Beowulf & Grendel
Epic Dreams:
Andrew Berzins brings Beowulf & Grendel to the screen
by Philip Moscovitch
Andrew Rai Berzins starts off hesitant about being interviewed. It’s a few weeks before the world premiere of Beowulf & Grendel at the Toronto International Film Festival, and he wants to know what the focus of the Canadian Screenwriter cover story is going to be.
Well… it’s going to be him. The writer.
The $17-million Canada-Iceland-UK co-pro isn’t out of the gate, but Berzins is already wary–even of a screenwriting magazine.
"I initiated this project. I adapted it–independently. And I’m already finding myself attached to "Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel," Berzins writes in an email. He follows it up with another: "Sturla has been as supportive as any director with whom I’ve worked, but still the pressure remains from the media for the director to take total responsibility."
Early media, however limited, for the film, does nothing to quell Berzins’ frustration. The Toronto Star runs a piece by entertainment columnist Rita Zekas quoting him–but without any attribution. While Berzins blames lazy journalism in part for the absence of writers in the press, he also says writers need to play the publicity game better. "A lot of writers, it goes against our grain to jump up and down and wave our hands and say, ‘Hey, I did that.’ A lot of us work alone. It’s nice to get attention, and support and feedback, but we’re not used to the circus. The circus has its own different dynamic and energy and everything, and most of us don’t know how to play to that."
A longstanding obsession
It’s been about five years from script to premiere, but Berzins has been thinking about Beowulf–the oldest piece of literature in the English language–for a lot longer than that.
It started back when he was 10 or so, in the late 1960s, and his mother gave him a copy of Rosemary Suttcliffe’s children’s book The Dragon Slayer, with illustrations by Charles Keeping.
Now, in the original Beowulf story, (I say that knowing you can get in trouble using a phrase like "the original Beowulf story"–but more on that later), our hero arrives in the land of the Danes and battles the evil Grendel, who has been nightly killing warriors in King Hrothgar’s great mead hall. Beowulf slices off Grendel’s arm and hangs it as a trophy from the roof of the hall. In the words of the 10th-century poem, translated by Howell D. Chickering Jr, "It was a clear sign/once the brave man fastened the arm/from hand to shoulder/–and there all together/was Grendel’s claw–under the high roof."
That arm hanging from the roof wasn’t just a clear sign for Beowulf and his fellow warriors from Geatland (an area now in southern Sweden). It was a sign of sorts for the young Berzins too.
He remembers that the book had "these really fascinating depictions of the arm of Grendel, which went a long way towards visualizing how you could do a movie–because it wasn’t some amorphous thing. [Grendel] was a very humanoid-looking creature. He was bigger than Beowulf, but not hugely so. This could be done; it could be visualized. That stuck in my head."
After doing a degree in drama at Queens, Berzins wrote his first screenplay, which he describes as "one of those sprawling autobiographical things that really had no dramatic line to it or anything." Over the next decade, while working at various "menial" jobs, he wrote fiction, which was "easy. It was cheap. You could just write it and stick it in an envelope."
Out of that period came Cerberus, a collection of short stories published in 1993 under the name Rai Berzins. Look to the title story, and who’s there? Old Beowulf himself:
…Johnson and I again locked horns. I said it was time for a movie of Beowulf, Arnold chwarzenegger as the Geat. (I honestly do believe he’d do fine, the muscles, the accent that no one could actually prove was not Geat–besides, he doesn’t say much.)
What do you really want to do?
So there was Beowulf, floating around at the back of Berzins’ mind, and there he stayed through various screenwriting gigs–the TV series North of 60, Cold Squad, and the short-lived Tom Stone, as well as the vampire movie Blood & Donuts (Berzins wrote the script but hated the finished film), and various MOWS. It was on one of those MOWs, Scorn, directed by Gunnarsson, that the Beowulf & Grendel film was finally born. Gunnarsson says, "We were tossing around ideas and they were all within the realm of what was possible in Canada, and I said, ‘The hell with that, what would you really like to do?’ and Andrew said ‘Beowulf.’ It was an a-ha moment."
A-ha because Gunnarsson had been casting around for a story to shoot in Iceland, where he was born, but wanted to avoid the Norse sagas. (He thought that "translating them into English would turn them into something else.")
Berzins says, "Soon after that I was banging away at an outline–before we even had any kind of financing behind us. Sort of like, ‘Let’s make this thing happen.’" Alliance Atlantis funded the project for a few drafts, and then there were lots of financial ups- and- downs (with, Berzins says, surprisingly little effect on the script) before shooting started in Iceland in September 2004. Gerard Butler (Phantom of the Opera), Stellan Skarsgård (Ronin, Good Will Hunting) and Sarah Polley (seemingly every other Canadian film made in the last dozen years) play the leads.
Getting from that original idea to principal photography took 13 drafts Berzins says–but then he corrects that to four or five, saying the rest were "glorified polishes."
Gunnarsson says the first draft–well over half of which made it nearly untouched into the film–"really sparked everything, because people got very excited by it… It had so many images that were elemental. It had miles to travel, but you could feel the film in it."
"It was a big first draft, and so a fair amount in drafts six, seven and eight was moving scenes around," says Berzins. "One of the biggest issues was the pace of the thing. I think I do pretty well scene by scene–most of the scenes stand well on their own. Part of my problem has always been having the proper flow, pace–things like that. I have no problem doing three scenes in a row where people talk at each other.
Suddenly you look at that on the screen and you’re going, ‘Well people are talking for 10 minutes. Let’s do something else.’"
The story behind the story
Classic though it may be, the Beowulf epic is not exactly renowned for character development. In the first part of the poem, Beowulf heads to Daneland to help out King Hrothgar, whose great mead hall is being ravaged by nightly attacks carried out by the monster Grendel. Beowulf is good. Grendel is evil. Beowulf slays Grendel. Grendel’s sea hag mother becomes enraged and goes after the Geats, and Beowulf slays her too. Mission accomplished.
There is a lot more to the poem, of course (including Beowulf’s slaying of a dragon and his ascension to kingship), but Berzins knew early on that he wanted to stick to the early part of the story–the Grendel episode. The Beowulf story takes place around 500 AD. The poem, as we have it, was written down centuries later, and even though the tale takes place in a pagan culture, by the time it’s committed to paper, it has been thoroughly Christianized, so that rendel’s evil comes from his being the spawn of Cain. No more explanation needed.
"I think a lot of the genius of the script," says Gunnarsson, "is that Andrew’s gone back to the idea of the campfire. This is coming from the oral tradition; something happened 500 years before it was written, and people talked about it around the campfire." In other words, a human story lies behind the heroic poem, and Berzins wanted to imagine it. Berzins also knew that he wanted the story to be rooted in the real world. That Grendel the troll was a creature of nature, and not some supernatural being (in keeping with that goal, the film uses no CGI).
Even as a teen, Berzins recalls being puzzled by the Christian bent to the Beowulf story. "It’s very monotheistic, and the references to Cain are very biblical. And I’m thinking, well no, this is the world of Thor and Odin–I was into the Mighty Thor comic books. So we looked at the story, and it was like, OK, what was this story like before the Christian imperative of good versus evil came into play?"
Once Berzins decided Grendel needed a motive, the whole moral clarity of the epic came into question. "Why is he doing this? And as soon as you get into motivation, you get into the area of moral ambiguity. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Why are people doing what they’re doing? And then it gets very interesting as far as Beowulf on his mission and what his mission becomes." Because, of course, if Grendel is not purely evil, then neither can Beowulf and his men be purely good. In the last scene of the film, Thorkel the bard, a new convert to Christianity, is extolling the heroics of his fellow Geats and putting the mark of Cain on Grendel.
BRECA
I think Thorkel's saying that Grendel's just like Cain - a killer.
THORFINN
We all are.
BRECA
Yeah well...
See the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete interview.
