When worlds collide
Ridley Scott explains how 9/11, David Lean and cheating at conkers led him to make his epic film of the crusades, Kingdom of Heaven
Friday April 29, 2005
The Guardian
Ridley Scott: 'We are now living in the post-9/11 world'
People who come to see Kingdom of Heaven will discover a moment in history that isn't well known. When one thinks of the crusades, one generally imagines pitched battles between knights and Saracens, or endless sieges of forgotten fortresses. There will certainly be plenty of fighting on the screen - we've created some impressive images of massive fields of battle with thousands of people (not all of them real) and huge medieval war machines that are completely real and built from scratch. There are siege towers and catapults that were carefully researched and constructed to fit with the era.
I'm known for creating worlds on film, and I like to get into the research and the fine details. How do you re-create a particular situation in a certain century? That's part of the fascination of the job. And I admit I'm especially taken with those great contraptions that hurl heavy objects long distances. (It probably goes back to playing conkers as a child. I'm afraid I was quite competitive and used to cheat by baking my chestnut in the oven until it was very hard, then polishing it with bootblack so it looked shiny and new. Then I'd have this lethal missile, like granite on a string.) The trebuchets we built for the film were a bit like giant conkers, with an arm that pivots 56ft and can sling 100lb of rock about 400 yards.
But warfare is fairly predictable in a crusades movie. What's unusual about this one is that our story offered the chance to show not just war but an attempt at peace. I always try to do something surprising - that, after all, is the target of drama, isn't it? So where people might assume war and bloodbath, we approach from a different angle.
The period we focused on is a brief era of truce that occurred between the second and third crusades. I'd always wanted to make a movie about knights and medieval times, the crusades especially. It was our scriptwriter, Bill Monahan, who came up with this period when the two cultures - Christian and Muslim - stood at peace. However uneasy and brief, the truce was maintained by two remarkable leaders: King Baldwin IV, who ruled the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and the great Saracen general Saladin. Reading the exchanges that took place between these two, one is struck that they obviously held great respect for each other. There is no escaping the parallels with our time, when leaders who try to make peace are admired, but their efforts are subverted by more radical factions.
We set out to tell a terrific story from a dramatic age - not to make a documentary or a piece that aims to moralise or propagandise. But since our subject is the clash of these two civilisations, and we are now living in the post-9/11 world, Kingdom of Heaven will be looked at from that perspective. We did make some choices about the values expressed through the story, beginning with the central situation of two leaders trying to serve their own people and their sense of mission, while exercising a degree of tolerance of the "other".
Beyond that, certain values are embodied in the central character of Balian, an innately good man and a seeker. Though he becomes a knight in the film, he was already the kind of person a knight was supposed to be: valorous in battle and honourable in personal conduct. He goes through a hard journey and various temptations, as heroes tend to do, but at the end of the day we want our heroes to emerge relatively pure, as someone who is fair and good and does the right thing. This may make me sound like a boy scout, but a little bit of boy scout would be very useful today. Chivalry is just good behaviour; it's quite simple, really, yet we don't seem to be able to apply it.
But making a successful drama can't be all about high ideals. Working on a large canvas as we are, I've tried to make sure there is a strong personal story within the big frame. Pulling this off is partly a matter of experience; also of having good collaborators. My model is David Lean, whose characters never got lost in the proscenium.
But mainly it's in the story: what happens to the characters and how they respond. It's been said that the medieval mind was very different from ours, to the point where we cannot hope to identify with the people of that time or understand their motivations. I don't agree with that. They may have faced different challenges and lived with a level of violence we can hardly imagine. But even though it's based in history, a lot of the film's emotional territory will be familiar ground for us. It comes right from the heart in terms of who the characters are, the central personalities that run through the story and make its world evolve and dissolve.
It begins with Balian, a man who has lost everything worth living for. His child dies, his wife becomes so depressed that she commits suicide, and because the church hadn't outgrown this barbarous custom, she is considered damned and denied burial in holy ground. So he's a man in complete bewilderment about his religious roots and what to do with his life. One motive for joining the crusaders and going to Jerusalem is to redeem her soul, but the journey is also a kind of redemption for him - he is seeking forgiveness for sins of his own. So it's a spiritual journey, but also one that serves to demonstrate his inner nobility by showing how he responds to life-threatening and soul-threatening challenges.
The knight Godfrey is a good man but more worldly than religious. He talks about the opportunities the Holy Land presents, and about an ideology that's based on the right actions and common sense. Both of which we could use a lot more of these days.
Then there is the princess Sibylla: her story is specific to the period but its human tragedy can speak to anyone. She is very close to her brother, the king, but since he has been destroyed by leprosy, she can't bear to touch him. She is attracted to Balian, but for the sake of the kingdom she must remain married to a man she loathes.
Jeremy Irons is the king's chief adviser, Tiberias, a man who has served his government faithfully but finds himself worn down by the effort of peacekeeping; he has a diminishing passion for his job and for being in the Holy Land at all.
I wanted people to see events from the Muslims' point of view as well, and the way to do that was to develop strong, multidimensional characters on that side. Especially Saladin, as played by Ghassan Massoud, a wonderful Syrian actor. I felt it was important to use Muslim actors to play Muslim characters. You see Saladin in private moments; you see his leadership, how he tries to keep the peace. He was under pressure from his people, and on the other side there was the radical faction of the Templars and other knights - what we might call the right wing or Christian fundamentalists of their day. He is a man with a strong sense of his destiny.
You might do a magnificent job of creating an unfamiliar world - a far place, a far-off time, or both - with the most skilled film-makers and the best technology available. But at you have to make sure that world is inhabited by people whose lives and fates we care about and whose story has something to say to us. The Crusades were a glorious but tragic series of events that are still having an impact on the world today. I hope that in opening a cinematic window on that time, we're doing the job that good drama is meant to do: to excite our emotions, stir our souls, and make us think, all at once.
·Kingdom of Heaven is out next Friday. This is an edited extract from Kingdom of Heaven: The Ridley Scott Film (Newmarket, ￡16.99).
rdian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1472495,00.html
Ridley Scott's new Crusades film 'panders to Osama bin Laden'
By Charlotte Edwardes
(Filed: 18/01/2004)
Sir Ridley Scott, the Oscar-nominated director, was savaged by senior British academics last night over his forthcoming film which they say "distorts" the history of the Crusades to portray Arabs in a favourable light.
The ￡75 million film, which stars Orlando Bloom, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson, is described by the makers as being "historically accurate" and designed to be "a fascinating history lesson".
Sir Ridley Scott
Academics, however - including Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading authority on the Crusades - attacked the plot of Kingdom of Heaven, describing it as "rubbish", "ridiculous", "complete fiction" and "dangerous to Arab relations".
The film, which began shooting last week in Spain, is set in the time of King Baldwin IV (1161-1185), leading up to the Battle of Hattin in 1187 when Saladin conquered Jerusalem for the Muslims.
The script depicts Baldwin's brother-in-law, Guy de Lusignan, who succeeds him as King of Jerusalem, as "the arch-villain". A further group, "the Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians", is introduced, promoting an image of cross-faith kinship.
"They were working together," the film's spokesman said. "It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar cause friction between them."
The Knights Templar, the warrior monks, are portrayed as "the baddies" while Saladin, the Muslim leader, is a "a hero of the piece", Sir Ridley's spokesman said. "At the end of our picture, our heroes defend the Muslims, which was historically correct."
Prof Riley-Smith, who is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, said the plot was "complete and utter nonsense". He said that it relied on the romanticised view of the Crusades propagated by Sir Walter Scott in his book The Talisman, published in 1825 and now discredited by academics.
"It sounds absolute balls. It's rubbish. It's not historically accurate at all. They refer to The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."
Prof Riley-Smith added: "Guy of Lusignan lost the Battle of Hattin against Saladin, yes, but he wasn't any badder or better than anyone else. There was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense."
Dr Jonathan Philips, a lecturer in history at London University and author of The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, agreed that the film relied on an outdated portrayal of the Crusades and could not be described as "a history lesson".
He said: "The Templars as 'baddies' is only sustainable from the Muslim perspective, and 'baddies' is the wrong way to show it anyway. They are the biggest threat to the Muslims and many end up being killed because their sworn vocation is to defend the Holy Land."
Dr Philips said that by venerating Saladin, who was largely ignored by Arab history until he was reinvented by romantic historians in the 19th century, Sir Ridley was following both Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad, the former Syrian dictator. Both leaders commissioned huge portraits and statues of Saladin, who was actually a Kurd, to bolster Arab Muslim pride.
Prof Riley-Smith added that Sir Ridley's efforts were misguided and pandered to Islamic fundamentalism. "It's Osama bin Laden's version of history. It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists."
Amin Maalouf, the French historian and author of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, said: "It does not do any good to distort history, even if you believe you are distorting it in a good way. Cruelty was not on one side but on all."
Sir Ridley's spokesman said that the film portrays the Arabs in a positive light. "It's trying to be fair and we hope that the Muslim world sees the rectification of history."
The production team is using Loarre Castle in northern Spain and have built a replica of Jerusalem in Ouarzazate, in the Moroccan desert. Sir Ridley, 65, who was knighted in July last year, grew up in South Shields and rose to fame as director of Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver.
He followed with classics such as Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, which won him an Oscar nomination in 1992, and in 2002 Black Hawk Down, told the story of the US military's disastrous raid on Mogadishu. In 2001 his film Gladiator won five Oscars, but Sir Ridley lost out to Steven Soderbergh for Best Director.
egraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/wcrus18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/18/ixworld.html
Hollywood Crusades film labelled anti-Muslim
Date: August 14 2004
Los Angeles
With bloody images of Muslims and Westerners battling on the nightly news, it may seem like odd timing to unveil a Hollywood epic depicting the ferocious fight between Christians and Muslims over Jerusalem in the Third Crusade, late in the 12th century.
But 20th Century Fox is planning a release next year for Kingdom of Heaven , a $US130 million ($A184 million) production by Oscar-nominated director Ridley Scott, shot in Morocco with hundreds of extras, horses and elaborate costumes.
William Monahan's script is based on real characters, including Balian of Ibelin, a Crusader knight who led the defence of Jerusalem in 1187, and the Muslim leader Saladin, who defeated him. Balian is to be played by British actor Orlando Bloom.
While the studio has tried to emphasise the romance and thrilling action, some religious scholars and interfaith activists who were provided a copy of the script by The New York Times questioned the wisdom of producing a movie about an ancient religious conflict when many people believe those conflicts have been reignited in a modern context.