Past Perfected

Indian cinema is becoming global now. Are you game to casting Indian faces in your films?
Are you crazy, who wouldn’t?! Filmmaking should be an adventure.  Mixing genres, cultures, ideas, and whole worlds is what is fun and exciting. I would love to work in India. Give me a ticket and a fun idea and I am there!

Do you know of any Bollywood actors/actresses?
Not well enough to name specifically — but that is something we are going to have to fix — won’t we!

Where did the inspiration for Outlander come from?
I kept thinking I always wanted to make a version of Beowulf and then around 1998, decided it could still be a cool idea. Only that we’d use science fiction as the excuse to jump back in the past and basically tell Beowulf that way. It was originally written as Beowulf with the lead character called Beowulf, and we re-titled it and all of the characters changed and it became Outlander.

I’ve heard you built an actual Norse village and a Viking ship.
Yeah, we built a beautiful boat, and I went to Norway to research the film. We couldn’t shoot in Norway, because it’s the most expensive place on earth. I went to the Viking ship museum in Oslo and that’s where they had the  Oseberg ship, the burial ship that they dug up. We got  the measurements and designs for that and that ship was 77 feet long. We had  to shorten ours by 10 feet,  and we had to take it to this place called Little Port in Newfoundland where we put it in the water.

We built the village out at Nine Mile farm, and logged our own trees to do  to build the parapet. It took three months to build the village and it’s pretty big. It will be very sad when they have to tear it down.