For starters, why medieval horror? I think it’s kind of undernourished in the sense that anything medieval ends up being fantasy. You end up having sword fights where the guys are lugging these big, heavy swords around, and you have these guys like ninjas. That seems to be the way it’s been done. I grew up loving – it doesn’t sound right for the horror crowd – those medieval [Ingmar] Bergman movies. When I was in college I used to watch loads of them and think I would love to make a movie set in this time because this is a time when,
despite the worst plague to hit civilization in modern times, these people were still burning each other. Fundamentalism was law. Everyone was panicking be-
cause of the plague, blaming each other, blaming witchcraft, blaming minority groups. I just thought, wouldn’t it be great to go into that world in a horror way, but use all the madness of the time, rather than invent your own mad-
ness? What kinds of changes did
you make to the script to ex- plore these ideas?
The way the script was written originally, the first half of the film is kind of identical
to the movie we’ve got, but the second half became a completely different beast, much more supernatural. When I read the script, because it didn’t have a trace of the supernatural in the first half, I really bought
into this real world and I wanted to keep it that way, so I just said, “This is what I want to do, this is the way I see it, and can we change the second half and make it much more about fundamentalism and so on?” And they said, “Yeah.”
But at the heart of this movie is a necromancer character. How does that fit into all of this? One of the first things I thought when I was making the film was, what is a witch? And that interesting idea of what
Wicked Women?: The torture of a suspected witch.
would a witch be like in the real world? I think that was one of the things that drove the project. ... The medieval side of things always brings the sense that there could be demons in this world. Because it’s not a modern setting, when we are told that there are
demons in this village, we believe it. Where if we were told that a guy walks into a police station and says, there are witches and necro- mancers, the characters would immediately have to go, “What?! What are you talking about?” I think the idea that the characters are believing this makes the audience believe that’s maybe what will happen in the story. One of the things I like most in the film is the moment where Sean Bean kills a ‘witch’ and slices her neck open and you immediately buy into the idea that he’s this dark horrible killer in the way he cuts her down, but in the very next scene he explains why he did it, and it seems reasonable. I think in that moment, be- tween those two scenes, you suddenly under- stand the kind of world you’re in and that thinking, which again comes down to one of two options: I can either kill her or let her live, but I can’t free her. The third option, of just maybe taking her with him, he doesn’t see. That simplicity of the way that people believed things is scary. It’s a much crueller world on one hand than ours, but at the end of it you realize it’s just the same world, only wearing different outfits.
In another interview you were quoted as saying Black Death “is a dark parable about how things haven’t really moved on in the last 600 years.” I found that very inter- esting. I wanted to give the film a modern style, in the sense that it’s almost like a news report style, where you are following behind the characters, [though] not in a documentary style. … The rea- son I did that was to give it an immediacy that makes you think about images you’ve seen on the news, war footage, that kind of thing. ... With- out getting too political, I found the way that we use the word “evil” and that we have to destroy this evil and [use] all of these kind of symbols to try to drum up fear is certainly very relevant to what we’ve been going through in recent times. So, for me, when I read that story about a bunch of guys going off on this mission, it felt relevant. I don’t want to become too political… unless you want me to.
Oh, I don’t mind. I think there’s certainly a relevance between being told something is evil and finding out it’s actually the opposite. But [in regards] to Chris- tians versus pagans, I didn’t want to suggest that any one side is more right than the other, be- cause the film is not about which religion’s right – far from it. It’s about the way that religions can Cont’d on p. 20
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