“Keep moving. We are still rolling.”
I am running as chaotically as I can manage through a mucky field. I
am dressed in fur boots, leather armbands and a metal helmet. I am
wildly swinging a sword in one hand, and a shield in the other, as
bodies emerge from the darkness and disappear again. We’re screaming
unintelligibly. All around me are explosions, copious amounts of fake
blood, fire and smoke, and I must confess it doesn’t take much
imagination to feign terror in the dark field. Suddenly, a voice over a
microphone shouts, “Act more chaotically! Look for your lost
children.”
Outlander, a sci-fi Viking flick by Americans Howard McCain
and Dirk Blackman, is about the humanoid alien character Kainan, played
by Jim Caviezel, best known for his title role in Mel Gibson’s 2004
Passion of The Christ. Kainan is from a world more
technologically advanced than Earth; however, when his homeland is
destroyed by monstrous beasts called Moorwens, Kainan manages to
crash-land in eighth-century Norway. Unbeknownst to Kainan, one of the
Moorwens—described by an assistant director as “the size of a small
elephant but only scarier”—secretly hitches a ride with him to Earth.
This leads to nothing but death, destruction and a romantic make-out
scene with a lady Viking.
“Your turn. Show me something.”
The Moorwen has broken through the walls of the village, which is an
elaborate construction of wooden buildings surrounded by a
fortification. It is located in a farmer’s field, 15 minutes past the
airport in Nine Mile River.
Suddenly, Jim Caviezel whizzes by me and collides head on with
another chaotic villager. As a crowd of people gathers to see if
Caviezel is injured from the accident, I overhear somebody saying,
“That is going to look really great in post.”
My first day as an extra on the Nine Mile River location was
sometime in mid-November, 2006. The production had been underway for
several weeks, and the area in and around the Viking compound had
turned into a mud pit. I ran through the mud. I played a dead body in
the mud. I shot flaming arrows in the mud. I played a wounded Viking in
the infirmary after a Moorwen attack. Again I was a dead body on the
ground in the mud. This was all in the same scene.
By December it was cold, and the fake blood now stuck to my face
like the shell of a candied apple. Between shot set-ups I waited in a
canvas tent the size of a small living room with about 40 other people
dressed like Vikings, each painted with fake-dirt make up and
oiled-down hair. These people were a mix of professional actors and
locals who replied to a newspaper ad. They were mostly men. And they
all had beards.
As the weeks of waiting in the tent accumulated, so did the bonds.
We spent so much time living together in these eighth-century get-ups,
being shuttled back and forth from the city, that it didn’t seem so
strange when one day the bus stopped at Tim Hortons and the 40 of us
walked inside wearing dirt make up and full Viking gear to get coffee
and egg sandwiches.
By the end of principle shooting in January 2007, I estimate that I
played about five dead bodies, not excluding a three-day stint at the
soundstage in Halifax where I was a corpse in a pile of dead
bodies—some of which were real people, and some not. I remember each
of those days beginning with the pile being hosed down with a blood gun
in which you had to remain very still.
In an industry that is saturated with ridiculous entertainment, it
is hard to see what public need a film like Outlander fulfills.
With a price tag rumoured to be around 42 million dollars, the movie
now seems somewhat out of place in this tentative economy.
Regardless, I feel amused to have been a part of something so epic,
which is lot more than I can say for that extra who got run over by Jim
Caviezel.
Related Stories
Free screening of Outlander on June 18
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.
That sounds like a lot of fun. It’s a shame the final product turned out to be such a piece of crap. Had it not been for the fact it was filmed locally, this DVD would have never warranted any attention whatsoever. Rent “The 13th Warrior” again instead.
I too was an amused extra, and it resulted in a new laptop. In point of fact, I was the extra that Caviezel ran over in that early morning chaotic battle scene as I followed orders from my A.D.; but hey, I am only 60 so it only hurt for a little while. 🙂 D. J. M.