Reykjavik Dispatch. 2.

I only saw one Icelandic film at the Reykjavik International Film Festival, a documentary about making a film in Iceland. If Iceland had much of a documentary tradition outside of television, I wasn't aware of it.

The "making of" documentary has become a genre of its own, with enough differentiation so there's space for a whole range of subgenres. At one end, there's the worshipful infomercial about how technicians make a monster or how a star gains fifty pounds. Then there's the disaster film, the doc about the failed project, the backstage farce. I would never have expected to find one of the latest installments of this genre in Iceland at the Reykjavik International Film Festival.

It's not typical for the flagship film festival in a very small country (fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, where people know each other and are listed in the telephone book by their first names) to disclose uncomfortable truths - albeit cinematic truths - about the country. Isn't it the goal of the festival to promote Iceland, and at least by extension to promote it as a potential location for filmmaking? That's just what the RIFF is doing, issuing a message of caution in premiering Wrath of Gods [site], by Jon Gustafsson, about the ill-fated making in 2004 of the ill-fated co-production with epic aspirations, Beowulf & Grendel.

Having seen the 70-minute doc once in an unfinished version on a DVD, I can still recommend that film schools show it to their students. Wrath is a "making of" in which everything goes wrong, and I think that I'm safe in assuming that only a fraction of what went wrong got into the documentary.

It begins with foolhardiness on the part of the Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson and others. The idea seems to have been to film Beowulf in an "authentic medieval" setting, hence Iceland, which has endless radiant sunlight in the summer that can shift in an instant into storms that seem to rise from the wrath of Thor. It would have been easy enough to film the adaptation of a Norse epic in Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Spain or northern Minnesota. Making the film in Iceland was the first mistake, but it was a colossal one. Iceland, while a beguiling island of breathtaking rugged beauty, happens to be one of the most expensive places on earth, a place than can make your income feel medieval. The makers of Beowulf have the receipts to prove it. As the saying goes, if you want to ruin a man who can't handle money, just force him to spend some.

Another mistake before shooting began was the production team's failure to get their financing into place with their despised British producers, which meant that they did not start shooting until September, when the days had already begun to get shorter. Both money and light turned out to be in short supply, and that was just the beginning.

In the spirit of Iceland's pagan tradition, someone got the idea that the production should begin with a blessing. It turned out that the film's music composer, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, was also a shaman in a neo-pagan cult, and he was happy to oblige. Once he pronounced a blessing, however, he turned around and fell on his face, cutting his head open. Crew members swear that he had turned to the wrong page in his book of pagan incantations, and pronounced a curse instead. The evidence seems to bear out that theory.

The filmmakers thought that one of the advantages to being in Iceland, in spite of the weather, was the labor force - highly educated, trained in cinema professions, near-universal fluency in English - but they couldn't find young students to drive cars for the production at a price within the budget. Then there was the "authentic" ship. The filmmakers and the screenwriter expected that they would be able to work with a replica of a Viking ship, which would sail into a harbor with warriors, slaves, animals and arms on deck, just like in the rape-pillage-and-burn days. Once the ship was built, however, it could not be brought to the shooting location because no bridge on the roads leading there was wide enough. Once they found a bridge (which they barely crossed) and put the boat in the water, it "leaked like a sieve," as one of the producers put it. We're not just dealing with a figure of speech here. Water was rushing through thousands of little holes. The actors had to wear life jackets.

Then there's the scene of Vikings on horseback galloping across black-sand beaches, except that the waves were so fierce that the spray scared the horses away. It didn't help, the assistant director explained, that all the riders (skilled Icelandic horsemen) were drunk, and that no one else on the island could replace them. The scenes were supposed to be shot with a special lens, flown in from Canada and brought to the water's edge on a jeep. The crew hadn't anticipated that a huge wave would engulf the jeep and the camera. That's on camera, too, thanks to the intrepid Jon Gustafsson.

The list goes on with one Biblical (or pagan) plague after another - rain, cold, mud and constant shortages of money that ensured that the crew went unpaid; at one point, a driver says he just plans to keep the truck that he's driving, since he hasn't been paid. Toward the end, when another crew member smirks that at least a volcano hasn't erupted, you can guess what happens.

Every loss for the film seems to be the gain for Jon Gustafsson, whose camera is there at every disastrous moment. The final version of Wrath of Gods reflects a composure and competence. This young filmmaker knows how to tell an entertaining story, but I wonder about his documentary as journalism. Many of his subjects never appear - the stingy and perfidious British producers, the Icelandic producers who lured the production in, the actors Stellan Skarsgard and Sarah Polley (whom we don't see except in scenes that are filmed when they're shot for Beowulf). Did their agents or their contracts forbid anything more than that, and demand that any incriminating footage be destroyed?

The director Sturla Gunnarsson and the actor Gerard Butler (Beowulf himself) are remarkably good sports - Butler, who wore chain mail in conditions that the Guantanamo torturers only wish they could recreate, is particularly game with joke after joke at the most desperate moments. Where are the rest? Were they afraid, after the fact, to be associated with a project that none of then could control? Let's not forget, after all that hardship, that the critics just savaged the movie, pointing to a conclusion that many must have feared when making it - that all the work was indeed going for naught. (I should note that I'm one of the few who doesn't condemn the movie outright.)

In fact, Wrath of Gods may be just what Beowulf needs right now to ward off is own forgettability. I'm sure that some of those who see the doc (whenever it's shown outside Iceland) will go back to the original in search of a seam that's off a bit or looking for signs of inebriation on a horseman's face.

Ultimately, the audience doesn't care if you almost drowned in river rapids to shoot a scene about Vikings fighting demons, and it really doesn't care whether you managed your budget so incompetently that the crew which took the risks was always late being paid. Credulous and incompetent, maybe, but these guys who made Beowulf weren't outright villains, either. We don't know enough about them to say for sure. But we do see that they were hopeless lightweights, struggling with forces far beyond their control. To blame Iceland for the travails of the film is like blaming water for drowning a man who can't swim. We just wonder who the real villains were, and why there's not more about them on the screen.

Perhaps Jon Gustafsson wanted it that way, out of self-preservation. He's clearly got talent, and probably wants to make another documentary some day, or perhaps something more ambitious. This is clearly a man who has some stories to tell.

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2006 2:03 PM