Paul Risker chats to Vikings creator Michael Hirst…
As part of a special week long feature to coincide with the home entertainment release of Vikings series 2, Flickering Myth sits down in conversation with the cast and creator Michael Hirst to go behind the scenes of the critically acclaimed historical drama.
From the reflections of two onscreen brothers, and the new faces of sea series 2 creator, writer and producer Michael Hirst reflects on his passion for history and bringing the Vikings to life for a modern audience…
Paul Risker: The opening gambit would be history – what draws you to it? Clearly you are a fan and something of a scholar… Would you say scholar is the correct term?
Michael Hirst: No I wouldn’t. I went to three universities. The first was The London School of Economics where I went to study history, but I walked out on that, and then I studied English literature and then American literature.
I have a huge defining interest in history, but I think it works like this. What I like is the research – finding out about these different worlds, plunging into books and texts, and finding storylines and characters – interesting and quirky stuff that comes out of reading. I have never written anything completely original – I wouldn’t know how to. I prefer to find things and build or recreate a world. But at the same time I don’t recognise the difference between history and contemporary life. For me life is continuous. As T.S. Eliot said, “Time past; time future are all present in time present.” So for example because we all live in history there is nowhere else for us to live, and we are historical – this conversation tomorrow will be an historical conversation.
I’m writing something set in the 1960s at the moment, but are the 1960s historical – not to me because I lived it. I was there and so it is not historical, although I suppose it is the past.
So my principle aim in the things that I write is to connect the past to the present, and to make the past relevant so that it resonates with people today. With the Vikings people said, “How are you going to write something about the Vikings – they are horrible people. They just go in and plunder rape and slaughter everyone.” That is the image that everyone had of them, which by the way was an image created by the Christian Monks who wrote about them – the Vikings didn’t write anything about themselves. Do you know that they were family people – husbands loved wives, and adults loved their children? They were a democratic society as opposed to the Francs and Saxons. Their attitude towards women was much more emancipated than, and much more enlightened than in France or in England. Women could rule; they could own property, and they fought with the men folk. The Vikings had an extraordinary technology which allowed them to sail around the world, which nobody else could do at the time. The whole prejudicial, precocial and ridiculous view of the Vikings is something that I’m trying to overturn.
But I’m also making their issues… Ragnar has family problems; he has problems with his wife, his ex-wife and now his new wife, as well as with his children and his boss. He had to kill his boss because he was stopping him. These aren’t themes and ideas that are so remote for us. These are ideas, themes and storylines that everyone can connect with, but it just so happens that they have axes. So I’m afraid that’s a long winded answer, but as I say I don’t feel in a sense that I am particularly writing history, because I hate those BBC costume dramas. They are so stuffy, and it’s about wheeling people out from museums. They speak a dead language, and they talk about things that aren’t really interesting. I think human beings are human beings, and I don’t think human nature has changed. Circumstances have changed, but human nature hasn’t changed. We would recognise people from a medieval French village as human beings with issues that we would certainly understand. I guess we are interested in family life and the big questions – is there a God? Of course that’s what the Vikings would talk about, because they had Gods, and I love writing about the Viking Gods and all of that.
So for me it is the richness and the texture, which is why I don’t like writing about what I call my contemporary life, because I don’t see the richness. It’s what William James called the “Budding, booming chaos.” I’d rather be able to find out how societies work, what they believe, think and how they operate, and all of that comes out of reading and research.
PR: Would you say then in a hundred years down the line you would look back on today’s society and say that there was richness to it?
MH: Yeah… Of course I’ll be dead, but yes people in a hundred years’ time will see density whereas we don’t. It’s like just seeing moving images really. We can’t see patterns. We are trying to impose logic and patterns onto experience, but actually you can’t make sense of experience until you can look at it from a distance. For example if you went to live in a completely different culture, then after a few years you could look back on how you lived, and understand more about it – oh gosh that was the reality, I never knew that. This was the important thing but I thought this was.
PR: This might be an unfair question, like asking you to choose between your children. But who are your favourite characters to write for?
MH: No I don’t have a favourite one. They are very real to me, and so I feel that when I go to my study in the morning I go to talk to them, and to find out what they have been up to, what they are going to do, who’s going to be brutal, and who’s going to be naughty.
I have always liked writing about Athelstan because he’s Christian, and he was originally our way into a different world. I could imagine that he would share a lot of our values and our outlook – here he is going into a very different Pagan world. We could feel with and for him, and then of course he develops this spiritual crisis which is wonderful to write about, and which is really rich. He’s confused and he doesn’t know what to believe. He’s torn between Ragnar and King Ecbert; one world and another, and because I like writing about the Pagan’s and their God’s, I did like the scenes with him. But crisis is always a good thing to write about – continual crisis.
PR: How do you balance the historical information and entertainment element when writing this show?
MH: Well this question crops up all the time and I sometimes don’t know why in relation to the things that I do. Hilary Mantel wrote this book about Thomas Cromwell that really has nothing to do with Cromwell – she doesn’t reach out and quote Cromwell’s words. It’s a great book that is so well written – it’s fantastic. The insight and the depth, but it’s total rubbish as far as history is concerned. It is well written but it is rubbish if you want to learn about history.
The things that I do are really well researched, and are based on realities although they are not completely true. One thing is drama and the other is documentary, and I’m not writing documentary. Everything I do starts life as research. Ragnar was the first real Viking leader to emerge from myth and legend, but he was real and he had at least two wives and he loved his children. We know certain things about him. We know certain things about Viking society, but we don’t know a huge amount because they are the dark ages.
So I have certain given material that I like to use, and I always like to add to the drama and things that are real and plausible. I’m not interested in accuracy; I’m interested in truth. So I’m trying to tell the truth as I see it, as I’ve discovered it in my research in the story. So I would never take it into fantasy – I’m not interested in fantasy. So whether it is absolutely accurate or not a) I don’t know, b) You can’t tell and c) the head of Scandinavian studies at Harvard University who’s a Swedish professor who we showed him some of the first series to said, this was the first time his culture had ever been taken seriously. So I can live with that. But it’s not a documentary; it wasn’t meant to be a documentary; it’s a drama, and it has to keep people entertained.
PR: What was the biggest challenge of writing season two content?
MH: Well it is almost like the challenge that the Vikings themselves had, because we started the show at the beginning of what was known as the Viking Age. The first boats were going west when they found a way of navigating across the ocean, and reaching lands that they had heard about, but didn’t know where they were. So in our first season we had Ragnar with one boat going to Northumberland in England and attacking one monastery. But subsequent to that in the Viking world of course, there were more Viking raids. There were slightly bigger raids of three, four or five ships going to England, and ultimately to Ireland and France and spreading out.
But everything needed to be bigger. We just had one boat, so we had to have three or four boats built. We had to have more extras. The show had to get bigger in every way. We had to do a bigger build Kattegat set. We were building more sets and we went to Wessex, which was a bigger Kingdom in England, and I decided that Ecbert, this wonderful new character is so interested in history. We know that he spent time as a youth in the court of Charlemagne, and so I assumed that he was more sophisticated. He’s built his villa on the ruins of a Roman villa, and I live in Oxfordshire where I am surrounded by the ruins of Roman villas, and it’s certainly what I would have done if it had been dotted around the landscape. So we had a Roman baths, and everything was just stepped up.
So that was the physical challenge, but the other challenge was that the first scene is always the hardest to get. To get all the storylines up and running, and to create characters that are believable, and to get the actors embedded in the characters. So it was a question of giving them storylines that allows them as actors to do great work, and as characters to fulfil any potential you might have seen in the first season. I think that is exactly what they did, but we have a lot of characters. We have a lot of lead characters, and I tried to give them all God arcs. Hopefully I succeeded because all the major characters have interesting things that happen to them as well as dilemmas and all the rest of it.
I thought the cast were just wonderful – Floki, Lagertha and Travis goodness me. What he has become is just so tremendous – he has redefined what a Viking is. Vikings aren’t big hairy guys who just shout loudly. They are a deep and counter-intuitive people. I’m really pleased as well because one thing I was pushing for was for Lagertha to be a major character, but to also have a lot of other women in the show – Shield Maidens. I’m really pleased to say that Lagertha is a feminist icon across the world. In American TV there is nobody like her – she’s a mother, wife and she kicks ass. It’s totally unique, although I got into a little bit of trouble because I read a couple of people telling me that wasn’t true, and it couldn’t be true. Women couldn’t really fight in the Shield Walls, because how could they fight these big hairy guys? They would have been killed easily. The show was pushing that too much, but recently – only a matter of a few months ago, a Viking grave was found from a battle and fifty per cent of the corpses were women. So we were right; we were absolutely right.
PR: Are there any writers you look to for inspiration for your work or you thought you’d like to emulate?
MH: No, but my problem was that I did my doctorate [PhD] on the short stories of Henry James, and I wanted to write. I have always written stories and such, but I wanted to be a serious writer; a novelist. But every time I tried to write a novel Henry James was standing behind me – that’s not very good. I’m not really impressed by that. So a film director called Nick Roeg, who I met almost by accident and who was my mentor, I had a couple of short stories that he read and he said, “I’d like you to write a script for me.” I said, “I don’t know how to do that” and he replied, “Good; no bad habits. We’ll do it together.” He told me, “I can’t teach you – nobody can teach anyone to do that, but I’ll mentor you or encourage you.”
He showed me movies; weird, wonderful Buñuel and Cocteau movies, and he’d say things like “It is magical Michael. If you write something for me I want to be astonished. I don’t want two guys in a room talking.” But it meant that I was never influenced by any other writer. I hadn’t read any other scripts, and I had never thought I’d be in this world. So I had no shadows falling over the work.
The big discovery was actually when I was asked to write The Tudors which was my first TV project. They asked me, “Do you think you can write a long form TV drama?” I had no idea, but I took to it like a duck to water. I love teasing out storylines and following characters. In movies a character is revealed, but in TV drama it is developed and that is the great thing. You live with these people and so you can expose their contradictions. You can flip them around and say what if they did this? Are all people naturally rational; are they all simple – no. But you know it’s like that, and so let’s do things with the characters. That’s why leaving things to the writers is better, because an executive will always tell you “We wouldn’t do that.” But we are talking about human beings, and human beings are capable of doing anything. You are just talking about old movies that you have seen and which are one dimensional. So it was liberating for me to write scripts.
PR: What content can fans be most excited to see on the season two DVD release?
MH: Well there is one scene which Variety voted one of the ten most powerful scenes in TV drama last year, and when you see it you know what it is. I think all the story arcs are very interesting and takes it into very interesting territory. The show is bigger, better, bolder and more confident, and I did a couple of special things with Floki [Gustaf Skarsgård], where I sat down and watched a few episodes and talked about them. I don’t know if it’s in the DVD – I think it probably is. We just chatted as we watched these episodes, and it was wonderful to talk to Gustav about how he played the role, what he was thinking and just how subtle it was. It is great for me sometimes to learn about the craft of acting and how actors approach things.
PR: Can you talk about the training each character does for the action scenes, and is that discussed further on the DVD?
MH: Yeah, it is obviously a very central part of the show because it is about Vikings, and it is about fights. But the early directors and I decided that we were going to do the battles in different ways. We were going to be innovative; we were going to get as close to our characters as we could, and each sequence would be different. So if we did a Shield Wall attack we’d be with the characters inside the Shield Wall to give you a sense of how claustrophobic it was. Each battle sequence and each battle would also be a narrative in which you cared about the outcome of the battle. So it wasn’t just CGI figures swarming over the landscape and it didn’t matter if it there were just thirty Vikings against fifty Saxons. You would be caught up in the narrative of the battle because you cared about what happened to these characters – you were invested in these characters. So that’s a policy we have continued even though the scale has grown and grown. We are still invested in our characters.
Franklin [Hanson] and Richard [Ryan], the two guys who do the choreography for us are absolutely wonderful. They have spent a lot of time choreographing each battle sequence, fight or whatever it is. Richard’s background is choreographing ballet, and Franklin is at the end of sharp end of a sword – weapons, moves and stuff. So together they are perfect, because all action should in some ways be balletic. It should be that movement and rhythm, and they do this wonderful thing that you are not even aware of it. Each battle sequence is very different – very carefully wrote out and also they then spend a relatively long time going through it with the actors.
So all of the actors go into these very intense training sessions, which they are up for, because Kathryn’s a black belt in Taekwondo; Travis is from the Outback, and Clive does a lot of martial arts stuff. They love it and you can tell. But you can also tell they are really fighting. We do some CGI but it’s just a topping, which enhances it.
There will be a bit of shock and awe when we get to Paris, but we don’t do gratuitous violence. If you see other shows where blood is spraying everywhere it’s for effect, and a lot of the gratuitous sex scenes are for effect. It’s nothing to do with the story or the nature of things. It is just showing off, and we really made big decisions partly because history is a network company, and with it shown on network TV and not on cable TV in America they have very strict rules – though you wouldn’t think it sometimes [laughs]. They have very strict rules about the sexual content and the violence. Even though the famous scene I was talking about in the Blood Eagle episode, History actually said, “We don’t want you to shoot that because we know we can’t show it.” But we said, “Trust us.”
So I had Ragnar telling his son beforehand what actually happens in a Blood Eagle, so when you saw it you knew what was happening, although you actually don’t see it, or you see very little of it. You see Ragnar behind Jarl Borg, and you know what he’s doing, and so in a way you think that you are seeing it. So that kind of imaginative way of doing things was partly forced upon us by these limitations, but it was also a good challenge. It is a positive and creative thing to solve these problems because you bring in everyone – the costume department, the choreographers, and it makes it all very creative. It’s a wonderfully creative atmosphere and I don’t know if you’ve been aware of that in the time you’ve been here, but this is a very happy production. It’s a great crew and cast – a happy show where everyone works so hard. If everyone works so hard then why shouldn’t you try and create a happy production, because otherwise it’s not good going to work.
PR: What elements of filming are actual sets and props vs CGI?
MH: No there isn’t that much. There is always some in each episode, but I wanted there to be crossbows when we got to France. I knew in medieval times they had crossbows, but in the dark ages did the French have crossbows? We had people research this, and yes they had crossbows, and so we made them – a hundred crossbows. The CGI sometimes is just multiplying the crossbows perhaps, but we had them and everything, because everything in this show starts from something real.
There will be a lot of CGI when we come to Paris, because we built a huge wall, and what we call two cheese graters – ladders to get up the walls. But when you see it there will be a hundred ladders, there will be a hundred boats because that was what actually happened.
Many thanks to Michael Hirst for taking the time for this interview.
Vikings series 2 is out now on Blu-ray and DVD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Paul Risker is a critic and writer for a number of on-line and print publications, including Little White Lies, Film International, Starburst Magazine, and VideoScope. He is currently based in the United Kingdom.
