Iron And Maidens: Torture devices are ever-present in the film, and (below) suspected witch Langiva (Carice van Houten).


Then, the problems were trying to keep a spirit, a grimness to it, when, as is often the case on movies, we were having a very good time behind the camera.


On the less jovial side of things, were all the torture devices that you used in the film based on actual historic contrap- tions? With the exception of the upward guillotine, which is something we came up with, they were all based upon the period. The truth of the matter is that every- thing that can be thought of has been thought of. If you can think of a twisted torture, someone’s thought of it and someone probably enjoyed it. So with re- gards to the contraption, when it was described in the script – the cart they pull behind them – we needed to have an imagination there and something that would look visually interesting, but also not look preposterous. I think the designer did a great job of it.


How was the upward guillotine de- signed and how does one actually go about getting that kind of a prop made?


It was quite a funny thing, I was upstairs in the pro- duction office before we filmed, and down below they were drawing this thing. We got a local manu- facturer in Germany to do it and obviously they had


to make it blunt, so we had to have two blades. But when you work in a film environment, nothing is re- ally crazy. What always happens is that you have to subcontract some things out, so we went to this local steelworks to have it built. They were obviously very excited about building some- thing for a movie. I think it cost about $15,000 and then it just gets thrown away at the end of the shoot. Such a waste!


The plague seems to be a ripe subject for horror films. Why do you think so few plague movies have been made?


If you are making a movie where there’s a killer disease, like 28 Days Later, and it


turns you into a zombie – that’s commercial. But if you are making a movie about just an epidemic that kills lots of people, then I think that’s a trickier sell.


R M 22


There does, however, seem to be a recent resurgence of bloody period pictures with films such as Centurion and 300. What is the appeal of these movies for modern audi- ences? I think it allows you to show brutality. Looking through the lens, back in time, you can be more brutal in a way because something about the period softens the vio- lence. It doesn’t feel so immediate if you do it Gladiator-style, which is very fero- cious, or 300. What we tried to do a little bit here is take away that distance so there’s a savagery that feels real. If someone gets shot in real life they drop down and they die. If someone gets shot in the movies, they can get shot ten times, still come and pick the knife up and still kill the guy. We followed a very basic rule that I think is slightly different in that we didn’t use some of the rules of history, which is that you can make it about the elegance of the battle. The way you watch movies of the past, it’s all about the choreography. I wanted this to feel dirty and the total opposite. So that’s why I find this movie – even though it’s certainly not the blood- iest movie I’ve made – feels the most brutal because of the way we handle the vi- olence.


Was the release of Black Death timed around the release of the similarly plotted Hollywood offering Season of the Witch? More than you would believe. In terms of fear of things, when we were making the film, it was, “Oh my god, this is really similar to the Nicolas Cage movie. Quick, we have to get it out, we have to get it released in January” – this is in England, January of last year – “we have to get it released because that film is going to come out.” We’re like, “Hold on, that film’s still reshooting. They’re doing reshoots, they’re doing pick-ups.” There was this sort of unrealistic, crazy comparison because they’re both period movies, dealing with witches, that we had to rush. In fact, our film is never going to be like that film, that film is a certain kind of big Hollywood movie with Nicolas Cage.


You were obviously exposed to many horrors of the era when working on this movie, what was the gnarliest thing you learned about the Black Death? The basics of what happens is you get this infection, you get this lump under your glands – under your armpits or on your neck – that then turns into a head, it bursts, it starts to smell, and 24 hours later you’re dead. What I find so horrific is not the way it landed on the people with that ferocity, it’s the way they knew it was coming for three or four months. Although we get a sense that people weren’t travelling so much in those days, in fact they were. People knew this thing was coming. I think the most horrific thing is you know something is coming, and then it does come and it does kill you. I think that’s the thing that scares me the most, that they couldn’t get away from it.


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