Working with Scorsese was an absolute dream, and one of my favourite ever jobs was 'Beowulf' because it was just pure acting. Your imagination explodes as you try to imagine you're fighting a dragon or whatever.
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.
We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf - you know, not seen very often but often talked about.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
When filming for 'Beowulf,' we were close to Hadrian's Wall; there was no phone signal, and the scenery was spectacular.
In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
