DESIGNING FOR WAR

MILLIMETER / Matt Cheplic / March 1, 1998
http://millimeter.com/ar/video_designing_war/index.htm

For John McTiernan, director of Michael Crichton's EATERS OF THE DEAD, an adventure set in 10th-century Norway, executing the story meant filling in a lot of blanks."What Michael did was take several legends from that culture, deconstructed the methaphors, and said, 'What would this be if it was real?' What was a dragon, for instance, in reality?"

While Crichton's story had room for speculation, McTiernan had the task of accurate replication. In a remote location in Northwest Canada, McTiernan and crew got into some serious set design. They contracted a local lumber company that provided the production with logs, then hired Canadian Indian carvers and furnished them with examples from Norse tradition. The carvers then used their own techniques to carve Norse themes. McTiernan says: "We had four giant sets of doors 20 feet high and six inches thick, all with elaborate carvings. All posts in the house have visions of Norse monsters." McTiernan also had three Viking ships buillt, two of which were a little over 100 feet long.

A side interest of McTiernan's also came in handy during production: his horses."I own four large Shires-they're like the Budweiser horses-of my own. It turned out they were about the only ones in North America that were saddle-broken. So we bought about another dozen and trained them. They're great, big, stout animals that were used to carry weapons." The production also gathered nearly 300 Fjord Horses (McTiernan reckons they had most of the North American supply).

EATERS OF THE DEAD called for characters adept at spear throwing. McTiernan called on an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming, who tutored the crew not only in proper battle techqniues but in weapons construction. "I had people making the spears, and they were terrible," McTiernan laughs. "So we had this guy come up and teach us the secret of how the damn things work."