Duncan Kenworthy read Rosemary Sutcliff's “The Eagle of the Ninth” when he was a teenager. “It was my favourite childhood book,” says the 61-year-old producer of hits such as Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Gulliver's Travels (the 1996 television mini series). “The author died 20 years ago but the characters and the story are still vibrant.” So he bought the rights in 2004. “I had a screenplay written which I didn't fancy too much. At the end of 2006, I had the final script in hand and wanted my friend Kevin (Macdonald) to direct it but he had to make State of Play then. I decided to wait for him,” says the producer, who is glad he waited. “The film is a very satisfying experience”.
Set in 2nd century Britain, The Eagle is a film about two men, a master, Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum), and his slave Esca (Jamie Bell), on a mission to discover what happened to Aquila's now-missing father. Kenworthy confesses that Gladiator was a huge morale booster when he was thinking of making The Eagle after a series of romcoms, but Troy and Alexander were definitely not. “I learnt a lot from Troy and Alexander ,” he says. “I felt that I should not make large armies with VFX and have fake costumes and fake sets. The audience can perceive the shallowness of it all. So I decided to focus on the emotional aspect of the story. The bond or what I would like to call the anti-buddy aspect in the film between Marcus and Esca. There may be no love story in my film, but the chemistry between my lead actors more than makes up for it!”
Adventure film
Ruing the fact that the film was “slightly oversold as an action release,” Kenworthy says he would like to describe The Eagle as an adventure film with elements of action. “There is drama and quest, and the best part is the way it has been shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, the Oscar winner for Slumdog Millionaire .”
The Eagle is one of the first films to be shot in the Scottish highlands because it is very difficult from a production point of view. “We had so many scenes on top of mountains, and, in Scotland, the soil can get really loose. Horses find it very difficult to go uphill on this terrain. In fact, Kevin wanted to shoot the final sequence in the river and it was a challenge. We encountered a lot of unusual issues but we managed to pull it off!”
Cinematographer's paradise
Kenworthy is hoping that his film, dubbed into Hindi, Tamil and Telugu too, will meet with success. But it is not just business that brings him to India. “I am on a vacation,” he says, and has visited Jodhpur and Nagaur in Rajasthan. “Some of my friends are working on the restoration of the Nagaur fort and they asked me to have a look at it.” The other reason, of course, could be that he finds Rajasthan a cinematographer's paradise.
