The Eagle's Director on Roman Battles, Pict Rituals and Lying

Jordan Hoffman: The movie really gets cookin' when the soldiers go over Hadrian's Wall and encounter the Pict culture. What was the research that went into those cultures?

Kevin Macdonald: I wanted the audience to be immersed in the culture of the Northern Britains, the Picts, the Celts, as much as possible. However, much less is known about what life was like for the Barbarians compared to the Romans. The Romans wrote a little bit about what they encountered in the North of England and Scotland. There’s a little bit of archeological evidence and there are anthropologists who have studied and tried to figure out how people lived. There’s a lot of evidence for these cultures that lived off the sea, and tribes like this one - they’re called the seal peoples tribe. They thought of the sea eagles and the seals as totems of the tribes, very much like a North American Indian tribe would have a totem.

So that’s where we took the ritual that you see, the initiation of new warriors. You have a totem and a witch doctor figure in the village. He's dressed up in the skin of a seal with seal-like make-up on.

There’s a lot of archeological evidence for that kind of aspect of the culture, but when it comes to the clothing, it gets much much harder. Other than a few scraps of cloth and the kind of thing you find in peat bogs, there’s really very little evidence there. The costume designer I worked with, Mike Lucanneau, was very careful for instance, we had the cloth for everybody in the north woven separately to the cloth of what the Romans wore. Woven in a deliberately rough way as opposed to Roman cloth that has a very similar and modern feel. There are a few Roman documents where they describe how some of the tribes used to shave their heads, and have long bits dangling down the backs of their heads, and how sometimes some of the tribes used to paint themselves blue. But we had to invent a lot more, in what seemed to be feasible.  We know that they hunted and ate seals, because of the remains that have been found so we imagined that they probably also wore seals and used it for their shoes and their boots. We know that those far Northerners didn’t have horses, because horses can’t really survive up there, so we guess maybe they’re fantastic runners, maybe they can run forever. So it’s more on that, we’ve taken what little amounts of evidence there is and we extrapolate on that.