Ragnarok 2012: The Movie (Part 1)

Question: You're given unlimited funds to produce a movie based on Ragnarok. Who do you hire to direct? Who do you cast as which gods? Where do you film? And how about a film score?

Okay, ladies and gentlemen. This question has been in our queue for what feels like eons while we tried to figure out what to do with it, and we still don't know! So we're going to take a bunch of stabs at it in a series of posts this weekend, and then ask everyone else their opinions! Today, we'll start with talking about directors.

First of all, we are horrible control freaks, so I pity the director and writers saddled with us. We aren't schooled in directing so we couldn't do it ourselves, but we'd be those creative consultants that directors hate - constantly over his or her shoulder, constantly flailing around about inaccuracies or things that need fixing, constantly tweaking and driving him or her nuts. It is true that we have never met a mythology movie that we liked to date, and in order to satisfy us, this director would need to have saint-level patience.

Ah, yes, Executive Directors. That's the word I was looking for for us. We'd be that.

But if this is a magical land in which our whims are being catered to and the most temperamental of directors are willing to put up with us, we'd want only the best of the best, and we went through a long laundry list of possibilities. John's first call was Joss Whedon because he excels at ensembles and Ragnarok is nothing if not in need of someone who can handle massive numbers of people at once without marginalizing any of them; however, in talking it over we decided that Whedon doesn't have the scope needed for something as large as Ragnarok, and his pathological inability to not be whimsical would hamstring him in much of the proceedings. My first call was Guillermo del Toro (because I fucking love del Toro and I will tell everyone about it), but while he does an incredible job with magic realism, gut-punching horror and representing the fantastic satisfyingly, he usually does it on more intimate scales, and Ragnarok needs to be so big and brain-busting that viewers leave the theatre feeling as if they might have just escaped certain death themselves. John suggested the Wachowski siblings for their excellent ability with worldbuilding and action sequences, but we worried that they didn't have the stamina for something of Ragnarok's size (the last thing we want is for the second and third segments of the movie to go the way of the second and third Matrix films). Kenneth Branagh could probably pull most of it off, but he's the opposite of Whedon in that he does better with a few characters to focus on and might have trouble being satisfying with a large range of important people (and also, he's brilliant at directing men but tends to let female roles fall by the wayside, and we don't want to marginalize the ladies of the Northlands). Tarsem Singh certainly has a taste for the dramatically epic, but we can't really tell how much is his directing prowess and how much is just having really awesome special effects and cinematography teams behind him. Terry Gilliam's got the magic but not the focus or the scale, James Cameron is great with large events but not great with the emotional impact past a character or two, and while we totally believe Peter Jackson could do it, we also believe he needs to really be in love with the source material to do so, and we don't know his feelings on ancient apocalyptic Norse myth.

So, after all of that discussion, we boiled down to our final choice, the most obvious choice of all: Stephen Spielberg. He's done some of everything we need in Ragnarok and done them fantastically - he can do gigantic scale, strong emotional impact, wide ensemble importance and focus on individual personalities, and equal parts action, horror and emotion. Spielberg tends to live and die on the strength of the script he has to direct; if it's an amazing script, he'll make it work amazingly, and with the Norse myths to work with we think he practically couldn't fail. (But could, like, all of the other directors above be on consulting status or something? Please? This is our fantasy world in which the perfect Ragnarok movie is getting made, so we can do that, right?)

As for that script that needs to be awesome, there are a lot of amazing writers out there who have done excellent treatments for the screen, but since this is our fantasy world and we get to do what we want, we're probably writing this. Screenwriting isn't my area of expertise, but for this, I would learn. (Alternatively, Neil Gaiman plz? Can he be on our Fantasy Filmmaking team, too?)

And speaking of writing - where would you begin a movie about Ragnarok? Does it start with the eve of the battle itself, or with the death of Baldur, or with the long-ago prophecies of the voelva? It should probably include everything that has a future impact on the battle, like the binding of the children of Loki and the courtship of Gerd, but that's a whole lot of stuff happening. Eff, guys, we may have to go trilogy with this.

Stay tuned for tomorrow, when we talk about film scores and music, but in the meantime - what do you guys think? Any directors that are super perfect fits that we didn't think of, or any disagreements with our list up there? Remember, we want to make this the best imaginary movie it can possibly be, so don't be shy.