Writer/Director Neil Marshall is probably best known for his inspired women-lost-in-a-cave horror flick The Descent, which put a group of believable characters face to face with what can only be described as a group of blood-thirsty mole people. In his latest film, Centurion, Michael Fassbinder plays the leader of a besieged group of Roman soliders, alone and unprotected in a very hostile environment: Northern Britain. Marshall and lead actress Axelle Carolyn (Aeron) met with us to discuss horror films, Iron Maiden and homemade, flaming fireballs.

What inspired you to write Centurion? It is different direction from your previous horror films.
Neil: Well I think that’s part of the reason is to do something different. I never wanted to be purely seen as a horror film maker, although I love the horror films I’ve done and I want to do more. This was an opportunity to do another genre I also love -- historical action movies. It was also a magnificent story, when I first read about the ninth legion disappearing in Scotland I was hooked on telling this mystery. And dealing with a kind of wilderness adventure in the U.K. is unheard of, partly because we don’t have much wilderness to do an adventure in, but when you got back 2000 years then there was. To do an outdoor chase movie in the U.K. was so unusual. I like to kind of confound expectations within the British industry.

Why did you pick the Scottish mountain landscape for the setting?
Neil: It’s a location I am very familiar with. That whole area, the highlands of Scotland, is an area I know and have loved all of my life -- that’s part of it. It’s where the story took place, so it seemed like really the only setting I could put it in.

Axelle, beyond the obvious, what attracted you to portray a powerful female warrior?
Axelle: If you work like I do in the horror films, most of the time as a woman you get offered the part of the victim. You get killed in interesting ways, but that’s about as much fun as it goes. It was just a great opportunity to play something that was the complete opposite of everything I’ve done previously, although I have played some pretty insane people in the past. It was just using physicality to express yourself. There was a lot of stunts and fight choreography and looking incredibly fierce and trying to sell the fact that you can really fight and be scary. It was just brilliant.

How did you prepare for the role?
Axelle: Part of it was the fact that Neil very much described it as a Western. I thought, “Ok, this is me playing a Native American.” This was a very unique opportunity for me to play a part that is exactly like a Native American fighter going up against the invader. Part of it was just trying to find some kind of aggression in me, which was weirdly channeled by listening to Iron Maiden -- listening to “Run to the Hills” and that kind of stuff --I kept thinking that this is exactly what it is: This is me defending my country. Otherwise, it was mostly just learning the physical part of it, the fighting and the horseback riding.
Neil: And you got to shoot bows, ride horses, and fight guys…
Axelle: If everything I did could be like this it would be perfect. Riding horses and doing stunts, getting killed in a horrible way. It’s pretty cool.

How did you go about  your casting?
Neil: It was really just a matter of getting the right people for the right roles, and for getting a high caliber actor for each role. Regardless of their status or name or whatever it would be, it’s my preference to go after the best actor first, so in this case we wanted to put together an ensemble of great actors for every role. In the case of both Michael (Fassbender) and Dominic (West), I’d actually auditioned them both for Doomsday but we couldn’t make our schedules work. They were both people I had wanted to work with. I knew [Michael] kind of personally and knew he was right for the part. Same with Dominic, I just think he is fantastic. He is a real presence. His character requires someone who could be kind of larger than life and that’s Dominic in a nutshell. ?

You’re known as a director who prepares meticulously so that the shoot can move quickly without needlessly wasting time. Were you able to keep that kind of pace for a movie this size? ?Neil: Well, we only had seven weeks to shoot the whole movie. On a big Hollywood movie like this you’d probably have 12-14 weeks so we were always up against a time constraint. I like to work quite fast anyway because it keeps the energy and enthusiasm up. If you spend half the day doing forty takes of something it wears the cast out and I don’t think it really improves the move for the sake of one take. The cast very quickly picked up on the fact that I wasn’t going to do more than three takes. We were just rolling through everything at high speed to get so much done in such a short time. It’s a historical action movie with horses and make up effects and battle sequences. All of these things take up a massive amount of time. Trying to get a horse to hit it’s mark twice is virtually impossible so you have to be flexible about that. My opinion on that was that I didn’t care if it hit the mark, as long as the actor performance was good the horse was secondary. ?

How historically accurate is the film?
Neil: It is kind of book ended by historical facts. The Ninth Legion were there, and they did go into Scotland, and Hadrian’s Wall was incidentally built at the end. What happens in between is a hypothesis of what may of happened to the Ninth Legion when they marched into Scotland and disappeared. What I wanted to do with the characters was set them into an authentic world although essentially they are fictional characters. We made sure that the costumes and the behaviors and the sets were as authentic as we could possibly do. ?

What made shooting on the first day so challenging?
Neil: Day one just set the standard.
Axelle: It was not actually so bad for me, I was sitting on my trailer for most of the day. For everyone else it was incredibly cold, and then a few days later they had to jump in the river. It wasn’t necessarily in Scotland that we got the coldest. We shot part of it in Scotland and part in Sussex, which is south of London, and a lot of it was a night. It doesn’t look as cold, but that’s when it was the coldest.?

How did the scene at the beginning with the giant fireball attack come about?
Neil: I was mainly trying to figure out how the Picts could beat the Romans. They would try to use the landscape to their advantage and would not allow the Romans to assemble into a battle formation. They basically would have to ambush them on the road, so I came up with the idea to roll flaming balls down the hill into their ranks. So the way that we did it was to just do it for real. We didn’t have as many as you see in the film, we had about eight and duplicated them. They were big things, four or five feet around and wrapped in the stuff you find under carpets and then set on fire and literally rolled down the hill into the Romans. It was a lot of fun to film. And the noise … when you lit them they just sort of roared.