DUNCAN KENWORTHY, producer of Love Actually and Notting Hill, chats about his new film THE EAGLE, an action adventure set in Roman times.
Based on Rosemary Sutcliff‘s historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth, the film tells the tale of centurion Marcus and his slave Esca’s search for a Roman missing army and its Eagle emblem.
**THE EAGLE is in cinemas from 25 March
MMM: It’s a project that you’ve longed to do for years. But to do it right it needs to be as authentic looking as possible. And so much one knows is a bit of a cheat these days, so what went through your mind in terms of what you thought you could get away with?
Kenworthy: Kevin [Macdonald, director] and I both agreed we wanted it to be as authentic as possible. Somehow between Gladiator, which I loved personally and thought it reinforced the need for a film like this, and then after that Troy and Alexander, which whatever you think of them are full of CGI, and I thought actually that’s not the way it should be, it should be something smaller, something like a Roman documentary. The quality of the book is very much about the physical environment, and CGI seemed to go against that.
We both thought why have so few films been made in the Highlands of Scotland? In America, they’re so good at taking advantage of all their natural assets, and I could only name Rob Roy as having taken place truly in the Highlands, whereas Braveheart went to Ireland. And now we know why, because it’s too hard!
If we’d been a bigger film, we wouldn’t have taken the risk of the weather. We had no plan B. If we’d been a smaller film we couldn’t have afforded the 4×4 vehicles, so I think we were just through the eye of the needle. So we took that risk and it worked.
MMM: Have you thought or talked about the possibility of sequels?
Kenworthy: We have an option on The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers, the next two books in the sequence. I think The Lantern Bearers would make a fantastic movie, but they’re not sequels to this.
We’ve been accused of, or maybe praised for, I’m not sure, setting up a possible sequel in the last scene, with the dialogue between Marcus and Esca: ‘What next?’ ‘You decide.’ It’d be quite interesting to see what they end up doing. Why not?
MMM: Did you have any discussions about making the film accessible to a wide audience and yet keeping it authentic in terms of the violence of warfare?
Kenworthy: We agreed that we would let the film tell us what the rating should be. You can’t have a film about battle and warfare without some violence. But we weren’t making the film because we were driven to make a gory spectacle.
I’m proud of the rating system here that this is a 12A. This is the director’s cut. In America it was initially rated a hard R, and the studio wanted a PG13, so we had to make a few cuts. I think flying blood was the thing [that went].
By Jan Gilbert
