from the story so some of those elements got lost. The ashes thing is still there to a point. It just became more about telling a good, solid story about these survivors trying to find their way home and then the cover-up. For me the big thing was, if I wasn't going to do it supernatural, I still wanted to maintain a horror aesthetic to it by making it as bloody and realistic as possible. I figured, "If I'm going to make a battle film, it's inevitably going to be full of blood and guts." We're dealing with people who are attacking each other with swords and spears and axes. There's no clean way of killing somebody with an ax. I had to be honest to the world and the subject matter by doing that.

FANG: Obviously you're a supporter of more on-set and practical FX. How was it making the transition to epic battle scenes as opposed to one kill at a time?

MARSHALL: It's definitely more complicated. It was kind of a new experience for me. We did as much as we possibly could, but we didn't have very long to make the film at all. In comparison, for BRAVEHEART, Mel Gibson had six weeks to shoot one battle. We had seven weeks to shoot our entire film. We had like three days to shoot our big battle, and obviously we're trying to move as fast as possible and we did. Maybe about 90 percent of the gore effects in it are practical and on-set. Unlike a lot of other directors, I don't like to leave that stuff until the end of the day, unless I absolutely have to. Most of the time, that's just as important as anything else in the movie, so we schedule it properly and get it in there. You have to know how long these things take to do. One particular kill in the movie involves Olga cutting this guy's head off in the middle of a river. Well, that was going to be hard enough for the effects guys because they're in the middle of a freezing cold river and they're just standing around with this mannequin that they had that was rigged full of blood. It was incredible, the dummy that Paul [Hyett] built, it was fully armatured and it had like a skin on it as well and inside it was pumped full of pressurized blood. The idea being that whenever Olga hit it with a real ax, no matter where you hit it, blood would pump out, and under pressure as well, so it looked very realistic. She had to hold onto it by the head and with a real ax had to hack its head off, but its own weight kind of kept it there. What’s funny about it was, it was really hard work. It was a little ax and Olga was about 20 hits in and had blood spurting all over the place and she's just like, "I can't do it anymore." I said, "Cut it there, take five minutes and we'll start again and literally pick up where we left off." She goes back in there and is hacking away at it and eventually the head comes tearing off and falls off into the river or something like that, and it was kind of messy because she tripped just as the head came off, and because she tripped, tore it off and I was like, "That looks great! That's going in the movie!"

FANG: Watching an invading superpower like Rome battle the Picts, symbolism with current events can easily be found. Was this film made intentionally to draw parallels with today's goings-on in the Middle East?

NEIL MARSHALL: It was not intentional when I first started writing it, but the more I wrote it, the more I kind of saw that in it. The allegory is there for all to see but I didn't want to make it some kind of blatant allegorical movie. All it shows is that in 2,000 years, the same things are happening now as they did then and there might be huge armies, but all the superpowers are still going to be under threat from people fighting guerrilla warfare or terrorism or just defending their homelands or whatever. I thought, "The comparison is there, but let's not make a big issue about it and just make the film that I want to make."

FANG: The Romans are very much the invading and imposing superpower in the film, yet Michael Fassbender's character is the protagonist. Do you think audiences may take issue with that or do you think they'll understand it's more about the actual characters, rather than the Roman army as a whole?

MARSHALL: Absolutely, it's all about the individuals and whether you happen to agree or disagree with the war in Iraq, or the war in Afghanistan, we still root for the soldiers. We still want our boys to come home. That's what it's all about. It's about the individuals. I knew that I was creating problems for myself by telling the film from the Roman point-of-view because it would be seen as supporting the invaders and that's wrong and such light, but it's like, "Yeah, but have you ever seen DAS BOOT?" It's an amazing film and told about the Nazis and Germans. Even something like GLADIATOR, we root for Maximus, but in the opening of that film, he is very much the invading Roman army. It doesn't really matter that much if it's a character who you ultimately care about for personal reasons. But also, my feeling was that war is not as cut and dry as good guys and bad guys. There are heroes and villains on both sides. Both sides are capable of that kind of brutality. Yeah, it's true the Picts are defending their homeland and the Romans are invading them, but it's not a pro-Imperial movie. It's not a pro-invasion movie. It's nothing like that at all. It's a survival movie about these guys trying to get home.

FANG: You have the Picts in CENTURION. DOG SOLDIERS revolves around werewolves in the highlands and in DOOMSDAY, Scotland is this quarantined, walled-off place. Do you secretly see Scotland as this lawless land?

MARSHALL: [Laughs] I see it as a great backlot to go and shoot movies on. I grew up spending a lot of time on holiday there. A lot of people mistake me for being Scot. I'm not, I'm very much English, but I've spent so much time in Scotland. I love the country; it's the only kind of wilderness that we have in the UK, and because of that, I've got a lot of inspiration and story ideas from just being there. It's a spectacular landscape. It looks incredible. So that's the main thing, but it is fun applying this kind of lawless ideas to aspects of it.

FANG: Are you ever surprised when actors like Fassbender willingly take on genre projects?

MARSHALL: I don't know. I've actually known Michael for quite awhile. I knew him before he did HUNGER [2008] because I met him for a potential part in DOOMSDAY. So I knew he was interested in genre stuff and personally, he wants to try a bit of everything. I didn't have any issue with it at all. He signed up to do this movie very early on and stuck with it.

FANG: Not that you would have issue with it, but some are very quick to judge genre projects.

MARSHALL: Yes, but I like to think I try to get the best performances out of my actors and I don't want to be seen as making the kind of movies where actors are going to be slumming it in. With something like THE DESCENT, if somebody heard that it was about six girls in a cave, they might think, "Oh, it's going to be six girls in bikinis," but it's not like that at all and it required a huge degree of performance from the actors involved. It was the same with this. Once Michael read the script and realized what this character involved and what he was going to go through, he was like, "Oh, this is going to be just as arduous and difficult and challenging as HUNGER was, but in a very different kind of way. So instead of being beaten up in a prison cell, I'm going to be running through the snow with no shirt on."

FANG: Was it fun to get Olga Kurylenko a lot dirtier, savage and less pretty?

MARSHALL: I think I have a habit of doing that. I put women in my films in stronger positions, but I don't necessarily film them in an obviously glamorous light. They look great. They look striking. They look spectacular. But they don't necessarily look glamorous and pretty. It was always the case with Olga to try and make her look as savage as possible with the war paint, makeup, the hair and costume stuff like that. I definitely wanted to dress her down a bit; she is a model. You have to kind of work against that because you don't want her to look too pretty but at the same time, I don't want her to look pig ugly either. It's just finding that balance.

FANG: Can you talk about the very chilly, blue color scheme of the film?

MARSHALL: The director of photography, Sam McCurdy, and I discussed it for a long, long time. We wanted this to be a cold movie. We filmed it in cold conditions and it's a very cold movie as part of being the flipside of what everybody expects in a "sword and sandals" film. When I think of sword and sandals movies, I'm thinking deserts and the Middle East and sun and dust and all that kind of stuff. With this one, it's like, "Yes, it is a 'sword and sandals' movie. Yes, it's about the Romans, but it's in their farthest, grimmest, coldest, wettest frontier. It has to have a totally different feel about it." And so we wanted it to have this steely blue feel to the whole thing and make the audience sense what they were going through; the shivers and the chattering teeth and breath, that's all real as we filmed it in subzero temperatures. In order to help the audience really sense that, we gave just a little of a blue tint to it. It just makes it feel a little colder.

FANG: Recently, the IFC Center in New York did a miniretrospective of your work up to this point. Is that a great feeling to have had such an impact so relatively early in your career?

MARSHALL: It's unbelievable. I never thought I'd get to a place where people would be having a retrospective of my work. It's fantastic, I love it, but I'm kind of bowled over by the whole thing. It's like, "Really? You want to do that?" But people want to see all my old work as well, that's a good thing.

FANG: What's next after CENTURION and its press duties are done?

MARSHALL: I'm going to move on to other things. I'm producing a movie that Axelle's written and is directing. We're going to shoot in October. Technically, I'm executive producer on it, but I seem to be producing it. So we're going to get stuck into that. I'm writing some stuff at the moment and developing a few projects, some horror, some not horror and just see what's going to come off the ground.


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