Lögberg-Heimskringla - 15.03.2007, Blaðsíða 8

8 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • 15 March 2007
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David Jón Fuller
Terry Gilliam once at-tempted to film an adap-tation of Don Quixote. It
was a notoriously difficult shoot.
Lead actor Jean Rochefort suf-
fered an injury that removed him
from the production and floods
destroyed sets and equipment,
among other problems. The film
was never finished — though it
became the subject of a famous
documentary, Lost in La Man-
cha.
Sturla Gunnarsson may
know how Gilliam felt.
The Canadian filmmaker’s
ambition to film a movie in his
native Iceland was realized in
2004 with the movie Beowulf
and Grendel. It was a coproduc-
tion between Canada, Iceland
and the U.K.
The screenplay was written
by Andrew Rai Berzins and the
international cast included Ge-
rard Butler, Stellan Skarsgård,
Ingvar E. Sigurðsson and Sarah
Polley.
The plan was to take advan-
tage of southern Iceland’s stun-
ning scenery, principally in Vík
in Myrdal, as well as the long
hours of sunlight afforded by
the northern country’s summer
days.
But when delays pushed
filming back until the fall, and fi-
nancial difficulties began to dog
the production, the experience
of filming Beowulf and Grendel
took on a life of its own.
Thanks to Icelandic film-
maker Jón Gustafsson, who
worked on the movie, that story
is being told in his new docu-
mentary Wrath of Gods.
“ S t u r l a
o r i g i n a l l y
hired me to
do three things
on Beowulf
and Grendel,”
says Jón. “To be-
gin with, I was
hired to make
the electronic
press kit — to
interview the ac-
tors and capture some
behind- the-scenes
footage. Secondly, to
make a website for the
film while it was in pre-produc-
tion and during shooting. This
was the first time that I know of
that a film let the future audience
into the world of the film set
through the web. We had daily
photographs, blogs, video clips
and such from the set and start-
ed building up an audience base
that way. The only problem was
that they had hardly any money
in the budget for those things, so
they also hired me to play one of
Beowulf’s warriors.”
The result was that Jón spent
most of his time in costume, in-
cluding chain mail, leather
breeches and all.
As videogra-
pher, he always had
a camera with him.
“I just decided to
start rolling the
camera when-
ever I could,”
he says. “I
thought that
in a worst-
case sce-
nario I would
end up with
fifty tapes
in a storage
box and three
months in the mountains of Ice-
land. Things turned out a little
bit different.”
The weather was a constant
adversary. Winds and rain gust-
ing up to hurricane force as-
saulted the filming locations,
resulting in lost tents, swollen
rivers, and damaged vehicles.
(The set, King Hrothgar’s mead
hall, seems to have been imper-
vious).
Then there was the rep-
lica viking ship Íslendingur.
While it had been seaworthy
enough to cross the Atlantic in
the year 2000, when the craft
was brought in to shoot, it still
needed time in the water for the
wood to expand and seal. That
was time the already delayed
schedule did not allow, and the
filmmakers were forced to shoot
— during a rare period of calm
weather — in a boat that “leaked
like a sieve.”
Financing from the company
in England was also tight — oc-
casionally Sturla and his com-
pany had to wrestle with short-
ening the production schedule
or delaying payment for those
working on the film, neither of
which eased the already frayed
nerves.
None of this makes for your
standard movie PR. So when
did Jón’s work become a stand-
alone documentary?
“It wasn’t till October 18
that I knew that I actually had a
film,” he says. “That was the day
of the big storm. I went up the
mountain with [producer] Paul
Stephens and filmed him and
Sturla arguing about whether
to shut down or try to film, and
then a rock came flying in the
wind and smashed the rear win-
dow of our vehicle. All I could
think was ‘I now have a story.’
We lost eight vehicles that day.”
Jón’s position as a member
of the cast and his role as cam-
eraman, documenting the pro-
duction, allowed him access to
many critical moments. A few
times, he says, he was asked to
turn the camera off.
It wasn’t easy to collect all
the material from which his doc-
umentary emerged. “Most of the
time people like Sturla and Paul
Stephens were very upfront and
honest with me and, but others
were more suspicious,” he says.
“Later in the production it
came to a point where I had to
force myself to continue film-
ing because if I had stopped,
everything that I had done up
to that point would have been
meaningless. I must confess
that there were some horrible
things that happened where
I said to myself, consciously
IAN JOHNSON
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Filmmaking is never easy. But when a perfect
storm of financial and weather trouble hit Sturla
Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel, the pro-
duction took on a heroic scale that rivalled the
plot of the movie itself. Jón Gustafsson brings
it to life in his documentary Wrath of Gods
Jón Gustafsson
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARTIO FILMS
Sturla Gunnarsson on location
for Beowulf and Grendel.
Gerard Butler