be manipulated and used by bad peo- ple for their own good. And what you have is this group of soldiers that are in this clash between these two things, where they are told on the one hand to go to this village and destroy the evil there, but when they get there they find a place that seems to be the exact opposite of what they were told it would be. ... It’s also a movie about the ways faith can be tested. If you are told that if you come to church you won’t die of the pestilence and then your children die, how do you go back to church and say, “Why didn’t that work?” At the time, the Church got very scared with the question that faith is being challenged by the peo- ple. Part of what you see in the film, this idea of needing to find a demon, needing to find someone that we can pin the blame of this thing on, to go and destroy it, and then when we’ve destroyed it harmony can return again, that’s a very modern parable.


How does the concept of this film as a parable tie into the physical and emo- tional journey experienced by Osmund in the movie? The parable’s simple, I think. Here we have, although he’s a monk, a moderate Christian that believes in two things: he absolutely believes in God, and he ab- solutely loves his girlfriend. And in a time when it’s not possible to have the two, he is saying, “Can I not love this girl and love God? Can I not escape the trappings of the bullying priest, the Church and live a life that’s pious but also have a woman?” And he is told no. So he decides to run away, and when he runs away because he is not allowed to have that love, he gradu- ally, through the journey and the ter- rible things that happen along the way, becomes radicalized. And that’s another modern parable I think.


So how does faith, religious fundamentalism and superstition relate back to disease here? Blimey – good questions. For me, the metaphor of disease is not in any way meant to link to religion. The reason we use it as a starting point is the way I fear that what we now know to be a dis- ease, something that comes from science, can be turned into something that is bibli- cal. [Although] I think biblical is the wrong word. The way the movie works is this nat- ural occurrence, this disease is either sent by God to punish you for your sins or it’s sent by the Devil to torment you. And because of the period they are in, the general public believes that it’s one of these two things. So what the disease does in this story, and the way it affects religion, is that it gives the public within the story an either/or option and of course it wasn’t an either/or option. ... What I tried to do in the film, I think, is say that it’s the cor- ruption of people against any kind of faith, or this utopia that this witch has cre- ated, that there’s always something shady going on behind the scenes


that keeps people in fear. The young monk is in a world of fear at the beginning and the world under the control of the Church is under the


fear that the disease is sent by God or the Devil, and when they get to this other vil- lage, they are told to fear people that are from outside the swamp. In both cases the plague is the in- strument of spreading fear to the people.


The Black Death is reminiscent of Witchfinder Gen- eral and The Wicker Man; did those films influ- ence you at all? Not really. It’s weird that they get men- tioned.


I think


Witchfinder General gets mentioned be- cause of the last ten minutes of the film. Stylistically, as well, it’s bright and realistic. Truthfully, part of the madness of the road movie I wanted to cre- ate was Aguirre: The Wrath of God. I didn’t


think of The Wicker Man at all until I was doing the scene where one of the char- acters is strung up and it’s daylight and we’re by the marsh, and I said, “You know, this is going to look like The Wicker Man, this scene.” The Wicker Man is not one of my favourite horror movies. I like the film, I admire the film, but it’s not a film I’m rushing to remake. This film has similarities in the sense of someone coming to a village where there might be something, so I think sto- rywise it does have a similarity, but it was- n’t one that


was in my mind. I was much more trying to make the characters in the film feel medieval. The Name of the Rose, The Seventh Seal and Aguirre: The Wrath of God were much more the films I was subconsciously referencing.


Why did you decide to shoot on 16mm? For two reasons. I didn’t want it to have that feeling you get with a lot of costume stuff where a director will pan down from a tree just as a stagecoach arrives and it’s all very aesthetically done, and it’s almost like the framing and composition of the period piece become more important than the story and the people. I want [Black Death] to be a story where the camera is right behind the ear of the characters and we’re on the road with them, so we expe- rience the journey that they feel. I felt that when we looked at the rushes from 35mm to 16mm, there was such a marginal dif- ference that, actually, when you are filming it hand-held a 16mm, edgier feel works for that.


What were the biggest chal- lenges of shooting a piece set in medieval times? Practically, the most difficult thing is the modern world is never far away, so you come over the brow of a hill and you can see a petrol station. That was our fear be- fore we started shooting, but we managed to film the whole thing in a very rural area of Eastern Europe that hadn’t been cor- rupted by the West so much so that there is a Pizza Hut or a Starbucks on every cor- ner. We managed to find some areas of rural landscape that we could really lose ourselves in, so once we got over the ini- tial, “Oh my god, we’re all walking around with costumes on” – once I got over that in my mind, which only took probably a day or so, I didn’t think about it anymore. Cont’d on p. 22


At The Crossroads: Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) awaits his secret love.


R M 20


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