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Neil Gaiman on Beowulf
By Fred Topel | Image property of Paramount.
Beowulf
Neil Gaiman Talks Beowulf
"[It will be] ten years in May," Gaiman said. "Started working on it with Bob [Zemeckis] at the beginning of 2005. Originally, he wanted to produce it, and then he contacted us and said, ‘I really want to direct it,’ and talked us into it."
The collaboration took on a different dynamic once Zemeckis came into the scene. "He’s very mysterious and secretive. The process of working on the script was basically me and Roger and Bob, sitting in a room, and Roger and I read it out loud. It was just incredibly easy and incredibly pleasant, except that he had these brilliant ideas that he wouldn’t tell us, and he’d want us to discover them on our own. Occasionally, we’d say, ‘Okay, we’ve written this scene, and we’ve done it like that,’ and he’d say, ‘No, you can’t do that because that room isn’t facing that way.’ We’d say, ‘What?’ And, he’d say, ‘No, the room isn’t facing that way.’ And then, he’d show us the design for the room, and we’d go, ‘Why didn’t you show us that before?,’ and he said, ‘Well, you could have come up with something better.’"
In turning an ancient poem into a movie script, the screenwriters had to add some more modern storytelling touches. "The biggest motivation was creating a film that would be satisfying as a story. Beowulf is a remarkable, powerful story. It’s the oldest story in the English language that we have but it’s always been considered incredibly problematic, from a literary and critical point of view, in that it starts with young Beowulf coming in and rescuing [the Kingdom] from Grendel and from Grendel’s mother. Then we cut in 50 years later, and he fights the dragon and dies. That’s the poem. What we were trying to do was keep the events of the poem while giving the events a reason to have happened. As we wrote it, we tried to be very faithful to the poem and to the characters in the poem, whilst assuming that maybe there were things that were happening off stage, and that maybe some of the things that were being told had eroded over time, or sometimes people had lied.
They also filled in gaps in the story, derived from comparing the various translations. "For example, when Beowulf goes off to fight Grendel’s mother, he heads down into that lair, all on his own, disappears, is gone for eight days fighting her, and comes back with Grendel’s head. Eight days is an awful long time to fight a monster, and why didn’t he bring her head back. So we are actually very faithful to what happened. We’re just implying that maybe there was other stuff that happened as well."
Gaiman is still a comic book guy first and foremost. In fact, that is how he was introduced to the source material in the first place. "I actually discovered Beowulf first as a comic. It was a terrible comic, in which he wore one of those horned helmets, and the horns were so wide, he could not have ever gotten through a door. Then, I went out and found a copy of the Beowulf translation because I was interested in what material they based the comic on. That was how I discovered it, and I just thought of it as an amazing story."
Beowulf opens to theaters
on November 17th.
For stills, posters, trailers and more info on the film, go to the Beowulf
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Paramount.
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