Outlander (film)

Not to be confused with Outland (film).

Outlander
Promotional poster
Directed by	Howard McCain
Written by	Dirk Blackman Howard McCain
Produced by	Barrie M. Osborne Chris Roberts
Starring	James Caviezel Sophia Myles Ron Perlman John Hurt Jack Huston
Cinematography	Pierre Gill
Edited by	David Dodson
Distributed by	The Weinstein Company
Release date	2009
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$47 million

Outlander is an upcoming science fiction film directed by Howard McCain and starring James Caviezel. Caviezel has described Outlander to be a light combination of Braveheart and Highlander, but a film on a larger scale.

Plot

From The Weinstein Company: "Outlander begins when a space craft crashes into the majestic fjords of ancient Norway and into the time of the Vikings. From the wreckage emerge two bitter enemies: a soldier from another world – Kainan – and a bloodthirsty creature known as the Moorwen. Man and monster both seek revenge for violence committed against them. As the Moorwen ravages the Viking world, killing everything in its path, Kainan forms an unlikely alliance with the primitive but fierce warriors. Combining his advanced technology with ancient Iron Age weapons, the hero leads a desperate attempt to kill the monster - before it destroys them all."

Cast

• James Caviezel as Kainan
• Sophia Myles as Freya
• Jack Huston as Wulfric
• Ron Perlman as Gunnar
• John Hurt as Rothgar

Production

Director Howard McCain was inspired to write Outlander in 1992 when he was a student in Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He had seen an issue of Archaeology magazine that had a rebuilt Viking boat on the cover and conceived of a story based on the epic poem Beowulf. Since a monster in Viking times did not seem convincing to McCain at the time, he shelved the idea until 1998. That year, McCain met Dirk Blackman, an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who studied at Columbia University, who re-designed the story to carry science fiction elements and re-identified the characters to distance them from their Beowulf origins. According to McCain, director Renny Harlin expressed interest in making Outlander at one point. Eventually, Outlander was financed independently to have its effects designed by Weta Workshop and to be filmed at South Island, New Zealand. Development was a struggle at first, but in 2004, production company Ascendant Pictures and producer Barrie M. Osborne gave McCain and his crew the necessary support to resume.

In May 2005, The Weinstein Company announced the addition of the sci-fi epic Outlander to its distribution slate with Howard McCain directing the film. At the time, actor Karl Urban was in talks to star in the film, which is based on a screenplay written by McCain and Dirk Blackman. In September 2006, James Caviezel was announced to star in Outlander, replacing Urban in the role. Filming was scheduled to begin October 16, 2006 in Halifax and Nine Mile River, Nova Scotia, and to last 10 weeks. Filming was also done at the Bay of Islands, Newfoundland, which was found by a production designer who looked at photos of Newfoundland's west coast after rejecting scouted locations New Zealand and British Columbia. The bay possessed an inlet that simulated part of a fjord for the film. The conceptual design of Outlander was shaped by Iain McCaig, whose Ninth Ray Studios helped set up concept art, storyboarding, animatronics, and set design. Sophia Myles, Ron Perlman, John Hurt, and Jack Huston were cast alongside Caviezel in the film, which wrapped up photography on January 5, 2007 in Halifax and Newfoundland. Costume designer Debra Hanson designed by hand costumes for the main characters using designs from Ninth Ray Studios. She also provided leftover costumes from her previous collaboration, Beowulf & Grendel, to dress the extras. Actor Patrick Stevenson, who plays the superstitious Viking Unferth, studied pagan gods, the Norse god Thor, and runestones for his character.

For the character Kainan, director Howard McCain sought an actor that would be "a person with soul" and convey the character strongly, placing performance at the action part of the character second. The director chose Caviezel to fit the criteria. McCain saw James Caviezel's American accent as Kainan as a way to distance the character from the Vikings, whose actors had European accents. The director chose for Kainan to speak an alien language before adapting to the Vikings' language, which would be spoken in English for film audiences' sake. Old Norse was the alien language selected for Kainan to speak, and James Caviezel was trained to speak the language by a linguistics professor from Iceland. Kainan's opponent, the creature called the Moorwen, was designed by creature designer Patrick Tatopolous for free for McCain's film. The Moorwen was a play on the word Morlock from H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. The director and the creature designer created the Moorwen to be like an animal, only to be perceived as a monster by those who were threatened. McCain praised Tatopoulos: "He brought the right amount of fierceness, sensuality, the sense of personality and a sentient kind of intelligence to [the Moorwen] that was perfect." The creature was designed to possess bioluminescence, using light to draw its prey.

For the film, McCain constructed a replica Viking village and a replica Viking ship. The ship was modeled after the Oseberg ship scouted at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. The museum's ship is 77 feet, which McCain shortened by ten feet in designing the dimensions for his film's ship for easier transportation. The ship was deployed at Little Port, Newfoundland and later burned for a scene - the remains are still on display in the community of Lark Harbor Newfoundland. The Viking village itself was built at the Nine Mile farm in Nova Scotia. The crew logged their own trees and hired a logging crew and truck for constructing a parapet 800 feet in length and 20 feet tall. The village took three months to build. The village included long houses and a shield hall.

External links

• Outlander at IMDb
• Watch Trailer
• The Moorwen Creature Design at G4
• Outlander fan site
• Official UK Site