#19: Giles Kristian & Philip Stevens: Viking Books, Movies and Games

Welcome to the Grim Frost Podcast. Today's guests are best selling and prize winning historical novelist Giles Christian and award-winning director and actor Philip Stevens. Welcome to the Grim Frost Longhouse. Great to have you here. Actually, the tables have quite literally turned because this is the first time for the pod to have two guests.

Must feel pretty good. It's special in that way. It's a great pleasure. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. What a thing to be here in real life. Having watched it and listen to it and actually be here is very. Amazing. So you flew in? Did you fly in today from London or? We came into Oslo. Actually, Oh, you flew to Oslo? Oh.

Yeah, yeah, I have family in Oslo. I went to we went out for my with my cousin, her meal and some beers and stuff like that and then got the train over here. Yeah. So how was how was the journey? It was eventful. Yeah, we the train broke down. Oh yeah, on the way. Well, welcome to Sweden. Yeah, yeah, yeah, We heard when we got here how, how reliable the train services, but it's the same in the UK, Yeah. And yeah, we, we, we were in a small, small village in deepest, darkest Sweden.

Yeah, quite a long time before a minibus came, at least, at least. You were in a village, sometimes they'd break down in like middle of nowhere and people have to sit on the trains for hours. Yeah, we've been next to a shop which was handing. The sun was shining. It's really relaxed it. And then except for we had to then get a minibus that the the guy the train company put on for us to take us the rest of the way.

So we got a bunch of strangers sitting in a minibus. And I don't know if this is just a Scandinavian thing, but nobody said a word. It is. So it is a very, very Scandinavian thing. Swedish people, they like be quiet. They like to be like left alone with their thoughts. It's like we don't speak if we don't have to.

Yeah, it's a very sweet. We tend not to do uncomfortable silences. It's something which we get really freaked out. Yeah, but imagine doing this in Finland. That would be like that would be like a negative disability you've ever heard about the most quiet room in the world. That's worse. He's he's very bad at this. So we spend a lot of time in hotels. And whenever we get in a lift with a bunch of strangers, Bill always there's an awkward silence. And then he turns around to everyone in the lift and says, So you wonder.

You're probably all wondering why I asked you here today. Every time that is good. I love that. So you've done a lot of is. Well, first of all, is this the first time in Sweden for you guys? Yeah, yeah, even I'm half Norwegian, this is my first time. Oh, you're half Norwegian? Yeah, my mum's Norwegian. Yeah, I see.

I'm quarter of myself. My grandfather was from Norway, so we're in Norway. Bergen. Bergen. Oh, that's in that lovely place. Beautiful. Rainy. So rainy I call it atmospheric. Yeah, my, my from Fizz in Britain. Do we have? To go to where we get it in the rain. And I said, well, it's, it's atmospheric.

It makes me have interesting creative thoughts. Yeah, well, welcome to Sweden in a way. It's just great to have you here, guys here, pleasure to be here. So you've done a lot of Viking stuff and we'll talk about that later about your career, but let's start from the beginning. So I, I wanted to talk to you, to ask you, Jonas, because you were in a proper boy band back in the 90s, right? You found this.

You found that out, So what was that like? It was absolutely crazy. So The thing is, my father was in a, he was a singer in a rock'n'roll revival band and, and I mean a proper band, you know, rhythm guitar, guitar, bass, drums. He was a singer. And so I'd grown up watching him performing on stage in, in pubs and clubs and kind of sort of saw the romantic side of somebody being on stage. I was very shy kid, but watching him on stage, I thought he was the most important person not just in the room, but in in the world because everyone was watching him and I thought it was really super cool.

Then I grew up, went to university to to read English and creative writing. So I wanted to be a writer. Ultimately, I'm not academic. University was hard. The first few months of it was hard and I was painfully shy. I didn't really speak to anyone and maybe that's the Scandinavian thing. And I was pretty lonely and shy and, and there was an audition, well, in the newspaper, a national advert asking for singer songwriters to send in demo tapes. And I've made some demo tapes with my dad's rock'n'roll band. So I sent the tapes into this record company and they got back in touch with me and said we're actually holding auditions to put together a pop group.

Do you want to come to London for an audition? So I said yeah. Went down on the train, my mum came with me, my dad thought I was wasting my time. I went down to London. There were thousands of of young guys in this line to to audition. I'd never done an audition before in my life. The BBC were there filming the whole thing and.

It's going to be daunting though, right? It was. Terrifying. My mum took me for a couple of vodkas around the corner because she could see how terrified I was so. I couldn't imagine. Then I came back into the room a little bit feeling a little bit better, of course, did the audition and and then they asked me to come back and several stages later and I ended up weirdly, I was listening to grunge as Pearl Jack. I was Red Hot Chili Peppers, the the Cure, that that was my thing.

And then I found myself as a lead singer in a in a in a cheesy pop group, which was bizarre. This was also before the kind of rise of the, of the, you know, the re emergence of the boy band, you know, after the 60s. Yeah. You know, it wasn't like we, we, we used to it now where there's, you know, boy bands all over the place. But that's that's.

Touring with Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls and all that's that's. Crazy. Did you? Did you also have like separate roles in the band? Like and what was your role? Well, there was a cute one. I was, I was pro. I don't know if I was. Well, I was the singer. So I think being the lead singer, you kind of feel a little bit like you can you already do that bit so you can step back a little bit from the the other side of it.

So one of the guys was very was really personable. He was the Mr. PR. He was, he was so good at all the interviews, always smiling, always happy. So he was perfect. So he was the guy that you pushed to the front. And then we had the cute one, the young one, and he was just cute and just kind of really talented. But but because he was so young, all the ladies loved him. And then and then Richard was the Moody one. Yeah, You know what?

Yeah. But today, Today you're a best selling author, you're a prize winning novelist and you've written 2 Viking trilogies. How, how, how do you, how do you take that step? Like it? It's it's such a yeah, you know, it's a different world. So after the boy band, I recorded a a demo of a sort of six or seven songs. I tried to get a new record deal as solo artists, managed to get a record deal, toured in Europe for for a couple of years as a solo singer.

And then the music industry was was is hard. And I was signed for one style of music. And then the record company were telling me to change because something because a new style of music had come on the scene. They wanted me to do something completely different. And I just thought I'm just being pushed around into places I don't want to be. This isn't the boy band wasn't me. This sort of music wasn't me.

And and I thought, you know what, what I really wanted to do all along was be a writer. So I went back to that. And I found the freedom of being able to just express myself, just me and my words on on screen and create something myself. And if it was terrible, then that's, that's on me. And if it works, you know, that's on me. And it was, it was kind of therapy. I think it was.

It was an antidote to the music industry. And I wrote a novel. Yeah. I wrote. I wrote a novel about the First Crusade. I didn't really know what to do with it, sent it to a few agents, didn't get anywhere. It's 160,000 words. But I realised I learnt along the way how not to do it, you know? So yeah, the only way to write is by writing hundreds of thousands of words, which are probably terrible, and then eventually you figure out. How to do the thing and to find like how to find your own voice in writing as well.

Find your own voice, because it's at the beginning you sort of imitate and then eventually your own voice comes through. And so I left the Crusades novel and that's. And being half Norwegian, I'd grown up spending a lot of time in and around the fjords of Norway, imagining people going raiding and just kind of desperately wishing I could go back in time. And I went on a stag, a bachelor weekend for my brother with my brother and I organised it.

And one of the trips we did, which was pretty cultural for a for a stag weekend, was we went to the the the Ship Museum in Oslo. Oh wow. Well, that's pretty cool though. Looking at the Userberg ship and the lock step and I was there with this bunch of guys and in my mind I was putting each of the guys on the rowing benches in the ship and thinking what we're doing now isn't so dissimilar to what these crews were doing 1000 years ago.

That's true. I mean, there was slightly less pillaging on our on our slightly less and and I I thought, Hey, why don't I just write a story about a bunch of guys that go that go writing and that's the the first novel. But that's, that's amazing. But you said you studied creative writing. And the reason why I asked this is because my wife is going to watch this for sure.

And she actually studies creative writing right now at Oxford. So was that where you went? No, no, no, I, I, as I say, I was there for a few months and I didn't really even get to the creative writing side. I was more about the the English language and the building the building blocks of language which I found pretty tedious.

Personally. Well, it is, yeah. I mean, you really have to be nerdy about that stuff. I I I guess. I just want to create my, my. That's what turns me on, is creating new things, making something in the world that wasn't there before. Yeah, that's, that's what I. Thought yeah, that's crazy. So Phil, Yeah. Were you a fan of of, of of Joe?

Joe's a fan do. You know what? No, I mean, it's, I was also a bit, I was into grunge myself. Yeah. I mean, I think I probably did catch him on Top of the Pops at once or so. But now I put the two things together until after we'd been working together for a while and I found out about his past. No, I mean, I, I think that when we first started working together, we, I'd made a, a Viking short film.

So I started off as an actor and I'd, you know, I'd always had the passion for history and I wanted to make films set in different periods of history. It kind of really inspired me to try and tell those stories of the past, find the people's voices, try and remove the stigma of of storytelling from people who look at people in different historical periods as being other in some way, you know, like less connected to us emotionally to tell some, you know, human stories from.

Yeah, it's actually interesting that you say that because it's one thing that I often think about is that like when you look at people who lived 1000 years ago, it's it's a blink. It's a blink in the evolution of of like mankind so emotionally and we're the same we. Loved, we loved, we laughed. We, you know, we felt sadness, we felt elation.

We, you know, we giggled at each other, we joked around. It was all the same. You know, we had the same set of emotions that we've always had. And I think the best historical storytelling includes that. And so I'd made a short film, a Viking short film that was about the retaliation to the Saint Bryce's Day Massacre in in England and the Danish Vikings coming over to it's kind of it kicks some ass.

And I've made that short film. It did really well at film festivals and kind of, you know, got a bit of hype around it. And my wife bought me a book that Christmas, which was a fictional novel called Raven Blood Eye. And she was like, you've made this spiking movie. You know, you probably like this.

And I read it and I was like, this is great. I can read like this Is this guy's captured something really kind of the the same same thing I'm looking for in in a in human characters in history. And at the end of the book was his website. And so I went to his website and there was a contact page. And so I just shot off an e-mail and said, hey, man, I've made this book, made this short film.

Loved your book. You know, I'd love to know what you think of it. And he came back and said, this is great. Why don't you come down to my book launch? It's in a couple of weeks in London. We'll have a bit here. And yeah, we met. We had quite a few beers and that was kind of. Always up for a beer.

Right. Yeah, that was history was made. We bonded on that. Yeah. Because obviously you're from like different like worlds and you have different journeys in life. So is that like, did you know right away that this could be like a future partnership? I think so. It's weird. We do, you know, we clicked very, very quickly, sort of instantaneously.

There seem to be a kinship and we have very similar shared views on storytelling and life in general, I think. But to begin with, we just sort of, it was about the writing. Giles asked if I could adapt a piece of his writing into a script. We started working on it as we worked on it, as we went back and forth, I kind of said, look, you're, you're pretty good at this anyway.

You shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't be doing it for you. You should be doing it with me. And so we started working alongside each other doing that. And then from that point, you know, we started developing ideas together, working on those and yeah, kind of writing together. We. We made some book trailers, so we thought it'd be cool to try and sell the books with the use of. Basically it was just an excuse for us to make short films. Yeah.

And and sort of disguise them as book trains. So that's so that's what we get. People together, dress them up as Vikings, you know, do some combat. That's great. Yeah. So like, but but what makes your partnership work? Like, what makes you guys a good match? What do you say? I think we're not afraid to come up with ideas, being creative. You've got to.

You can't be shy about putting forward an idea, say something that a character does or how how a situation is going to unfold on the page or on the screen. And to have the confidence to suggest something but not be offended, not be hurt when the other person says, yeah, that's OK. But what about if we take it in this direction?

And I think for me, having always been, you know, the band was one thing, but then being a novelist and just working on my own day after day after day, you know, year after year, writing these books on my own and actually, in the end, it got pretty lonely. So then when I started working with Phil and collaborating on scripts, I just really enjoyed that collaborative process and in a way I've never experienced before. Yeah, because you tend, you tend to also keep the story in your head and, and I know it like, as I say, like creatively when you're working music and you probably know this as well. Like there's a there's a moment where you got like you have this great idea for a song and you

keep working on it. And then it becomes this big thing and you miss the fact that there are a couple of things that you probably should cut out of there because it it just makes this it kind of ruins the flow of the song or whatever. Absolutely. Is is that something? Yeah, we, we, we tend not to have any real ego about what we do. We're it's always the product.

It's sort of, you know, we're both and both of us very quickly, if someone says look at this idea, what about this, this and this? And then the next person will say, well, actually, what if it's this and you go, oh, that's better. We should def, we should go that route. And neither of us have any ego when it comes to what's best for the story.

I think also we're quite organic in the development of story. And because some writers that write together, they write one person will write a section, another person will write another section and then they go back and they look at each other's sections. And whereas we tend to, we work online, but we tend to work in real time together.

So we've technology is great. Now, you know, we can have the same document open that we're both whatever we put onto the document adapters in real time for the other person. And we're talking to each other in real time as well. So it's really organic. Everything we do is sort of tiny stepping stones, tweaks, changes.

So everything really feels sculpted at every single stage. But at the same time, we'll get to the end of a section and the next day one will sort of come up and say, I've had this idea like, you know what we said yesterday where this, this, this happens. Actually, if we go right back to the beginning and change all these fundamental things, this would be better. And the other person never goes, oh, that sounds like a lot of work.

You know, we always go, if it's better, let's do it. It's about making the best version of the thing that you can possibly do. And you know, Phil, Phil's a cinephile. He knows his his knowledge of different films is unbelievable. So he has millions of references for things and how sort of how the structure, how the scenes should be put together and stuff and sort of my, my writing is, is my, my skill. And you put them together and I feel like the combination just has us covered and it just works. I feel like we're, you know, against somebody who's writing on their own.

I feel like we're we're a football team with 12 players and. Yeah. But I mean, the writing is essential. That which you both describe, it's writing and rewriting, basically, and you have to do it enough until you're satisfied, right? Well, until you're abandoned. I was going. To say, nothing's ever finished, it's just abandoned. Yes, until we go, like, all right, I'm done with this now, Yeah.

It's time. It's time for the new thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I hear you. But so you showed this passion for Vikings on page, stage and and screen. So how does how did your interests in the Vikings and the Viking Age start in the first place? I think in the UK we, I've always felt that we have a, a sort of stronger connection in some ways than some of the Scandinavian mentality towards Vikings, at least back when we were when we were kids.

Obviously it's changed a bit now we've gone, you know, for the Vikings are are riding a wave so as to speak and you know, long may it continue. But when we're certainly when I was a kid, I was super aware of the Viking invasion of or say invasion that you know, so it's a it's a controversial term that. Yeah, but the Viking influence.

Influence. Of but but what? Why? Why was that? A bit of place names, you know, I come from the East East Anglia and we, you know, we have a always remember, we have a place called Bury St. Edmunds, which is this town. And I remember going there as a kid and my mum telling me this story about about Saint Edmund and the Vikings coming to to come in there and and and have been saying, you know, God will protect me. You do what you want to me.

And so they filled him full of that was. His first mistake? And that was his first mistake. And, you know, some people maybe would have felt sympathy for us, for Saint Edmund. I, on the other hand, was like, who are these guys? Like, who are these guys that turned up and just went, yeah, well, OK, we'll, we'll test that theory. And that was exciting to me as a kid. And, you know, all around the places where we're from, all the place names, you know, our little terms that we have, you know, every by town or village nearby. Derby.

Derby. Grimsby. It'd be all. Around Thorpe's, you know, Scunthorpe, Grimsthorpe, all those places and you think, where does it come from? And we, we have kind of obviously we have our great invasions in, in the UK, you know, with the Romans and then the Anglo Saxons and then the Vikings and then the Normans. And you know, the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. They have a lot of similarities.

You know, some pretty much some of the same people. Well, technically the Saxons and the people of Scandinavia, they have the same roots. Exactly. And so that heritage is kind of just seeps through sort of every part of the landscape around you. And every museum you go to is full of, you know, full of these stories of these carefree Raiders that came in.

And you can when you consider that we did have Scandinavian kings, you know, we had to spend fork beer and then his son Canute the Great and we England was ruled by Vikings and the Dane law, obviously half the country, the north and the east and down into the Midlands where we we were in the Dane law.

And I think people forget that that that we were a Viking until the Norman invasion. We were culturally very, very Scandinavian. Also the idea part, another huge part of our heritage is, is Alfred the Great of the, you know, the structure of kingship and Alfred the Great is kind of revered as our first unifying king proper.

And you know, his, his enemy were the Vikings and they were the people he could never really get a hold on. And so they're always part of that story growing up. Yeah, because I, I always, I actually read this the other day and I never really thought about it. Actually. We're going to talk a little bit more about more about Viking ships a little bit later.

But I read, I'm, I'm reading, I'm currently rereading The Children of National by Neil Price. And one thing that just leapt out of the page me this time, was that like Vikings from Denmark could sail to England in about three to four days. Four days, yeah. So that meant they could go to to England, raid for a week and go back in a fortnight. Yeah, it's a weekend holiday.

When you think about it that way, it's it's, it's incredible like how often these raids could actually take place. And how the why wouldn't you? Yeah. Yeah, why wouldn't you when you have, you know, you do the first one, too, and then the confidence would be to do it like anything, you know, it seems daunting.

You do it, and then we realize it's not actually quite so hard. There's a lot of rich pickings over there. You could pull off the like 3 or 4 in a summer, yeah. And actually the PR that what was considered negative PR because it's only the churchmen that they're writing accounts of it and sort of calling these Raiders, you know, all the bad names they could possibly think of and how evil and terrible they were. For me, that's great PR for a Viking war band because, you know, because then when you turn up the next time people just run away.

They're not even going to stay around because they've heard how bad. You take what you want. Hopefully you can get you can go in take the silver without getting you sword wet. Perfect. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, that's probably. Not so good for the slaves. But no, no, the ones who couldn't run the fast, I guess. Yeah, yeah, you're right.

So you're both creatives within like Viking Age history and and other historical periods as well. How do you go about your research when it comes to this? Well, we're so lucky. We live in a time where amazing academics like you've mentioned are, are doing the research for us. And then it's so accessible for for us as fiction writers. So for me, yeah, for me, the storytelling is what I want to do.

But you have to ground it in the research and it has to feel, right? It has to feel. Feeling is everything for me as a fiction writer. And because we can't know everything about that period, obviously, or, or many of the periods of history, but you have to make it. You have to give it a sense of feeling, right? I have some colleagues, some friends who they can't write about a battle without actually going and walking the battlefield.

I find that I think it's cool to to be able to do that, but sometimes I wonder if that's a little bit of procrastination. Sometimes, you know you you might even jokingly say it's a failure of the imagination because. I was going to say that actually, I was going to go like, like, isn't that like? Yeah, I mean, I'm probably saying this because I can't. My wife and kids wouldn't let me just go off on research trips all the time, and I would if I could. But but also at the same time, you can't really research what it feels like to stand in a shield wall and stick a length of metal into somebody, another human being's body. But yet we write about those scenes on so the the whole thing really is is imagination, but

imagination informed by by research. I think there's a there's a act of collection that takes place over time. You know, as you know this from from the work that you've done studying Vikings over time. You start off and it's in any period of history, you have this daunting kind of vast Galaxy of information to.

And then the more you look at the specifics that especially in storytelling are related to the one person or place that you're writing or thinking about, all of those bits of information start filtering through to become relevant. And then you you learn more about them that way you know they stick. Exactly, Yeah.

You know they're and that that also helps you paint a much more vivid picture of the use of history. I think both of us are really interested in in not trying to get blanket history lessons. It's more about finding out about what's useful to the person, you know, what's the world like to that person? And if they need to do a thing, what do they do? So we research, you know, OK, well, they're walking through a certain type of grass here.

What kind of grass would they be walking through? And how would that affect their shoes? Oh, OK. Well, what what's on the bottom of their shoes? And, and then, you know, how does that, do they keep their socks dry like that? Or do you know, have their bindings and and so on. And the more that you you search through the information that way, the more the world becomes tangible to you.

Yeah, the, the tricky thing is, is take is knowing which bits to take out because when you're researching for a historical novel, you have to learn so much about the subject and the, the temptation is to put it all in the story just to show how much you've learnt. You know, because you're kind of this information is fresh and new to you and and it's and, and you so you sort of put it in the novel and then with a bit of objectivity, you realise it's this this whole section here about woodturning is not actually advancing the story in any way, even though I've just spent a whole day watching YouTube videos of somebody would say.

So you take you take it back out again and you leave just the flavour in there that that just really something that makes the reader feel that they're in good hands. I think that's. But I think that's an important aspect also that if you have a specific topic, you have to trust the reader to like this. Sounds interesting.

I'll look that up. Yeah, you have to trust the reader to to do some more his own his or her own research, I guess. It's a two way St. isn't it? Because the reader also trusts you as a historical novelist, that you've done your homework. So you have to It's yeah, this symbiotic relationship of you can trust me because I'm not just coming up with stuff that's ridiculous.

I haven't done. I've done my work. And. And then hopefully they can, yeah, be inspired by the novel to go and find out more. That's that's. It it also depends a lot on the medium. You know the the medium. Each different medium requires a different type of research. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's definitely different for screen. Absolutely.

You know, the, the, the work that we're doing on the game at the moment, it opens up so many more doors when it comes to those things that a, a viewer or a gamer in that respect have to engage with. And so the research, you're focusing it in a different way. You're looking for different answers often to try and build a world that that is believable in whatever way you need it to be. If it's screened, you know, it's the same thing. When you're writing a script, you need to know that you you need to avoid the questions that are going to be answered. Sometimes you don't want that moment where someone pauses and goes, Oh yeah, what about that would turn? Maybe I should Google that, you know? So you need to show enough of it

to make it believable, but at the same time skirt over it quick enough to keep telling a story efficiently. You. Don't want to stop no and just pause the story. The story is important thing obviously, but I mean, going back to the research and like you said, like a lot of imagination obviously.

And you said like, well, walking on grass and all that stuff, but do you personally do more like like practice practical research? I mean, I heard this story about a World War 2 bomber excursion. Were you both part of that, or was that? Yeah, we were. Yeah, I, I was. I made a short for wrote and directed a short film about a World War 2 bomber crew in the UK and I wrote Giles into it. I brought him into to actually act in that one. Well, I didn't do much.

I was the mid upper gunner, so I was mainly looking at the sky, just shooting. Which was it? But yeah, that, you know, that's, that's the crossover and that's the beauty of, of what we're able to do is that because we work in, we sort of have our feet in lots of different camps. You know, we, we are passionate about the history telling, but we're passionate about the storytelling and the way that the two fuse together. So quite often we get to do things and go places that are, we're looking at it with a story storyteller's mind, but we're being informed by the things we're seeing. So in that respect, yeah, we, we filmed on a, on a Lancaster bomber, you know, one of only three Lancaster bombers out there in the world to fly this,

this one was this one is being being made to fly in the future, hopefully. But we, you know, we spent a week in the dark with, you know, we did green screens. It wasn't flying in the film, sadly. But we, you know, we had a whole group of actors in completely authentic uniforms on the plane with darkness outside the windows for them. And it was so immersive.

You know, it's the one of the closest exercises certainly I've been part of that. You could just lose yourself in it and feel that you were there in that time and completely imagine what it would have been like. Those guys, not at least as much. And you get these poignant insights into the one of the things that really struck me was the only bit of armour on the whole plane because of the weight, obviously the the least weight, the better. And the only bit of armour was this iron plate behind the pilot's head.

The the only bit that mattered on the plane was the brain of the pipe. You know, everyone else is enjoying, you know, and just the idea of crawling through inside the fuselage of this bomber. Yeah, I'm probably bigger than a lot of the, the World War 2 pilots, young guys would have been. But with your parachute on and your, your kit on, you're not in the dark.

The plane is rolling. You're not getting out. Chances are pretty slim it's. Terrifying. But that, that type of research when we, you know, I know, you know, we haven't really walked the battlefields as such, but we, we have done a lot of of kind of living archaeology whilst we've been making the film.

So, you know, we put, we create a meet hall and we put a bunch of guys in it. And then we start looking at the logistics of, OK, this is what we know would have happened here, but actually, how would it work? And what's the, the best way of saying? And so you're, you're working out the history whilst you're, whilst you're working out the best way of telling the story at the same time. And obviously it's important to us to make sure that we're telling a truthful story and being as accurate as we can be. Obviously, you know, stories have a way of, of molding themselves out in their own, living their own lives. You know, Star Wars isn't a documentary. But at the same time, those things then help inform whatever we say next.

And those collections, I mean, you know, we we went out to to Skidden's halften didn't maybe and roads the. Track and Harold Halford. Oh yeah, that's right. It's the largest lightning ship in the world. I mean, so how? How was that experience? That was incredible. It was amazing, yeah. The ship is huge. This thing is the mast is 24 metres long, it's 35 metres in length, 88 metres in the beam.

It's incredible. 2 men to an oar. So that was interesting. You had to be able to coordinate with, with your, you know, fellow rower. And it was, yeah, we were taking it through helping with the sea trials and taking up and down the coast and. So what did you discover, like or learn a few several things.

One of the. Things was when we were rowing 2 men to an oar, the speed was only marginally faster than one man to an oar. So you can, you can say, well, probably it's more efficient to have one crew resting and one crew rowing. That's probably more beneficial in the long run. That, that was something that was interesting that everything being covered in the resin, the sticky resin to waterproof the, the, the ropes and the, the, the boards and everything was kind of sticky.

And as a writer, I'm thinking, so when somebody comes ashore, they're probably their clothes probably smell of this sweet pine tar, and you probably can tell if somebody's just walked, walked ashore from a ship because you're going to smell it. So it's that sensory research I find really, really and really inspiring.

The landscape as well. We, you know, we spent a long time walking around our Val's nest and looking down, you know, a stretch of, of water that was a toll, you know, the the kings of Arvasness would, would charge you to go through it. And, you know, we did had a lot of discussion about what it would have been like to have been approaching the, you know, the mentality of thinking there's a threat up there that's going to make me pay to go further.

How, you know, how do I deal with that? Do we go around? Do we avoid it? And those small sort of chinks of, of attitude, I think really seep into some of the narrative that, yeah. Because you, you, if you take the outside route, you're going into the open sea, but if you come through this channel, it's so much quicker and safer. So the guy who owns that bit of land becomes eventually a king because he, he's, he's getting money from everyone who passes through.

So for me, I put that straight in one of my in one of my novels that have got a vengeance because it just made so much sense. Yeah, because on on the way here I I finally got a chance to to listen to a little story. Was it brothers in arms? No. Sword brothers. Yes. Sword brothers, of course yeah, sorry about that.

Sword brothers. And it's a couple of things I thought about now that as you were talking about. Well, first of all, two men to an or and there's one passage where you write that and that he it's under our arms. Where's war for? Probably gripping the war too hard. Oh, yes, yeah. And it's such a like minute detail that kind of gives like a a true ring to to that passage, right?

And you go like, yeah, that's interesting. But then also you talk about what you also mentioned now, like the smell of the people chasing them at the end. And it's, it's, it's so is, is, is that stuff that you deliberately, is that stuff you think of or is that like experience that you have that you weave into your storytelling? It's it's both.

I think if you can engage a reader's census physical senses, you're instantly connecting them because sometimes it can be hard for a modern reader to actually get into the mindset of a raiding Viking. But if you can sort of press those buttons, which make them think of smells and the way something feels, and then then you're you're connecting them, and then everything else becomes easier to connect with.

So, yeah, I love putting little details like that in. Yeah. So. So Sword Brothers, a short story. Which Phil did you you listen to Phil narrating it. Yeah. So Phil narrates. Great. Yeah. So, but but as as a director and actor, is that something that you couldn't bring to the screen as well? Like is that? It's stuff that I probably think about it more after John, you know, narrating Charles's books It that it's a very real mentality for us today.

No, you stand, you stand behind someone in a queue and you know, and you're like, I probably should take a shower, you know, or they smell nice. So whatever it is. And we don't often it doesn't come to the fore of our minds throughout the day, but it's something that in the moment we consider. You very rarely get that in, in writing that they're the they're the beats that really put you in the moment. And that they do.

I try to capture small moments of that. In film making, it's a lot harder because you're trying to direct the viewers eye in a different way. You're trying to give them an experience that is affecting rather than considered. So you you want them every beat you want them to go Oh, ah, lean in become part.

Of plus also it's hard to translate someones thoughts of course. Yes, that's always something we struggle with. You know, we've adapted quite a lot of Charles''s work into script form and you know, we often have conversations about, well, how are we going to do that? Because in the book, they actually they're thinking about it.

It's a very difficult thing. It's a danger to becoming like daytime television. And it's probably not necessary in the film version because it's a little thing that you can write some You're inside the the protagonist's mind when you're writing the novel, but every little thought can't is not necessary in the film version. You just don't have the time.

No, of course not. I mean, it's narrating. A book is like like 30 hours. Sometimes a film is like. And he knows it's two hours. Yeah, he has to narrate them. Yeah. So, So what? What challenges are there bringing history into today's world, would you say? I think personally I I've seen historical fiction getting a hard time recently.

There's not so much of it about. It's not selling as well because it's not being represented as much. It's not getting into book shops as much. And I and I think that's because it's hard to make historical fiction fit with a lot of today's kind of views, as simple as that is like when I write Viking fiction, I'm not, I'm not trying to rehab, rehabilitate Vikings and make them cuddly and nice and polite. That's, that's not what interests me in these stories. So I've got no interest in trying to rewrite history to make it make it more palatable to everybody. It's, it's, it's what it was, it was in the past. And that's, but that's not so easy for some people to, they're not into it, you know?

History is in its nature problematic. You know it. Did we? We are a brutal race and we've throughout history been a lot more brutal than we are even today with the things that go badly wrong today and the and the atrocities that we face day-to-day. History is, you know, it's shocking and it and it's painful and it's challenging.

Those are the things we shouldn't shy away from when telling historical story. They're they're the things. And I believe that in all art as well. I think that art in general should be honest and it should be if it's something that challenges you, that's a positive. If it's something you don't like, well, then it's maybe it's something that you shouldn't explore. But I'd never think that you should censor to the point of, of misdirection.

And I think history is one of those things that it's, it's easy to pick and choose the nice bits, you know, it's easy to pick and choose the things that work for us as a society today. But it's a lot more difficult to show warts and all this is actually no, this is actually the reality of of what those people did and and the life that they LED.

Would you say that also like most people, they kind of expect a a good versus bad theme? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there's, you know, there's been a lot of great material that's come out in the, in popular culture recently. You know, obviously Game of Thrones is a great example of, of a kind of beacon of, of a show where the massively popular, there weren't very many good guys in it. You know, everyone was a great, you know, in the grey and that's great.

I think the, the, the more storytelling that can come out of that, the better. But you know, Hollywood studios and TV companies are always looking for a clean cut thing that works for the mass audience. And I get that it makes sense. The problem we have is what we try and do is we try and fit ourselves into that that world at the same time as not being untrue to what we want to do as storytellers. And that can sometimes be tricky. No one, no one thinks of themselves as as the bad guy in the story, do they?

No. So, so in the video game, the, the, the, the antagonist Stainer, he's, the reason he's, he's betraying his, his Yaal is because his Yaal, he thinks his Yaal has gone soft and they're not going raiding anymore. And come on, we, we used to be Raiders. That's what we do. That's what we're about, fame, glory and all of that stuff. Whereas his Yaal has become more of a, he's more about commerce and a more settled lifestyle.

And that's not what Stainless signed up for. And that's where the, that's where the conflict lies. So it's not a bad guy and a good guy. It's just differences of of opinion. Yeah. But so bringing history like into life as you do, what would you say is the biggest or the most common misconceptions about Vikings in that that that people like expect, but it's not necessarily accurate.

Well, I think the lack, the lack of culture is a major 1. You know, the idea that they were cultureless kind of Raiders that had no sympathy for anyone and and, you know, killed and maimed, yeah, you know, they did. But it was part of a much wider, much deeper rooted evolution as society and one that was just as much part of the people that they were raiding as it was them.

You know, they just were a bit better at it. That's actually misconception. You're really similar to an answer I've given them that question. Really. Well, when when I first went with my first novel, Raven Blood Eye, my mum even who is Norwegian, said two things she said. First thing is, she said, why don't you write something that people want to read about? One thing which, and she's Norwegian, and then the second thing she said when she'd read my first novel, I think she was a little bit horrified by some of the violence in it. And she called me a filthy heathen savage. And we actually got a quote from Bernard Cornwall to put on the cover which blew my mind.

But actually, in hindsight, I think my mum's comment would have been. Better. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, but The thing is, the thing about Vikings is, as Phil says, when people think, used to think of them as brutes, but the beauty in their art and when they made things that it wasn't just functional, well, it was you make something beautiful. My my grandfather was he was always making something. If he made, if he made a stool, it wasn't just a functional stool.

He embellished it and he made it beautiful. And that's something that the Vikings did so well. Which is kind of ironic because Scandinavian, the sign these days is very minimalistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of kind of weird. So but how, how do you balance the expectations then of like what people expect and with historical, your historical knowledge?

Well, everybody probably expects something slightly different from the Vikings. You know, the Vikings now enjoy such popularity in culture worldwide, probably. And obviously the TV show has done a lot for that. People want something slightly different from it. And you can't, you can't know what that is.

But I, I feel that some of it is this sort of idea of counterculture about the Vikings were some of the last in Europe to become Christianized, some of the last to be centralized into centralized power. And that idea of resisting, resisting. I think people like that even today, people, people like the idea that we that they, they don't have to follow the rules. They're not bound by Christianity or moralized sort of.

And if you die, you go to somewhere even better than than than this life, you know, compared to a lot of other religions. There's something pretty appealing about that. I think Vikings have spent, you know, they spent a long time certainly right away from the late 1800s. I mean, obviously, you know, opera popularizing the, the, the horned helmet and that sort of misconception. They've they were became cartoons of some. No one really knew much about them. They just knew that they had these big ships and, you know, they arrived with the horns and helmet and they, you know, they took people and they went off and, you know, and they had big beards.

And for a long time, you know, outside of, of anyone who was interested in history, that was sort of the, the textbook Viking kind of image. And thankfully, over time, we've humanized them and we've, we understand them. And I think we understand them more because of a shift in Christian society. You know, I think that for a long time, the idea of a, of a warring, successful Pagan nation that didn't go by the rules of the Christian gods that were being pushed on them, It was a little bit frightening.

You know, I mean, and certainly the Victorians in the UK, you know, we, we whitewashed a lot of history in many different ways and Vikings was one of them. You know, we, we wanted to, to make them this otherworldly, almost kind of boogeyman, kind of demonic, demonic race that just appeared out of nowhere and which may have been what they seemed like to, to farmers, of course.

But but I'm pleased that we've started to, to really sort of zone in on those things that do humanize them, their, their craft, their creativity, their lyricism. You know, the, the obviously the sagas being the, the greatest case in point, but the beauty of their language, the beauty of their mentality, the humour, you know, that's something that we're always talking about and something that we try and inject certainly in Giles's books is that they're, you know, these guys are funny. I think the Brits today and the Vikings, they would get along really well because they like dark humour. Like dark.

Humour, it's true, but also, you know, we one of one of the groups that really gets into Giles work are people in the armed forces. And the one of the comments they come back with is that, you know, you really capture the, the group dynamic of a group of guys going off and doing stuff. They, you know, they care about each other, They're brotherhood, but they also, they take the, you know, take the Mickey out of each other and, you know, and they laugh and they joke and they, they have a, a cavalier attitude to life and death.

And that's supported by what they're doing, by their action. It's supported by their faith system. It's supported by the beauty of their, of their art. It's supported by the poetry. It's, you know, all these little ingredients that make them so much more than the. The banter is important, you know, as as guys, we know that taking the piss out of each other.

Well, I don't know if this is the same here, but certainly in the UK, in the UKA bunch of friends, that's kind of what you do and it's really a sign of affection. It's a sign that we're friends with. We're such good friends that I can insult you. Yeah, I called my best friend yesterday and and when he picked up the phone I said how you doing you fat fuck?

No, no. Exactly. That means you really rate that guy. Yeah, Marcus, you have to bleep that later. But that's that's fantastic. And I think that sometimes when kids are sometimes now it's called banter is a is sort of banned from schools and stuff. And of course no one wants bullying. That's a different thing.

But but banter, a school I know was banter is is banned. There's no banter allowed and and thinking you this is this is not a good thing. No, that's that's not how humans work. It's just that's how we build relations and. Resilience, yes. The important things, you know, the, the, the ability to actually converse today. And also understand that when someone expresses something that might seem offensive, that's not exactly what they mean. Yeah, I totally get that.

So Jones, you you've written a lot of historical fiction. You mentioned the the Crusader story that you started off with, but can you tell us a little bit more about your Viking trilogies? Yeah, so the the first trilogy was the first one was called Raven Blood Eye, and it was the archetypal Viking story really. I started it in 2004.

I got a publishing deal in 2007 and it wasn't published until 2009. So it was a long road just to get to that point of being published. And it's, it's about a boy who gets taken on a raid by a crew and just he's an outsider in his own village. And when he's taken as a part of this raiding crew, he really, he learns to appreciate what it means to be a bunk about amongst a fellowship, fellowship of warriors and to find your place amongst other people. And I, and I think for me, some of that was coming out of the music business and not having a place and not knowing where I fitted in.

And, and I think all the way through my career with my books, they have kind of followed events in my life quite closely. If a, a psychiatrist would have it and would have a great time. You'll be with that. With it, yeah. With my novels, yeah, sure, yeah. So what about your other trilogy then? Yeah, the other one is is all set in Norway and it's called the The Rise of Sigurd. And that's, I think with that trilogy that my first Viking books were such good fun to write. But the second trilogy is very, very rich with Norse mythology and kind of the books sort of almost smell of Moss and Mead, you know, it's kind of.

The prequels as well. They are prequels to the to the first. Trilogy did you did you feel that you had to like expand and put more effort into like the the research and everything to to make it like bigger in some way? Well, it's with the Viking stuff because it's never felt too much like research because it's just always been something that I've enjoyed and been, I've just been into it forever. So it's not like I have, you know, some of the other novels, the research felt heavier.

The I I did 2 novels set during the English Civil War and I had to research so much for that because the places I'm writing about are still the look the same today. If I talk about a country church in the in the Civil War novels, it probably still looks the same inside. You can't really change that because.

Exactly. You get a lot of that sort of thing. But with the Viking novels, it felt just instinctive. It just felt instinctive. I see. So what's the, what's the process of presenting this world and, and shaping the characters of this world? Because obviously we have the sagas and we have the mythology, but when it comes to ordinary Viking life, we, there's so much that we don't know.

So what? What are the challenges here? Well, they are challenges, but they're also the opportunities. The stuff that we don't know is where I have the most fun. Because then it's just about what, what, what's it like being a human being and how, how does it feel to go on a raid? What's going on in your stomach? You know, when you, when you're on board a ship and you're going to a raid and you're trying to be brave and you're, you're, you're, you're, you can see how worried your friend is over there and he's, he's thinking that this is his last day. And kind of the way you interact with people and the the stuff we were talking about earlier about being a human being. That's I was going to say that

that goes into what you were saying before. I felt that the the camaraderie as well and how you as a group. Well, I also, it goes to what we were talking about earlier about the connective tissue between periods of history and the fact that we've been here for such a short period of time. Because, you know, it's, it's the same thing as, you know, the group of soldiers sitting waiting on a boat as they approached Omaha Beach to a group of Raiders, to a group of Polynesians coming across the sea in canoes, waiting to every single one of them has to go through the the mental process of I'm a warrior. This is what I'm here to do.

But it could be my last day. This could be the last thing I do. And that's such a powerful, the kind of imprint of humanity and in US, certainly in today's society, you know, very thankfully, many, you know, very few of us will ever have to experience that. But at the same time, it's something that has been experienced in human society since the very beginning.

And that's exciting because it's, that's that part of history, that part of the, and the history storytelling is the part that is universal. It goes back to the emotion. It goes back to the idea that we are the same then as we are. We're the same then as we are now. And that I think it is one of the exciting things for a reader or a, you know, a listener or a viewer or a gamer to just have a little part of that, to be involved in that in a way so that they can just have a whisper of what that would be like, you know, and that's adrenalising.

It makes this exciting. Because you've narrated a bunch of, well, I don't know how many books of history, I don't know how. Many books of his. I've done 13. I think I've narrated all but two, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so, so, So how do you find the voice of each character then? Because like. Well, it was interesting though, when I first did the, do I start, in fact, the one first ones with the God of Vengeance, the Sigurd trilogy, which is the one set in Norway.

And I wasn't going to try and do sort of because it's a crew. It's got a vast cast. You know, there's this 60-70 different main characters that have speaking roles in it. It's it would be very stupid of me to try and do 60 or 70 various Norse accents. I'd run out pretty quick. So what I tried to do is just keep them about tone.

So you find a tone for a character. So you know, some, maybe a little more graphs, you know, some are lighter and they have, you know, richness in their voice up here. And then I'll quite often I'll go through a book and I'll actually associate people with maybe actors that I've known from the from history.

You know, it's maybe a little bit of Richard Burton in there. I'll try and find, you know, some Sean Connery or maybe someone a bit more obscure. And yeah, just kind of, I read it, read it again. I mean, I'm, I was lucky with Charles's books and I've, I've worked with, with other authors as well. But Charles's books, I had been a fan for a while and read them all and worked with him.

So I, you know, I knew he was writing them when I was, you know, working with him. So it was good to say. What's that character like? You know, it's an insight. It's kind of scoop, but yeah, it's tricky. The The Raven trilogy was easier because there's a lot more kind of UK characters in, so I felt a bit more a bit more comfortable.

Yeah, you can use your normal speaking voice. Yeah, yeah. I mean. Do you direct? Do you direct yourself? Yeah, very much so. I mean, I I try and make, I try and make the listening experience like watching a film. It's. Isn't isn't that difficult though? I mean, I'm just saying like from from a musician's point of view, like we're a band that I'm going to Martha as a band. And we tried producing our own records and after the 5th record we realised that this is not a good idea. Yeah, it's tough.

I mean, you, you don't do it solely on your own. So when you do an audio book, I and not all audio book narrators do this. Lots of them do do it on their own. And I have great admiration for that because I'm the same. I, I think if I was purely judging my own, well, I'd never get anything. I'd never finish it because I'd, I'd constantly be going back and doing it again and, you know, tweaking it and it would take me 6 months to record a book rather than the, you know, the week or so that it should. But you have a producer who's just keeping the foot on the gas, you know, saying that's fine, I don't need to do it again.

It's for. We're on a time. We're on a time again, but I love him, hearing him do the different voices. I love hearing the voices that he ascribes to the to my characters. And then when we go to the pub, I'll say, can you just be Olaf for a thing? Because I just want to hang out with I want to hang out with Olin.

I don't want Phil. I want Olaf. Give me a hint. And it's but it also weirdly then informs my writing. So I, I did a series I did of an Arthurian trilogy and Bill plays Merlin and he and he, I love the way he does Merlin, but the way he does Merlin now makes me in subsequent books, I was writing the dialogue with Phil's voice in mind and that changed the way he, Merlin spoke because so that was a very sort of reverse. Interesting.

Yeah. It, I always, you know, the, the, certainly the, the Viking books was a new learning curve for me because I was learning about Viking, you know, different pronunciations in parts of Scandinavia. I was, you know, different place names, etcetera. All those things are quite tricky. But certainly the the the the Arthurian trilogy were very.

Difficult. Do Merlin. Do Merlin. Well, Merlin's great. He's, he's Welsh and he's, oh, Welsh. He's a graph character. He's Merlin. What would you say is Phil's strength as an actor? Oh my God, as an actor. Yeah, because you were talking about Merlin's voice. And how is it good to do that? Well, one one of them is actually completely committing to the role in a way that some actors now can be a little bit precious. Protecting voice, protecting the body he doesn't care about. Either there's not a lot to protect, to be honest, I mean. Completely reckless.

I wrote a poem called Hadrada Saga and we made a short film of it and called it The Last Viking about the life of Harold Hadrada. And Phil starred in the in the this this short film. And he just to sort of get into the vibe he was people. He had his, he had his premier on minutes heavy and he's running around the longhouse like running laps of it just to get exhausted and just to just to look the part and I was worried he was going to have a heart attack. Well, in the best shape, I mean, let's face it. But.

Yeah, it's total commitment. You know, there's an there's obviously an instinct there. So he plays in the, in the video game we've made together, he play, he plays a lot of characters, several characters in the video game. And again, I like writing the dialogue for them because I know him so well. So I kind of think, oh, when he's, when he's, you know, when he's playing Torsten, what, what, what lines shall I give him?

And because I know how he's going to sort of deliver it. But yeah, commitment instinct. Would you call yourself a method actor then? I don't know. I mean, I'm not a method actor. I, I, I kind of, I'd like to think I'm pretty transportative. So I'm, I'm definitely a character actor. I always had when I was younger, you know, I played the Romeos and the Hamlets of.

Shakespeare. A lot of Shakespeare and, you know, and I used to get to the handsome leading men roles and then I was no longer quite the handsome leading man I was. And actually that suits me, you know, that because back then I struggled with that. I would was always far more interested in the, you know, in the broken and interesting morphing characters to to actually really kind of, I suppose being a character actor with a bunch of different.

Characters to draw from is really exciting. It's you know, it's great because one of the great things about the audiobooks is you get to be everybody, you know, you know, and I, you know, I play the beautiful maidens and I, you know, I play the you do dark and well, I play the dark and crooked kings. But this is the other thing, you know, the game is great for it. The game because we've been able to mould not just for me for the voice, but we've actually been able to mould the physicalities of these characters from scratch. That's awesome, you know, So what if we have someone like Torsten is very much like this?

Yeah, a bottle of fun man. And everything he does is a kind of clumsy, you know, and that's so lovely to be able to go, right. What's this guy going to look like? You know, or we've got a character who's called Frackie. He's very much like this. And he's up here in the bit, mate, you know, and you're like, well, OK, what do they wear? What?

What? What are you going to put them? In It's interesting. When you do that, though, not only does your voice change, but your face, well, you become you become the physicality. The physicality is important. But I think that are good actors, you know, and you know, I'm I'm still so Clive on on the show talking about this, you know, the the being able to just stop worrying about yourself is the greatest skill as an actor. It's the thing we all search for. It's the, it's the the Holy Grail is to stop being aware of you, get you out the way so you can be the character. And being a front man.

On stage similar. It is doing the same thing. It, it is being you, but not being you at the same time. It is because, I mean, privately, I'm actually kind of a private person. I'm very Scandinavian. I like to, you know, not take too much place. When you're on stage. You're when on stage, you're a God. That's my, that's my element.

But yeah, it's it's. I totally get it. Yeah, it's exciting. I mean, the thing about performance is that for me, I think when I was a kid, I used to, I was an only kid. I used to watch a lot of movies. I lived in a small rural place that, you know, I wouldn't get out of great deals. So. So the the best thing for me was the video store around the corner where I could get films. And I was always really fascinated by these people telling stories on screen.

If it goes back to storytelling and to be part of that storytelling, A vessel, if you like, you know, it sounds grand and it's a bit cheesy, but you if you have, if you have the opportunity to, to go to a different place entirely and be someone completely different for a short space of time, it's great fun, but. People don't realise how hard it is because I've always been kind of self-conscious.

So for me acting is not something on stage. It's fine because like you say, I'm, I'm sort of I'm playing a role that I can, but just could I could do it, but being other people and and sort of just not being conscious at all. And I think people don't realise how hard that is. So some people in the game, some people want to have a role in the game. They want they go, Oh can I have a few lines in the game and they come on set and they in their in their motion captures suit under the lights and then they soon realise how hard it is. It's it's one of the worst things like when when the we talked a bit earlier about the movie, I was in Norseman of a Viking saga and I had two lines for that movie. And I was, I was like, all

right, I knew the lines by heart. I knew, I knew them. I knew exactly what I was going to say. So I decided like before it was the big day, I need to practice them, how to say them. So I recorded myself saying them and it sounded it was. That was the first mistake. It was like just terrible. It was so bad. So I talked to to my to well, actually James Norton, who, you know, who was playing my brother Vali in the in the movie. He, I talked to him about it because we, we were kind of working our, our characters together a little bit. And he said, well, you shouldn't really do that, but just just just throw it out, you know?

And then you gave me some advice. And there was this one thing where I'm supposed to like, up there, but and then there's nothing coming after. And it's like, yeah, but like, yeah, but just say, add something like up there. But that's madness. And all right, all right, now. OK, that came out natural.

So then we had the table read where everybody's reading their lines, and all of a sudden you find yourself reacting to what the other person said and all of a sudden. There it was, the moment. Yeah, it's happened to the moment. Absolutely. And then I realized, like, wow, this, this is difficult.

This is a hard job. Because you overthink it, Yeah, if you're not used to it, I think. Yeah. I mean, it goes back to, as I'm saying, it's about, it's about putting your mind in a position where you're not getting in the way in that way. And it's just, it's human nature. It's everything we, everything we're built to do is to to not go. I'm going to put myself completely on the line and encourage everyone to watch me.

You know, we don't do that naturally. No, I mean, some people do, but not many of us do. Yeah. Usually if somebody does that in in real life, there we we call them narcissists. Exactly. Yeah, that's true. So we talked about your strengths. Now, what are Giles strengths? And I was, I was nice, right?

But what? What do you think? He's he's as a writer and a novelist. What? What is his strength? Go, you know, we've we've covered the sort of the mentality behind it. But the thing for me that Giles does better than anyone that I've ever read, and one of the privileges working with him is his ability to give poetry to the most the simplest of tasks. This the you know, the the most.

What would we would class as mundane thing and make them feel beauty? You know, to to instill them with something that's magical. It the the craftsmanship that Giles has as a writer is a joy to deliver, certainly as an actor. But sometimes I find myself reading passages of Jazz's books and just stopping like in in the middle of of an audio book recording, do a line and just going, you know, And often I'd just look at the producer and go, jeez, come on. I mean, that's really good, isn't? It do you have any like a favorite passage that you. He's very good at Kennings.

Like Kennings are the, you know, kennings are the thing. It's like, I mean, I'm trying to think of something from from the last Viking, but something along the lines of, you know, we rolled along that ragged coast like Thunder. Yeah, it's. Just beautiful things or, you know, like Thunder. The shield walls clashed, hungry blades biting again and again. Forward, forward, our desperate cries on Christ's men, cross men, kings men and Ravens croaked in the darkening sky. You know, it's like it's so rich and it's funny because, you know, I spend a lot of time with Giles and we write a lot. And he's often completely unaware of everything. You know, the of these, these moments that he's put, he's like, oh, yeah, I remember that.

Did I write that or did I? They seem to just come very naturally to him. Sometimes you don't remember this, Sometimes if I listen to it or I can't remember the writing of it, so I don't know. It's weird. It's, yeah. Because like, sometimes, like, it's only when you go back that you're kind of like.

Oh yeah, it's like this. This was good. I I I forgot that I wrote this. Yeah, it's, it's something happens in the moment. And for me it's about rhythm, it is about lyricism. And when I'm writing, if the, if it starts to feel like it's got a rhythm to it, then it that really turns me on. And, and and, you know, if I write a paragraph that feels like that, then I can stand up and walk away and just walk around the room for a bit.

And I know I've done something that I'm happy with. Yeah, it has to. Yeah. The, the sort of the way it's written is, is, is, is is so much more important now than what what is written to an extent, you know, the story is a story, but I want to try and tell it in a really beautiful way. I. I think, I think what you said was really, really beautiful because as you say, like if you can get the mundane things, the the little things that make up most of our lives, if to be honest, to make them like that interesting. And in in a novel or something that you write, that's how a a, a, a novel or something becomes bigger than just book. It's human connection.

I mean, Charles, he, he writes characters. This is his other skill is he writes characters that you feel like you're sat with, you know, you feel like, or you could sit with, you know, he said to who'd like to go to the pub and sit with Olaf, where it's not just down to the voice, it's the fact that Olaf is so vivid that he's a character that you could quite easily imagine yourself sat in the pub with.

I mean, it probably wouldn't go well for you if you did. You'd end up having a fight and people would get killed. But to be able to capture character like that means that you have to understand the range of characters that are out there. You know, the people that are available to you as storytellers kind of colour your worlds.

And the people that inhabit Charles worlds as a novelist are all so rich, so easily accessible and funny, unpredictable, You know, they, they excite you or quite often they break your heart. You know, he's pretty emotional. He writes emotion well. I think the thing about being sort of reserved in, in sort of social terms is you become an observer. And as a writer, you have to observe. You just watch people.

You're in a room. You're not the loudest person in the room. You know, that's, that's not me. I I'm quiet generally, but I'm soaking it all up. And I know my wife said that they had this assignment when she was in Oxford. It's, it's an online course, but she was in Oxford for a two week period and one of the assignments they had was to listen in on conversations.

Is that something that you do? Well, naturally, yeah. Like like you know writing is is observing. I don't want to make people wary around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, obviously I have the power to put you in a book and kill you. I can do that. That's crazy. So you guys worked together for 15 years now and we talked a lot about like how well you were together and, and how you complement each other and all that stuff.

But how often do you have disagreements during your? Work this is going to be a boring it is because we we just don't really. No, it's really sad. I mean, in a way we probably should try and find somewhere that we do, but we tend not to. We're both pretty diplomatic and also I think we normal, we, we plan pretty methodically, whatever we do. And in the planning process, because it's so fluid, there isn't really, I mean, disagreements are kind of an everyday thing, but they're so, you know, rich, it's easy to do. You just go, well, we obviously we're going to disagree at this. So which way we're going to go?

And you make their choices rather than disagreements. So maybe, maybe not spouts, but like, yeah, I want to go this way. Yeah, you're probably right. No stuff I got, I got. You know, I think, but also we, because we now know each other pretty well, we sometimes second guess before the other person gets there.

So it's sort of like I'm, I'm probably, you know, I know he's not going to go with that. So you don't have any disagreements regarding work? Do you have any other disagreements like? Outside. Like when you're in the pub. I think we're because we're, we're aiming in this, we're aiming at the same thing.

So whatever project we're working on, we just want to make it the best we can. And because we're just heading in the same direction with with most things, whether it's going to the pub and drinking beers or whether we're trying to write a story together. Because because you know, like in in my band, I'm talking a lot about I'm and Martha hearing this, but it's kind of funny like because you work very tightly and and a band touring and it's also very like very tight and there is 11 disagreement says followers follows us to to this day. And I'm talking about 20 plus years now. And it comes up every once in a while. And it's, it's, it's a question of which battery is the Best Buy, the IKEA AA battery or, or

the Duracell AA battery. That's. A fantastic thing. Probably the least rock'n'roll thing I've. Yeah, it's insane. It's insanely stupid. It comes up every once in a while and and 1 camp argues for the IKEA battery and the other camp argues for the Duracell battery and the our argues which one is the Best Buy where I I would say that maybe the argument is which battery is the most value for money.

So yeah, with specifics about the argument itself taking place. Because technically there is a last longer but the IKEA battery lasts almost as long but it's way cheaper so I mean. I think there needs to be some sort of scientific task that take place, no? No, no, they no, they can't ever know. That's the point of. This it's they need a mitigator, but they will never, they will never budget this.

And I'm like, I'm just so tired of hearing it. The thing is, we when you're in a band, it's kind of you in a, in a way you against the rest of the world. And we feel the same way because when we're trying to create projects and we're trying to get our films off the ground and we're meeting with producers and execs and, and we have to be united because everyone else is trying.

It's very hard to be creative, to be successfully creative and actually make money out of being creative. All those things are the world is against you because nobody needs the things that we're trying to sell. No one needs. It's not like we're selling, you know, batteries. I mean, no one, no one needs these stories or these films. So we have to convince them that they do. And it's, it's, it's difficult.

Being a creative is is difficult. But we know that they need them. I mean, you know, the society needs them and the world needs them and for our souls need them. But but it is, yeah, it's quite difficult to get things. I think we we often do disagree about things that not disagree. But we, we have a different approach when it comes to sort of putting ourselves out there.

I'm, I'm often much more likely to be like, oh, well, look, we need to go and speak to these people. We need to go and do this. We need to do a bit of hustling here or whatever it is. And Joe's like, Nah, I'm not doing it. I'm like, come on, man, come on. I like, I often try and, you know, take him along in things that he often isn't quite as happy to go along to.

Yeah, I'm, I'm better at saying no. Yeah, I could stay at home then. But. Couldn't a bit of tension like at times actually be like good for the creative process? I don't think so. In ARCA, I think both of us, to be honest, both of us are pretty like we tend to avoid conflict. And I think that's probably the case where I was talking about second guessing each other.

I think we probably don't. We tend to try not to put ourselves in a position where we do have any kind of conflict. I think because I, I'm a bit quite diplomatic when my role as a director, you know, I and narrative director in the game, I work with a lot of people all day every day and they often have their own conflict. So I spend a lot of time resolving conflicts and so I see them coming from quite a long way off and I see that they're often, you know, it's rare that they have a good purpose. Sometimes, you know, sometimes a bit of conflict can create a healthy artistic dispute that resolves in a, in an exciting way.

But from our perspective, you know, because we are, we work as a team, I think we tend to try and avoid them before they happen. That's just deeper. Yeah, I mean. Maybe we should have an argument? We didn't argue about whether we should go for another drink. But never argue about that. Of course you'd have it's it's like, it's like that, that like.

Why don't we argue? But if you'd have said, do you know what, I'm tired, I'm going to go to my room, I probably would have said, yeah, that's a good call. But we. Didn't we didn't we didn't somebody even question. Yeah, so we talked about it like your like where where it comes from, like research and and all that stuff. But what inspires you to do this work? Because obviously there has to be something that drives you guys to.

For me with the with the books, it's actually, as I said before, creating something that didn't exist before and having actually, it's a Viking thing, it's legacy, it's leaving something. So we all know that for a Viking, the most important thing he could leave behind after his death was his reputation. Yes.

So for me, the idea of leaving a body of work behind, leaving books behind when I've gone and that's something that drives me, definitely drives me. And somebody said to me once, would you still write novels if it was just digital, if you didn't have the physical novel? And because my friend said, yeah, of course. Because it's, it's about the story. It's just, I don't care how they're presented or how they how they're published, as long as they're out there somewhere. And for me, actually, no, I have to have a physical thing to show.

It's like for me, it's a trophy. It's a, it's a there, it is on the shelf or on the book in the bookstore. And it's validation for what I've been doing with my time. And I had an e-mail from somebody who's serving on a British submarine, HMS Vengeance. So he's a submariner on there. And that's one of our nuclear deterrent submarines. And it's, you know, down there roaming the depths. And he was reading one of my novels and he said, I'm leaving it on here when I, when I leave, when I'm, when I'm finished, I'm leaving on there.

And I had this weird thought that, OK, what if the world ended in nuclear Armageddon? Somewhere down there in the ocean, this submarine is still cruising around, and my novel is on there. You know, when there's no more civilization, my novel's still there. And that's a bleak thought. Yeah, I get pretty bleak, but it's also cool. I I get that too.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think my, my, my pursuit is probably is a bit of that. I mean, I love the idea that you, my grandkids can listen to me reading a story that my friend wrote, you know, that I had, you know, a part in creation of it's that's, that's very cool. You know, there's something wonderful about that.

So they can hear my voice reading those stories. One of the reasons I, you know, I do like the the medium of audiobook because it goes back to the skaldic, you know, saying and, and just telling your people a story. It's it's a fantastic thing, but I think the other thing for me is it's about capturing those moments in in human existence that are totally personal. Moments of elation, moments of heartbreak, moments of love, that moment when you look across the room and see someone and have a connection with them.

They're all things that we pass by daily, but they're all things that we've very rarely recognise. Properly, we don't, you know, acknowledge them in perhaps the way that we we should. And storytelling gives you the opportunity to put those under the magnifying glass to, to really capture them. Performance does as well.

But I love sculpting stories to make people just stop for a minute and think about themselves. So you prefer to do that as a as a director than rather than an actor or? Both, I mean, they're both, they both you can do the same thing in different ways. So as a director, you're you're pointing the audience's attention to something as an actor, you're involving them in the feeling that the character's having.

And so, you know, it's part of a different type of orchestration. As a director, you're saying, look, look, look at that there that thing, you know, firstly, it's important to the story, so you should take note of it, but also it's important to the tone, the the atmosphere, the the world that you create.

And actually, you know, I think world building is, is another massive thing, something that we've, you know, we've been privileged to be able to create worlds, both jazz and, you know, in novel form and, and in film and now in the game. The having those platforms to be able to build a landscape that other people can be part of is, it's a privilege, you know, it's, it's really great. So what biking age story do you guys think deserves or needs to be made into a movie or ATV series? The other day I see this bliss.

So obviously there's so many. And when we've kind of, you know, we've touched on a few of them. You know, the Stamford Bridge Viking is always a great one. It's it's, it's a classic. But I was reading the other day about Thorkel the tall, you know, the mercenary who kind of flipped sides in the early 1000 in the, in the early 1000s and was basically just go to wherever the highest bidder was.

And I thought there's definitely a kind of cool, like, Western style story about this incredibly cool tall dude who everyone was shit scared off and he could, you know, he could just do whatever he wanted. It's a bit bit like the Viking leave Unclea for. Yeah, exactly. I like the idea of this guy is rolling into a battle and everyone going Oh no say this guy.

Fuck, he was fine with us last week. Yeah, I thought you were my friend. And also, you know, the, the, there's obviously there's, there's so many great exploration stories that we've, we've played quite a lot with the idea of doing something about the, you know, Leif Ericsson and the Americas and, you know, just trying to take it in a different, slightly different route just by once again, tapping into how incredibly brave that would have been.

It's it's insane to have gone somewhere that as far as you were concerned didn't exist and then find people. In an open ship. In an open ship, find people that were completely unlike anyone you'd ever seen and then try and settle is It's incredible. And yeah, there's definitely a story to be told there on screen, I think. So do you, do you have, do you have a favorite story that you would like to see come to life that way? No.

He makes his own. I make his own story. I know. Well, I mean, I I do have a favorite story. Well, I actually have a few that I think would be amazing. Some would be probably more difficult. Than that, Are you sure you want to tell us? Sure we might because I'm not I'm not kind of do it, but but I think the.

Collaboration. The saga of of Eagles, Gallagher and Sunday is one of the greatest of the Icelandic saga in my opinion and and. Unbelievable as well. I mean, they're just like what? Absolutely unbelievable. Eagle is a character. He's such an anti hero. It's stupid, but he's such like he's violent, he's bad tempered and it's. Ugly.

How old was he when he killed his first man 7. Seven yeah, and and oddly enough, the the person that he kills is the son of Hague of hag starch. So my last name there. So, but so if if you were to do like a story, like who would you cast as like a the protagonist, like like in the late for Ericsson, sorry, for instance, like would you have a favorite actor to to cast?

See this, I know that this is an issue that people have faced before. I know that Michael Hurst really, you know, when they first started Vikings, it was a very high process to find Travis Fimmel, to find their Ragnar. And I think actually it's the kind of thing where there, you know, there are, you know, the Northman was great.

You know, he's on Skarsgard, you know, fantastic Viking. He's, you know, he's brilliant actor and his physique's amazing. And, you know, he's got presents and all the things. I think we talked about him quite a long time before that film as well. It was someone who kind of cropped up. But yeah, it's it's hard. Leading actors are hard to find leading, leading actors. Young, good young leading actors are hard because and quite the profile yet and they might be the next big thing, but the kind of the older actors have moulded themselves to be, you know, a different thing to certainly Leif Ericsson, that's beer. They're often already attached to certain characters. You want an unknown?

Really. Don't. I think that's The thing is that when, if, certainly if we were going to go about casting Viking film with a young protagonist, it'd be hard. It'd be hard to find them with because you'd need to have so much presence. Brisman is, so is everything. Brisbane to be able to lead a group of people and I think that goes across the board.

If you know, even when it comes to to any film where the the protagonist is a leader of people, you know, believing that you could walk onto a battlefield and and someone could say something and you'd go, OK, I'll I'll die for you. I'll stand next to you until it's time to go. That's yeah. It's a it's a big ask for an answer. Definitely.

Yeah, so, but every everyone loves a good bad guy, right? So would your favorite Viking antagonist. Who would who would portray the antagonists, do you think? It's a good point you make. They say that a story is only as good as it's antagonist. It's an antagonist. It's tough. I mean, it's tough because we, we do, you know, we do look books or, you know, mood boards and we put things together quite regularly.

And yeah, we tend to, we tend to struggle finding, finding those, those people that we're happy to put in because they reference what we're looking for in the character. I mean, you know, going back actually to the, to the, to the scars guards who, who you know, have obviously got an incredible dynasty behind them. But we when we were doing the Raven, we were looking at Bill Skarsgard when we went with as a potential. So yeah, they've obviously got the Viking thing going. He's he's an interesting actor because he kind of has that like kind of pretty boy yeah face.

But he did do like Pennywise. I think that goes back to what I was talking about, about It's kind of difficult when you're a younger male actor. People want you to be a thing, but if actually if you're a character actor and that you can do that and play something like that, that's what. You should see that that other Stephen King thing it did.

It wasn't Stephen King, but I think it was inspired by Stephen King. It was ATV series and I forget what it was called now. It took place in Maine anyways, and he kind of played the devil that came into this place. There was it's. Not Salem's Lot, was it? No, no, this was what there was so many like Stephen King references in there. Because it made.

It's obviously that all of his novels are set in Maine. Yeah. So it was, yeah, it was, it was amazing. Anyway, so maybe it'll come to me by the end of this interview. Maybe this could be your your your next film. Appearance. But it was just such a such a cool story, I think, and and he was such a such an amazing bad guy in that in that series.

And I think he did a good job. So I think it's a good choice actually. Yeah, there's some. There's some quirky actors out there. We always talk about no country for old man is having the best boy, the best bad guy ever, you know? Yeah. Then again, you talked about Gary Oldman as well. Like in it back in the in the day, they did some really, really nasty pieces, pieces of work. Leon.

Yeah, Leon, the the crooked can't bring. Yeah, Yeah. Anyways, this is not why you're here. I'm just kidding. So we already touched a little bit on the game, but let's get a little bit deeper into it. To show. So gaming industry, the game industry is by far today the biggest money maker in culture. So currently you're collaborating on like a Arctic Astrid's upcoming Viking game called Norse Oath of Blood, and it's out in late 2025.

Like on. Yeah, late 2025, early 26. It's like. PCPC. PlayStation, Xbox, all of the platform. Yeah, that's great. I I didn't mean to brace Grace over it now, sorry about that, but it's it's great. Like, I love this, but can you tell us about your respective roles in this production and how how how it came about that you got involved? It was years a few years ago now, the the boss of Arctic Hazard, the studio, came to me and he knew about my Viking novels.

He knew I'd written 6 Viking novels at that time and asked if I'd be interested in collaborating on with him on a Viking game and writing story and the characters and the dialogue and all that sort of stuff. And I hadn't written a Viking novel for a little while, so the idea of getting back into getting back on my longship and going raiding again was something that I wasn't going to turn down at all. And so yeah, I said I'd love to be involved, it'd be amazing. And we started sort of putting putting the whole thing together.

I obviously collaborate with Phil a lot and Phil's knows more about gaming than I than I ever will. So Phil sort of was helping me out as well at that point. And then being a director, well, you should take over at this point. They recognise he has other skills, other things to bring to the, to the creation process of the game. And, and so Phil just jumped a board as well and and in a big way.

Yeah. So I mean, we, as we were working on the scripts, the the creative director said, you know, look, do you think you want to step in and actually start looking at working with some of the actors to do the voice lines, that sort of thing? Because, you know, we're writing the dialogue. I said yeah.

And I said, you know, have how much are we we working in what environment working in? And we started testing some ideas. And he said, look, man, you know, come in. I think you should lead this narratively. And so I came on board as narrative director and both of us have worked alongside the devs to kind of go hand in hand with the storytelling process to create, create a what? Viking living, breathing Viking world. Yeah, it's been, it's been a great challenge. Brilliant process.

So you already touched about this, but can you elaborate, elaborate a little bit more on the on the story of the game? Yeah, the story is a revenge story, as most Viking stories, yeah, tend to be. Tend to be sticking. Sticking with the sagas. If there's not a blood feud in it, what's the point? Then there's not invite.

That's not invite. Yeah, so. So Yao Gripa runs, runs his community and his prow man. His greatest warrior is Stainer fast beer and he's he is an Uber Viking. He is the guy you want to be leading the charge. He's at the front of the, the, the shield wall and he's a great warrior and they're very tight.

They're friends. They they've grown up together. And as I mentioned earlier, Stainer becomes disenchanted by the route that the Yoggreeper is going. Yoggreeper is settled now. He's, he's, he's sort of wealthy. He's got a a thriving settlement and he sees his future in more in trade than raiding.

Stainer doesn't like this. He's a Raider, he's a warrior. That's what he's born for. The blood fray that is his. That's his thing. And the the game starts with the betrayal of ya'll Greeper by Stainer Fastbeer. Yeah. Yeah, and so it's about you. You the the player plays as ya'll. Greeper's son, Gunner Gripson and the the story is about you as a player taking Gunner escaping from Bora where the the game starts and your father is Yaal getting to safety.

You head to Kalpang with your aunt where your uncle is Yaal and he offers you a piece of land and says look, I'm I'm not going to fight this guy, he's too much. But what I can do is I can give you the resources to start your own settlement, grow strong, bring people under your, you know, to your shield. And when you're strong enough, you can go back and take back your birthright.

And so Gunner and his twin sister, Sigrid, and their old retainer on they go off. And you as a player then start with nothing. You start off with a small farm and then over the course of the game you bring craftspeople and warriors and headman to your banner and your settlement grows and you have to manage that settlement and as it grows stronger, your warriors grow and become more successful and more powerful. And then?

But it's it's a turn based game, right? Yeah, the combat aspect of it's turn based. So I mean it there are other similar sort of games, I suppose boulders Gate most recently and you know, X Com, which is a kind of more sci-fi version of this where the the combat aspect of it is turn based. So, you know, it's almost like a very, very advanced chess and you you have to tactically work out the best warriors for a scenario.

You choose your, you choose your warrior team before you go into a bit of combat. And then you have to adapt using their skills. And so, yeah, it's kind of on the fly tactical combat that really makes you consider every choice you make and every piece of environment you come across. Talking of X com somebody coined this axcom axcom which which we.

Rather like it's kind of. Cool, So what was the like? What's the biggest difference writing and directing a game compared to like a novel or a or a movie or TV for TV or. Yeah, it's, it's been a, a very steep learning curve only because in a way, one of the things about film making or even writing a novel or script is that the restrictions are sort of what helps mould your skill. Your restrictions point you in the right direction. You guys, I can't do that because of, you know, they wouldn't go, they wouldn't do this. Or if you're in a film set, it's like, like, you know, I can't film that direction because the sun's in the wrong place or, you know, there's that mountain over there. And but in computer games, you

go move the sun, let's take the mountain away. And so that level of freedom has been quite interestingly challenging, but also from us as storytellers, it's, it's making the, the mediums collide. You're taking something that you have agency over as a storyteller and you're giving the agency to a player. And so that they feel that they are the ones that are, are developing the story.

They're, they're the protagonist. And so that giving a player that flexibility is quite a hard work as storytellers because you have to second guess how the player will react to something, where they might go, how they might try to experience something, whether they find that bit of information or not, whether they go to that place and see that thing or not. And so the the choices and eventualities are so vast that it can be the dizzying from a storytelling. Although it can be the other way as well. So in a novel I can put anything I like in it. But I now if I want, if I have to ask the devs if I can have a wolf in it, you know what I mean? It's like, can I have a wolf in this game, you know, and oh OK, I can.

So then we then I can write it into the story. Yeah, but like you mentioned before, Baldur's Gate, which I think is a great example, a great game. I loved playing it back in the day. But writing for a game like that, with so many multiple options of where you go, because as I understand it, that's kind of what this game is as well. Depending on what you're choice is here, it may develop in different ways.

Is that a big challenge? Yeah, I mean there in this game there is a linear path we've from what has been useful to us, but it's a it is a narrative game. So there is a beginning, you know middle and end you take those steps. But within the narrative structure there are multitude of different choices you can make.

And yes, that that can become really challenging when you when you have to think, OK, well, if they do that there then and they have to get there. How many options do we have that we have to explore along the way? So, so how how's that coming up with with the story for that? Yeah, it's again, it's, it's you have to fulfil certain criteria.

So we need a blacksmith in the village, you know, we need a shipbuilder, we need a seamstress. We there are certain sort of VIP characters that have to be in this game. And but then it's like, how do we get them in the game without just that? You're just wandering along and there's a guy, hey, I'm a shipbuilder. Can I, oh, you should be able to come, come and live with us then.

You know, it can get pretty tedious if that's the way you're introducing all these major characters, you know, So it's the most fun has been actually trying to create characters who really live and breathe and who have very distinct personalities and characters who you actually become rather fond of.

Like we mentioned Torsten the the blacksmith, and he's just somebody who is a big brash guy, but he's got a real soft heart, you know, that he's actually, you know, his back story is, is sort of heartbreaking. And yeah, these characters are great fun to write. But now, now I'm getting into details because I'm, I'm thinking isn't as an, as a, as a writer. Like if you think about it like you write the story and they're, they're, you may have like your favorite character Thorsten. Maybe he doesn't get the prominent position in the game when someone's playing because they're playing differently. So they may not encounter him and learn about him as a character.

One, one of the most painful things that in the game for us is that, and this is, you know, it's common across all gaming, is that you can just skip. You skip. You know, we are, I spend a long time crafting cutscenes with, you know, scores of actors, you know, cinematographer. And we we spend a long time moulding them and making them beautiful. And a lot of players will just go skip. Let's get back to the gameplay.

And yeah, that can be quite. And there might be important information in those cutscenes, so then we have to make sure the information still gets to the player but in in a different way in case they skip the the cuts. But at the same time, doesn't feel repetitive to the people who did sit and watch the cutscene, which, yeah, it's challenging.

That could be, yeah, I can see that. But like, what? What do you see? Have you learned about the Viking Age? Have you learned anything new about the Viking Age during the process of this production? Absolutely. Yeah. What? What did we learn about the Viking Age? A lot of things that you shouldn't put in the Viking game, that's been a big thing there.

Are no more potatoes in this? We have, yeah. OK. Yeah. We've, you know, because we work with such a wide team and a global team as well, we sometimes have to be the arbiters of, of accuracy as much as you can be because, you know, it is a computer game and, and it has to be fun and it has to serve the player rather than the historian.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we've, for example, we get questions from potential players about what what's the kit like, what's the war gear, what are the weapons and stuff like that. And yeah, we've set the game in 88102, but we haven't put everybody in in with weapons and equipment from exactly the same time we've taken a spread of the Viking Age.

So you you might have the famous Yemen boot helmet with the specs 'cause I think it's still the only surviving complete helmet found. Probably. So, but of course we've, and that's from the early Viking, we've put that in there. But we've also got the Spangon helm nasal, the traditional helmet that was used right up to the Norman invasion and beyond. Because the player will want to have variants on their weapons and arm and upgrades, you know, so in terms of historical accuracy, some, some nerd might say, well, those helmets weren't being used at the same time.

We are aware of that. But we want, but they are Viking. They're both sort of Viking kind of age, age helmets, so we've taken a spread of the whole Viking Age. We've been very careful as well. You know, we've, we've already tried to say, look, we're not trying to make a historically accurate game where we're trying to make it a historically inspired game.

Yeah, immersive. Yeah, and something that that hopefully gives the player a really good window into the mentality to the type of life and world that these people would be living in. And at the same time, it's a fun game. You know, we, we first and foremost, it's a computer game and it should be great fun to play. Yeah, because I can imagine that like some people, first of all, don't really know much about history or care, and most people who know about history and care about it, they still want to have an entertained product.

Yeah, I think most people are forgiving. I mean, you know, I think it's a very, very small amount of people that so give you, give you grief for making those choices. I mean, they are very much out there and. Usually very loud. And very loud, yes, about those choices. But I think some of the things we've learnt really has been about we have a very focused approach to storytelling.

When we're making a film or, you know, writing a book, we're telling a person's story. And in this it's about world building and our worlds are sort of they're not secondary, but they're they're also, we don't make a big thing of the world's. They're they're just there. They're part of a place our characters exist in. Whereas in this game, part of the game is the experiencing the world and seeing what it's like to exist in that world in different places with different environments. So you have to consider everything that you could could look away from as a writer or a director. If it's snowing, how does the snow rest on the top of a roof that's got a certain type of fire in it, you know, or you know, how does someone actually

sit down on that type of chair if that's the chair you've chosen for your long haul or whatever? There's so many choices involved that I think it's been a learning curve for us to go, OK, we have to be completely open to anything that a player might decide to do and get there before the player does make make the decisions before they do.

I mean, we've got an incredible development team that that's seen we work with are craftspeople of the highest order. And actually the world that we have created. It's kind, I mean, it's sort of, you know, in a way it's wasted because I could spend all day walking, you know, zooming in in in the dev world and actually just going into every little nook and cranny.

You can go down to the, to the seeing the, the weave on a piece of rope on a, on a harbour or the, OR the woodwork or you know, it's so rich and you know, our, our well designed team and our art team have gone above and beyond to, to sculpt and to craft and to create little intricate things that most players will probably just pass by and you know, and that's part of the fabric, but. That's isn't that like also with like filming in general? I mean in the book you read the book, you don't skip the lines. But in a film you may take like painstakingly take. Make a shot that lasts for about 5 seconds and most people will only see the actor, not the stuff behind him. Yeah, that's true.

That is true. I mean, I think that I suppose the difference is that with a game, you, you know, you've with a film, that's your frame and your and everything in your frame, you can dress and prepare and, and make right and make the actor the most prominent thing in it at the same time as complimenting everything else in the frame.

In a game, you can go over there as well and go over there as well. And and the freedom means that you there's nowhere to hide as creative we've. Had some wonderful actors come and record the MO Mocaps stuff. It's been a real pleasure to sort of be surrounded with talented people bringing these characters to life.

And and really, you know, we've had two Leeds, Gunner and Sigrid actually in tears in their eyes as they're acting out some of these scenes, which in, you know, when you're in a Mocaps suit, you know, you in a studio with kind of equipment everywhere. To be able to still immerse themselves so deeply within the roles that they're playing, it is very cool. It is, and that's one of the interesting parts of the process, sort of to juxtapose the, the, the directing and the writing that we do directorially. It's very strange to to put actors in a space, they they perform their parts and then you put them in costume and then you put them in an environment and then quite often you change their face.

You know, you take their face off and put someone else's face on it or, you know, or you're like, actually what they're wearing is completely wrong, let's change it completely. Or they're standing in the wrong direction, Let's turn them. That level of control is really exciting because you can't, you really can craft and mould. But yeah, it's just it's definitely a process that challenges the performers when they're doing those scenes because they everything has to be in in their imagination. They haven't got the kind of the, you know, the prop department to lean on and the things around them. So once you've been a part of creating a game like this and you've been so deeply involved

that it do you think it's going to be possible to enjoy playing the game as well? It's funny, actually. Like for a, for a good while I've because we test the game all the time, you know, we test the we on a daily basis often. And I try not, I try, I try to give myself a bit of space between doing big runs because also it's a big game, you know, there isn't enough hours in the day to play the whole thing over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But yeah, just just a couple of days ago, there's been so many kind of quick changes. We're coming up to sort of the end of the release. You know, we're, we're getting there now. It's everything's falling into place nicely. And I played a section of the game the other day and it was the first time in a long time that I played it and kind of forgot that I'd been involved in making it. You know, I was just kind of just enjoying playing because I'm a gamer.

And you know, I suppose the fear was that I could never, I could never enjoy it. Would you do? Do you rewatch your movies for instance? I tend not to, no. Actually I I give myself a lot of time and space after. Do you re read your books? No, the the closest I get is when Phil records the audio book, and usually that's a little bit after, so then I can come back a bit fresh and then I forget some of the scenes when I hear him doing. I don't sit there for the days, the five days that he's in heaven.

I usually come at the end. Like when he's doing the last few pages, I like to sit there and watch him do the last few pages. He gets emotional. I like to see that. Because I feel like as as like maybe you have a, a similar reference actually, as well as being a musician yourself. But when you've recorded the song and you've like, you tend to listen to it over and over again and you and then nothing. And then maybe for some reason it comes on on Spotify or whatever and you're like, yeah, this. Seems pretty good.

It's pretty good. So is is that a feeling that you get when you listen to reading your books? Yeah, very much so. Because when he does it, it's because it's a different format. It's a it's a different medium. And I think you've you take something new from that. So of course, when I'm writing the characters, I haven't got the voices in my head that until I hear him give them voices, they don't have those voices. So it becomes something different. When it's an audio book, it becomes something different again.

So, and if I'm doing a sequel to a book I've already written, then I it's a great way of immersing myself in the world again and getting to know the characters, which is again, I'll listen to Phil's audio book to remind myself of who everybody is and what's going. On That's a problem for me, though, because I have to do the same thing.

Yeah. And I mean, there's nothing more narcissistic than driving around listening to yourself, telling yourself a story. You know it. The worst one I found was when we did Lancelot and I was listening to Lancelot. It's very, it's a, you know, it's a very emotionally charged novel. And I got to the end and, and I was crying to myself, listening to myself and as I was doing, I think this is the most narcissistic thing I've ever done.

Like I've made myself so emotional with the delivery. I'm crying. Wow. I mean, I guess also as a musician it's different because you kind of have to go back and listen to your stuff when you rehearse, so. Do you find you lose objectivity though? Do you get? Nope, no, see, because that's difficult from when you certainly with edits of stuff, with film, you know, you're watching edits so many times you're like, I don't know, I've.

Well, yeah, I do. I do lose the objectivity during recording or, or writing. And that's why we need to produce her, which which we talked about earlier, because they can come in and say, well, this bit doesn't really work, does it? Yeah. But I love, I love this line. Yeah, but it doesn't work. Rewrite it, you know, Yeah, it happens all the time.

But going back and listening to stuff, it's rather that I can be very critical and go like should have done something different there or should have cut this bit out or redid this. And if there's ever the slightest doubt, you have to do it, because otherwise it haunts you forever. Ever. It's true, and that's terrible.

Yeah, anyways, really looking forward to to this game. It's going to be so fascinating to to to try it out. I'm I'm. I'm really. No, thank you. It's been a pleasure to be part of it and it's been a great thing to try to do a tackle the Viking world in a different medium, you know, and to give players the opportunity to experience a Viking world in a different way. So it's out late 2025.

Do you have a specific date? You know, it's late 25, early 26. It's still, it's still in debate at the moment. But yeah, it'll, it's coming soon. All right, the Vikings are coming again. Again, awesome. So Speaking of that or actually kind of going into one of my favorite parts of when we when we have our guests, it's our little questions that we usually put at the end of all the show.

So these normally it's only one person is now you both have to answer these questions, but the first question is if you could be a family on the wall anywhere during the Viking Age, what would you like to see? The Battle of Stamford Bridge. The Battle of Stamford. Bridge. I'd yeah, I was going to say probably in the Battle of Hastings, because it's so iconic in the UK, you know that, you know, I know it's, you know, it's Norman and Saxon, but there were Vikings on that field those.

Were Vikings. Yeah, exactly. Then the norms were Vikings. But you know, there were also, there were there were those Vikings from Stamford Bridge that decided to to hook up with the Saxons and go out. You know what? Let's just we'll fight for you guys. But yeah, I think that would be that would have been. There's so much conjecture over that. Good, good choices.

I think because pivotal moments in British history as well. Yeah. So wow, good answers. And now the the mother of all questions. Would you have liked to live during the Viking Age? If I could get get over the itchy clothing, I'm I'm, I'm sensitive, sensitive. So like if the wool is that not, you know, if it's actually forget it.

Everything else, the the pillaging, the the fighting, yeah, bring it on. But not, not the itchy. Clothes you are. You're a dirty heathen. Then your mother was right. Yeah, I think to be honest, I think the thing that would get me is probably healthcare like, you know, I you can medicine exactly toothache, those sorts of things that the the thing some of the cures were were pretty brutal and but all other things, yeah, I'd love to have.

I'd love to have maybe spend a few weeks rather than I'm. Not sure to be honest. Like if if I was magically transported back into the Viking age, I'm not sure how a modern person would actually survive more than a couple of days. I don't. Think they would? The life would it's. So that's such a different mentality, such a different like way of life that that what we know. But on the other hand, if obviously if you were born back, then you wouldn't know anything else so. Yeah, you can get used to anything in the. Fortnite.

Exactly. Exactly. Anyways, it's been great having you guys here. It's been a real pleasure. Forward to the game, Norse Otho blood out 2025 or early 2026. Yeah, great. Great to have you guys. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you. What a joy. Yes, thanks for coming. Hey guys, if you enjoyed this episode, check out our other episodes on our YouTube channel, Spotify and other podcast streaming services and also subscribe to support our work. Thanks for listening.

#19: Giles Kristian & Philip Stevens: Viking Books, Movies and Games

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin