Neil Marshall and Axelle Carolyn had a bloody good time making Centurion

Neil Marshall’s newest film, Centurion, premieres on VOD, XBOX and Amazon on July 23 and opens in theaters on August 27, 2010 from Magnet Releasing. Killer Film had the opportunity to sit down for a lengthy chat with filmmaker Neil Marshall and actress Axelle Carolyn on the brutal epic tale.

Jason Bene: Can you talk about the genesis of the project?

Neil Marshall: It originated as such an organic process. My education about Roman history began in the U.K.  I grew up in New Castle in the North East of England, which is at one end of Hadrian’s Wall. As such, when I was at school we took a lot of trips to the wall and the Roman forts and all of these kind of ruins. You have to ask yourself the question, what was so horrendous up there that the Romans built a sixty mile long, thirty-five foot high stone wall across a country? It’s kind of a big deal. It took them years to build. What was it for? Who was it to keep out? These guys must have been pretty terrified up there. Then I heard the legend about the Ninth Legion, about this entire legion of Romans that marched into what was Caledonia. I just immediately became hooked with that story, and so let’s try to figure out what might have actually happened to them. Why the legend exists.

Jason Bene: How did you get the part as Aeron in Centurion?

Axelle Carolyn: I originally auditioned for the part of the Roman woman that you see at the end. It was a slightly bigger part than what it ended up being in the film. Somehow I was offered the part of the warrior. I absolutely loved it. I loved the idea. I was going through the script and seeing what I was going to get to do. I was like okay, this is pretty cool. To go back to the blood, when I saw the death that I was going to get I was like, alright, I can totally do that. It gets such a big cheer from people, I loved it. It was the attraction to do something really physical. A lot of action. A lot of stunts. A lot of fights. A lot of horse riding.

Jason Bene: Did you need any kind of special training to ride the horse?

Axelle Carolyn: I have some horseback riding training. I was reasonably confident on a horse before that. I was going to spend six weeks on a horse everyday so I just had to go through that. I had done horseriding when I was a kid. I had three or four seasons and I was fine. I had some stunt training for the one-on-one fight. And some archery training to make it believable that I knew how to handle a bow and arrow.

Jason Bene: Wars are always visceral battles. Was it important to show just how bloody they can be, or was it an easy transition because your previous films have been violent anyway?

Neil Marshall: [Laughs] It was easy because I like doing that kind of stuff. It’s a lot of fun doing the blood and guts. I had a lot of fun doing that on Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and Doomsday. It’s great to hear the audiences reaction to it as well. It’s one of the big kind of kicks to it. But also, with this kind of subject matter, I wanted to be honest about how brutal those times were and show these guys charging each other with sharp sticks or big blades and show the blood and guts that would flow from that. I didn’t want to have a soft touch.

Jason Bene: Was 300 or Braveheart in the back of your mind when making the film?

Neil Marshall: I would say it [Braveheart] was in the far back of my mind. I didn’t want to do any kind of beautiful slo-mo. I didn’t want to do it green screen. I wanted this to be out in the rain and in the mud. I wanted it to be kind of feral and brutal and more realistic than that. 300 is very stylistic film because it it based on a graphic novel. I wanted to make almost like a documentary approach to the violence.

Jason Bene: How did you go about casting the film?

Neil Marshall: With any project it’s very important to get the best possible cast. I’m inherently more interested in high quality actors than necessarily big names. I’m sure there were maybe more commercial names out there who could have been brought into a budget like this, but they wouldn’t necessarily have the acting chops to pull off what we needed. I knew I was going to put the cast through physical hell, and it was going to be a really tough shoot. I needed people that were going to be two hundred percent dedicated to getting through it all. I was aware of Michael Fassbender and Dominic [West] having worked with them before on different movies and I was a big fan of their work. It was a great opportunity to get them in there. They have done three or four films together now. They had a great kind of repoire as well, which was really great to get together on screen. Getting the likes of Olga and David Morrissey and some really, really strong actors in there. It just brought a richness and texture to that ensemble and they were a joy to work with.

We did fight rehearsals and all of that kind of stuff but the bootcamp thing doesn’t work for Romans. It was the anti-300 thing as well. I didn’t want the guys to be so ripped that they look like they spent all of their time at the gym. Michael [Fassbender] has an amazing physique anyway. Dominique [West] has a more naturalist physique. He’s in good shape but he’s not like ridiculously ripped and all pecs and a sculpted figure. I thought that would look kind of ridiculous. He actually looks like a regular guy.

Jason Bene: At the Los Angeles Film Festival screening Neil joked about if you took a drink of alcohol every time your character nailed somebody in the back with an arrow you be drunk off of your feet. Was that your character’s specialty, or was there an invisible bullseye on everybody’s back.

Axelle Carolyn: It just happened. It was really weird. It was something we didn’t realize when we were shooting. Most of the time when you shoot you have the target on the person you are shooting obviously. We didn’t put it together. When we started editing when I first saw the film, it was eight or nine different people. It ended up being a joke. The whole thing for how my character was fighting was trying to find what was realistic and worked for a woman. There’s a lot of people when they saw that Olga Kurylenko, a Ukranian model was cast as a warrior woman, and thought how scary can that be. It was a lot about that it looked realistic and that we knew where to hit. That we knew how to use full advantage of our strengths and the weapons that we had.

Neil Marshall: It wasn’t so much about being strong physically, it was about being brutal and cunning.

Jason Bene: You always cast very strong women in your movies. James Cameron is a pioneer in that department. Do you think that the meek female character is the thing of the past?

Neil Marshall: Not entirely. You can look at something like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and having this screaming, hysterical woman that was done more as a parody in that film. But you can never get away with doing that now. I don’t know if audiences would want to see that. I don’t think women in the audience want to see themselves depicted that way. I think its changed. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good thing all women in movies should be butch and basically trying to be like men. I don’t think that is their best strength.

Axelle Carolyn: Raiders of the Lost Ark is a perfect example.

Neil Marshall: ‘Raiders’ is a perfect example of having a feisty woman but she’s not trying to be a guy. I think that’s the big difference. They can be strong but as soon as you start turning them into guys in a dress you kind of miss the point.

Axelle Carolyn: I think it all depends on the context too. The lucky thing here was the ‘Picts’ historically had women fighting within their ranks, so it was just great you could use that. One of my dreams is to be in a Western someday because I love the whole horseriding thing. I can do all kinds of tricks on the horse. I just wish I could do that, but it’s just never going to work out because historically that would make no sense.

Neil Marshall: This was good because it was the age before sexism. This was before sexism was invented. In a weird way there was more equality then.

Jason Bene: The tribal attire looks like an extension of the apocalyptic clans in Doomsday. Was it a conscious decision that they were similiar in a warrior kind of way or was it a coincidence?

Neil Marshall: It think it’s more coincidence. A lot of warrior tribes do similiar kind of stuff with war paint and tattoos. They utitilize visual ways of making themselves look more fierce. From everybody to the Comanches to Aztecs to the jungles of South America or the Middle East. They utitlized those techniques. I guess it was an unvoidable coincidence that in order to do it authentically it was going to have similarities. When I did Doomsday I didn’t necessarily know I was going to do this film next. But this film really required that it be authentic, so I couldn’t avoid that.

Jason Bene: Dario Argento was known for ‘offing’ his wife [now ex-wife Daria Nicolodi] in his movies. Do I see a pattern with Neil’s films with you?

Axelle Carolyn: On Doomsday I was helping out on the special effects make-up. I just had to try that make-up on. I really wanted to die in films. I’m such a huge horror fan and I love and live for horror films. It’s always been a dream to die in horror films. It kind of how I started getting into acting. I want to die in films. I get to die in this one too.

Jason Bene: The editing in the movie is well done. A lot of action movies today do the whole herky jerky camerawork. Did you purposely slow things down so the battle sequences could be appreciated?

Neil Marshall: I got quite a lot of criticism on Doomsday for it being overcut. I wanted to very specifically go the other way. I went with an old school style of being happy to sit back and let the film play. Only if necessary did I ever go in and get close-up coverage. The battle scenes are a bit more frenetic because we weren’t able to stand back and show rows of extras because we only had two hundred. We had to kind of play that one a bit more tight. That was also the nature of that battle. It needed to be intense and frenetic. I think what I learned from Doomsday was knowing when to show constraint on the editing and also pacing it better. Going slow when you want to go slow and then speeding up for the action sequences.

Jason Bene: How is your working relationship on set? The director has a lot of pressure to get the film done and finish on time and not go over budget.

Axelle Carolyn: To be quite honest, with being the wife of the director, I didn’t want people to know that so they wouldn’t judge me. There are so many assumptions. I actually had to audition. I had to go through the entire thing just like everyone else. I kind of made a point to not go and speak to Neil too much. Most of the time he would set up the shot and tell me what was going on then I would do my thing. If there was something he didn’t like he would tell me quite quickly. He tried to focus on other actors too. Just try to make sure that we don’t spend too much time together. Neil is quiet and relaxed.

Neil Marshall: It was very much a case of when we were on set together we both had our jobs to do. On set, Axelle was the actor and I was the director. The relationship didn’t get in the way of that at all.

Axelle Carolyn: It was very different from Doomsday where I was just hanging out. I had the special effects to do, but on the nights where there were no special effects I would just hang out and we would chat. But it was fine because I didn’t have a job there. Other than those specific times.

Neil Marshall: It only made me feel slightly guilty on the days that we called her in at six o’clock in the morning and then not actually shoot her until six o’clock in the evening for about five minutes.

Axelle Carolyn: I had to spent twelve hours in that wig. It took a hour and a half to put on.

Jason Bene: What is up next for you?

Neil Marshall: I don’t know exactly what is going to be next. I have a few things in the pipeline, one is a project called Burst, which Sam Raimi is producing. It’s a 3D horror movie. It should be a lot of fun.

Jason Bene: Is it a spontaneous combustion film?

Neil Marshall: Not really. People burst but there’s no combustion. It’s like a pressure burst. I can’t give away anymore about the storyline. I will tell you there’s aliens involved, but beyond that I say no more.