Exclusive interview with Diane Duane & Peter Morwood.

By Stein Rudolph (Kristanna.com).

Diane Duane and Peter Morwood have collaborated on the screenplay for the live-action theatrical feature, RING OF THE NIBELUNGS, tentatively scheduled to be released at the end of 2004 (the exact date will be announced on Kristanna.com as soon as possible).

Now that I have been so lucky to get to know Diane Duane and Peter Morwood a little bit, managed to get them to collaborated on one more thing: Their first "Ring of the Nibelungs" interview ever, I give you the following recommendation: Visit their sites below :-)

OwlSprings.com
The Owl Springs Partnership is the writing team of Peter Morwood and Diane Duane, novelists and screenwriters now almost twenty years married and living in Ireland.

Out Of Ambit
Diane Duane's weblog. Updated all the time.

And here goes the interview :-)

You and your husband live near the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland. Does this place inspire you in your work as a writer?

-While County Wicklow is unquestionably one of the most beautiful parts of Ireland - and prettier, in both our opinions, than more aggressively marketed areas like the West of Ireland - it's not inspirational for either of us by itself. One problem is that, when you live here for fifteen years, you tend to get a little blasé about the physical beauty of the place.

-What is good about living deep in the country is that there are fewer distractions…or different ones. Both of us grew up in suburban towns and later became used to city life. If we were living in a city now, there would be so many distractions in terms of entertainment and food (we both love to eat out) that our work would probably suffer. In the countryside there's less of that…though there are some distractions we have to deal with that city people don't. Yesterday (Diane says) I had to stop work to go out in the back yard and free a lamb that had become stuck between our hedge and a fence behind it. This time of year, I keep finding myself doing the Little Bo Peep thing…

You have written many books and scripts and are a prolific writer. What is your and your husband's main source of inspiration when writing the script for "Ring of the Nibelungs"?

-When we first started working with Tandem Communications on the project, our initial move was to go straight back to the original Nibelungenlied poem in several different translations. We spent weeks going over that earliest material, tracing the ways it had shifted over centuries as the myths on which the Lied was based started to spread through Europe. Each region or nation where the story passed added something new or local to the basic mix, just as more recent storytellers like Wagner and Tolkien took elements from it and adapted them to suit their own needs. We also spent a long time deciding which of the new "additions" to the Nibelungenlied we were not going to allow into this telling. For example, though there's a lot of magic in the original poem, the Gods don't appear: their presence in the Ring story was an invention of later storytellers, and (later still) of Wagner, who we were generally trying to avoid.

-The whole process of producing the script was very much energized by Uli Edel when he came on board. Uli has a marvellously acute visual sense and a tremendous sense of pace. He was also absolutely committed to keeping the story as closely allied to the spirit of the original material as possible. His office at Uncharted Territory was full of translations and analyses of the Nibelungenlied: it made our job so much easier to be working with someone who knew the original so well. The collaboration on the final drafts of the screenplay was very lively, and ultimately very satisfying for both of us.

Is "Ring of the Nibelungs" pure entertainment, or does it have a deeper message to the viewer?

-Naturally we hope there'll be plenty of entertainment - but neither of us would be satisfied with telling a story that was just about itself. However, we also have no interest in beating audiences over the head with morals or messages. There are doubtless a few messages buried in there, but it's the audience's business to dig those out if it cares to. Otherwise, our business is to tell as engaging a story as possible.

The battle between good and evil seems always to play a central role in fantasy. Are there completely evil persons, or are we all a little of both? Do you believe in God?

-Oooh, this is getting personal. : (Diane says: "As a nurse with a specialty in psychiatry, I'm fairly sure that 'pure evil' at the merely human level is impossible. There will always remain something untarnished, buried inside. But habit or circumstance can push that fragment of innocence way into the background, where it can no longer make a difference to what the rest of the person is doing…and people in such a state can be plenty evil enough without the state needing to be 'pure'. I think the fascination with the struggle between good and evil in fiction comes from the purely human tendency to try to figure things out, to understand what happens when you take sides, what happens when you refuse to…and trying to understand why people do the good and evil things they do. After watching drama that involves this struggle, if it's been well done, the audience comes away asking itself, 'What would I have done in that situation? Would I have done that well, or that badly?" - As for God: I'm sure the Universe has something alive at the heart of it. But beyond saying that, I normally keep my opinions to myself.")

"Ring of the Nibelungs" takes place along the Rhine in what we now call Germany. Have you ever read any of the old Nordic sagas, and studied Norse mythology?

-Diane says: "Peter and I both have had extensive knowledge of Norse myths for many years. When we got married we were extremely amused to see that we both had the same books on the subjects (but that each of us also had some that the other one hadn't seen). German, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Icelandic traditions and myths have been an interest for me for a long while: I can laboriously translate some Old English, and modern German -- not the older dialects -- but have no Scandinavian language. This hasn't stopped me from reading the Sagas in translation: one of my favorites is E. R. Eddison's translation of Egils Saga. Peter took his degree in English Language and Literature; the course included Old English and Old Norse, as well as Medieval works, all of which (eventually!) turned out to be a useful education for someone re-interpreting the Nibelungenlied."

Since you love to travel, may I ask if you have ever visited Scandinavia and Norway?

-Not as yet, but they're on the list. Brunnhild's domain of Iceland, too.

When did you learn that Brunnhild was going to be played by Kristanna? Did you have a "picture in your head" of the character when you wrote it and what was she like?

-We usually tended to think of Brunnhild as she appears in the Arthur Rackham illustrations of Wagner's Ring: young, beautiful, rather fierce. After all, she was a Valkyrie, and the daughter of Odin. We heard about the possibility of Kristanna playing Brunhild pretty early on, and we both looked at each other and said, "Oooh, she would be hot."

According to what I have read the writing on "Ring of the Nibelungs" started over twenty years ago, and is now being filmed because of the success of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of The Rings". Have you seen the "The Lord of The Rings" trilogy and do you feel that it will have resemblance with "Ring of the Nibelungs"?

-Well, actually development hasn't been going for anything like that long. We came on board about four years ago, when a friend in the German film industry mentioned to us that Tandem was looking for someone with a good sense of myths and legends, and good screen credential, to be involved in developing the story. We were delighted to be asked by Tandem to become involved.

-I suspect that the success of the "Lord of the Rings" films would have had something to do with the initial impetus of development. But increasingly we turned our attention away from that as we worked. The drama inherent in the Nibelungenlied makes for a story that's worth telling for its own sake - and has been for at least a thousand years, maybe more. It's going to take a long while to tell whether Tolkien's story, as dearly as we both love it, has that much staying power.

-As for resemblances between the two - There are some common themes, but that's unavoidable. "Ring of the Nibelungs", though, goes in a very different direction. There's no attempt (or need) to invent a whole new world. This is our world, in a period somewhere between the Dark Ages and the earliest medieval period. Looking closely at the Nibelungenlied gives us a chance to invoke some of the issues for people at that period, when one belief system was giving way to another (or, from another point of view, being shouldered aside).

-Anyway, of course we've seen all the "Lord of the Ring" movies - we're both hopeless Tolkien fans. We have the first two in the extended DVD versions, and can't wait for the extended version of the third.

Tell us about the writing process: Whose idea was it to do the film? How long did it take from concept to final script? Did the final script resemble your original outline? Any anecdotes in the creative process you would like to share?

-Well, "whose idea was it" is always kind of a thorny question. It would seem to have been Tandem's, originally. From concept to final screenplay (and there were a couple of drafts) took a shade more than four years, total. As for the script resembling the original outline - well, that's pretty rare. Outlines are routinely the most changeable part of any project, and we had about five or maybe six of them over the whole course of development. Probably it's safe to say that the film and the outline feature many of the same characters, mostly the same storyline, and some of the same motivations :-)

…As for "A Funny Thing Happened" anecdotes, it would be hard to pick just one, there were so many. The one that sticks in Peter's mind is a request from someone no longer associated with the project, a US co-production partner -- best paraphrased as "This story is such a downer - can't you write a happy ending?" Happy ending? To the Nibelungenlied…? Riiiight.… Meanwhile, our relationship with Tandem is a very warm one, and we've had a great time working with them, and look forward to doing so again in the future: the sooner, the better.

Peter Jackson's latest movie "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" just swept to a record-tying 11 Academy Awards including best picture and director, becoming the first fantasy to win the top Oscar. In my view "Ring of the Nibelungs" is a case of good timing. What is your view? Will all the fans of "The Lord of the Rings" have something good to look forward to in "Ring of the Nibelungs"?

-Whether LOTR fans will be interested in "Ring of the Nibelungs" is difficult to say. Again, there are some similarities - a world where powers and forces not strictly human are moving, and a historical landscape in which one set of influences is passing away while another one grows in strength. Beyond that, people are going to have to make up their own minds.

How much of the film you wrote is taken from the original sources and what is "creative license"?

-Quite a lot of our material, in terms of character interactions, comes from the Nibelungenlied with very little alteration. Much other material had to be altered due to structural or cultural problems. As Peter discovered a couple of years ago when writing a novel set in the very early Middle Ages, the ferocity of accurately-described period "heroic" behaviour isn't acceptable to a modern audience (or at least to a modern editor!) since it's become the sort of thing that only villains do. The Lied itself is extremely dark - a tale of passions running very high, and of rage and revenge taken to extraordinary lengths. In the original poem, there's a lot of behavior which looks like incredible cruelty and savagery to the 21st-century Western mind. There's rape, torture, suicide, mass murder, and some intrapersonal relationships that simply defy description and would instantly get a movie that included them X-rated. That said, the Nibelungenlied also contains episodes of great love, self-sacrifice, commitment, courage and honor. And it also contains a tremendous through-story, a flow of dramatic events that never lets up, as characters keep finding themselves in completely untenable positions, and try over and over to come to terms with them. Those are the elements we tried to emphasize during the various drafts.

How much is true of the rumour that all the swords in the film were taken from Peter's collection?

-(laughter) None of it at all, unfortunately. Peter's swords are from earlier periods (Bronze Age and Roman) or later ones (Medieval and Renaissance) than the 6th-Century Migration Period in which the film is set. (Though an interpretation of what Siegfried's sword Balmung might have looked like, had it been real, will be arriving here in July.) However, a lot of Peter's reference books were sent to the Tandem offices so that the art director/production designer could see what was in our mind's eye while writing the script. It's going to be interesting to see how these on-page historical facts have been translated into on-screen historical fantasy.

Kristanna.com would like to thank Diane and Peter for making this interview possible.

The views expressed in the interview do not necessarily comply with the opinions of the webmaster and the film production companies.

(March 29, 2004)

Copyright © 2004 Stein Rudolph. All rights reserved.

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