Tales From Development Hell (19 page)

Nine hundred years after the First Crusade, another began: a campaign by Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Paul Verhoeven, collaborators on the worldwide sci-fi hit
Total Recall,
to make an epic movie set during this bloody chapter of history. Part
Spartacus,
part
Conan the Barbarian, Crusade
was to star Schwarzenegger, then the world’s biggest box office star, as Hagen, a thief-turned-slave who winds up joining the Christian army to free Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1095, only to discover that each of the rival faiths have more than religious reasons for waging holy war. As Verhoeven recalls of the project’s origins: “We were sitting outside Arnold’s trailer in Mexico City at Churubusco Studios, while we were shooting
Total Recall,
and he started to talk about a script he had once read about the Crusades. He said it wasn’t a good script, but he really liked the idea so much, to make a movie about the Crusades. And it was also one of my favourite times in history.” Verhoeven had read a great deal about the period while still living in Holland, and even though he had discussed the possibility of a film with his regular screenwriting collaborator, Gerard Soeteman, he did not think they would ever get such a project financed. “But then, when Arnold mentioned it, I said, ‘Well, that’s very interesting, I think I know exactly who the writer for that would be,’ because by then I had met Walon Green.”

Born in Baltimore in 1936, Green had begun his screenwriting career as co-writer (with director Sam Peckinpah) on the bloodthirsty western
The Wild Bunch.
His first collaboration with Verhoeven was an unrealised adaptation of
Women
by Charles Bukowski; this was followed by a script for what became Disney’s
Dinosaur,
which Verhoeven originally planned to direct using a
combination of Phil Tippett’s ‘stop motion’ effects and Dennis Muren’s CGI. Says Verhoeven, “I thought Walon was a great writer, and I got along with him very very well. He reminded me of my Dutch screenwriter, Gerard Soeteman, in that he’s very well read, and he knows a lot about politics and history, and he has a good take on the politics of the Crusades. He seemed to be the perfect candidate for
Crusade.
When I discussed it with Walon,” he adds, “he was immediately enthusiastic.” Mario Kassar and Andrew G Vajna, whose Carolco pictures had bankrolled
Total Recall,
paid Green to develop a script, which they hoped would reunite their two biggest stars, Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, for a profitable venture into history.

Green’s first draft of
Crusade
opens in France as Hagen, a cynical thief in the employ of Count Emmich of Bascarat, is caught robbing an abbey, and brought before the Abbot. Sentenced to hang, he finds himself in jail with a Jewish snake oil salesman named Aron (‘Ari’), also sentenced to hang for using the occasion of a visit by Pope Urban II to sell fake cure-alls to the locals. Ari explains that Hagen’s booty of gold and silver is all very well, but religious artefacts — the tooth of a saint, the finger-bone of John the Baptist, a fragment of the holy cross — are where the ‘real’ money is. Upon hearing that the Pope is always on the lookout for signs from God, Hagen burns a huge cross into his back, thereby tricking the holy fools (including Bishop Adhémar, the Crusade’s spiritual leader) into thinking it is a stigmata-like symbol of his piety, and so engineering his emancipation. (This scene may have been inspired by the ‘miracle of the lance’: Provençal peasant Peter Bartholomew, claiming to have had a vision of Christ and St Andrew in which they told him that the lance used to pierce Christ’s side was buried beneath the high altar of St Peter’s Church, was allowed to supervise the digging, and the lance was duly found. Although the crusading army’s leaders were sceptical that a miracle had occurred, many of the Crusaders were convinced, and they took advantage of the boost in morale to launch a last-ditch attempt to break the siege of Antioch.)

Released from his bonds, and with Ari in tow, Hagen is dispatched to the Holy Land, where his first action is to rescue a Jewish wedding party from a merciless attack led by Emmich. “We wanted to be honest to history, and as close to what we think happened at that time, and were the motives of the time,” says Verhoeven. “And also to point out that the Crusades started out with persecuting the Jews. The moment they [the Crusaders] go on the road, they think, ‘These are the killers of God, the theocides, so let’s kill them first.’ That was all acknowledged in the script.” Emmich responds
to Hagen’s interference by challenging him to a duel in which Emmich is defeated, and scarred for life. Adding insult to injury, Robert, Duke of Normandy, punishes Emmich for his unprovoked attack, and rewards Hagen for his heroics by inviting him to march in his command. Emmich, vowing vengeance, sells Hagen into slavery in Jaffa, where he is rescued from a eunuch’s fate by Ari, now posing as a Muslim in the service of local Emir Ibn Khaldun, commander of Jerusalem’s forces. The Emir, meanwhile, is trying to marry his beautiful daughter Leila to a Muslim fundamentalist, Djarvat, whose army her father is eager to use to bolster his own. Although she and Hagen have a growing attraction — albeit from a distance both physical and social — and she is suspicious of Djarvat’s motives, Leila agrees to go along with the arranged marriage.

When Djarvat’s true nature as a bloodthirsty warmonger is revealed, Ibn Khaldun calls off the wedding, but Djarvat kidnaps Leila and demands the Emir’s obeisance in return for his daughter’s life. Hagen manages to rescue Leila, but after they consummate their relationship, she is captured again, this time by Emmich. Emmich is about to rape her when the alarm is sounded — Muslims are approaching the encampment under a flag of truce, and ‘Hagen of the Miraculous Cross’ is with them! Ibn Khaldun offers peace in return for his daughter, and a truce is agreed between the Muslims and Christians. Having brokered Leila’s rescue, Hagen then feels betrayed when Ibn Khaldun sends her away and, following Emmich’s murder of Ibn Khaldun, he finds himself on the side of the Crusaders in the subsequent battle.

When the Christians are victorious, the defeated Djarvat offers Emmich a deal: he will allow Emmich to acquire the holiest relic of all — a fragment of the cross on which Christ was crucified — if he is spared and allowed to control the Muslims who survive the slaughter to come. Emmich agrees, on one condition: he wants Leila too, “to wed and bed the true love of Hagen of the cross while he watches and dies.” Djarvat’s attempt to kidnap Leila is frustrated by Hagen and Ari, but the sepulchre containing the Holy Cross is set on fire — and only Hagen can save it. Hagen rushes in, and emerges from the smoke and flames carrying the cross on his back — a spectacle which brings his destiny full circle, and has Emmich’s men falling to their knees. Hagen seizes the chance to kill Emmich, and escape with the holiest of relics and his beloved Leila. At the end, disgusted by the death and destruction unleashed in the name of one god or another, Hagen turns his back on the Crusaders, and places the true cross in the hands of monks who vow never to reveal its location. According to a closing caption, it has never been found.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, coming as it does from the co-writer of
The Wild Bunch,
the script is as bloodthirsty as it is scatological. At one point, Hagen is bound, sewn into the rotting carcass of a donkey and set upon by hungry hyenas. He narrowly escapes the fate of a eunuch — namely, having his genitalia cleanly severed, the wound cauterised and compressed with a mixture of tar and fresh cow dung. An enemy is killed by having a trident thrown through his face. In a climactic scene, Emmich is severed in two by Hagen’s sword, his legs and lower body remaining on his fleeing horse while his upper body falls to the ground. It’s hardly PG-rated stuff. Blood and guts, carnage and chaos are seldom far from the screen, a tendency which might have phased lesser filmmakers, but not the taboo-breaking, envelope-pushing director of such ultra-violent films as
Robocop
and
Total Recall,
who later courted a different kind of controversy with
Basic Instinct
and
Showgirls.

“There are touches of lightness and romanticism and there are often funny scenes,” Verhoeven says of
Crusade,
“but it’s not a happy story. It’s cruel and it’s violent — my kind of ultra-violence that I’ve displayed in many movies — but there is also a lightness and tenderness, and I think with Arnold it would have worked for an audience. And the fact that it wasn’t made had nothing to do with the disbelief of the producer or anyone else that this movie, with Arnold as a Crusader and an honest political touch, would not reach its audience — we all felt that we would.”

The political viewpoint of Green’s script was certainly intriguing, if not groundbreaking. Although it does not contextualise the period in historical or epochal terms — it does not, for instance, open with a caption explaining what the Crusades were all about — there are political elements to both the story and the characters. The fictional Emmich and his cousin Waldemar are corrupt opportunists, using a Papally-sanctioned religious crusade as an excuse to rape and pillage — vividly illustrated by the attack on the Jewish wedding party, launched on the pretext of having them contribute to the war effort. Pope Urban II, for his part, seems more concerned with the geographic incursions made by the Muslim Empire than the souls lost to Islam as a result. Robert of Flanders, commander of the Papal guard, is nobler, decreeing that pillage or violence against any but the enemy will be punishable by death. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the knights leading the Crusade, is as noble as his counterpart Ibn Khaldun, who believes that Christians, Jews and Muslims are fundamentally the same, and hopes that peace may be forged between the disparate religions. Khaldun’s new ally, Djarvat, seeks no such accord; he wishes to drive the infidels from the Holy Land as surely as the Crusaders
wish to wipe worshippers of Allah from the face of the Earth with the rallying cry of “Convert or die!”

“It was always supposed to be a movie for Arnold,” says Verhoeven, “so we were all very much aware what kind of movie we had to make. I knew it would have a certain grandeur, also perhaps a little bit of hyper-reality, but on the other hand we wanted to have the historical events be completely correct, and the political point of view — the evil side of the Crusades, which is undoubtedly there. We wanted to make clear that this was not a great endeavour; that it was all cheating by the Pope, who basically lured all these fighting nobles from France so they could die somewhere else, instead of having trouble with them! That’s what most historians think about Urban II. On the other hand, there was this idiotic thinking in Christian religion that Jerusalem should be in Christian hands, for some unclear reason. Even today people think the city should be part of Christianity — [a view] still subsidised by a lot of fundamentalists in the United States.” Before the Crusades, he adds, there was no persecution based on religion in Jerusalem: “Arabs, Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Jewry were all accepted. There was just this evil thought of the Church that because Jesus had lived there, or spent a couple of weeks there, and got killed, that this belonged to Christianity — an even more absurd claim than saying that God promised it to the Jewish population. But as Gore Vidal pointed out, ‘God is not a real estate dealer’.”

Despite the script’s obvious strengths, Verhoeven was not entirely satisfied with the early drafts, and
Total Recall
co-writer Gary Goldman was called in to rework it. “They came up with a draft or two, and for some reason Paul wasn’t excited about it,” says Goldman. “I think he more or less decided there was something wrong with it, or it wasn’t good enough for him to be ready to make, so he kind of lost interest in it. He showed it to me at around that time and I remember thinking it was very good, and I told him so, and he thought I was an idiot for liking it.” Goldman describes Green’s draft as “a picaresque tale about a roguish serf who gets caught stealing, and the only we to get out of being hanged is to fake a miracle. He cynically endorses the Crusade, and shows the venality of all the European lords who were jockeying for power. It was a very good screenplay,” he adds. “He has a wonderful feeling for period. It was well written; filled with wonderful ideas. It was a great story, and very cynical — a serious historical epic tailored to Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Moreover, Goldman believes it was a subversive script, hiding an intelligent film in the guise of an action movie, allowing Verhoeven to have his cake and eat it — a trick they had already pulled off with
Total Recall,
in which the audience gets to enjoy an action-packed Arnie movie despite the fact that it takes place almost entirely inside the putative hero’s head. “We presented it in the way of
Total Recall,”
Verhoeven confirms, “so you can be looking at this movie completely in a non-involved way, just Arnold and adventure: he gets caged, he nearly gets castrated, he finds a girl — this beautiful Arab princess — and he has to kill the bad guys, and then he decides that the best part of life would be to be on his farm with his Arab wife. You could see it on that level. But there were also these other levels: the anti-Semitism, the anti-Arab thinking, prejudices left and right.

“You could say the movie was also pro-Arab, or certainly not anti-Arab — there are bad Christians and good Christians, bad Arabs and good Arabs, but most of the Arabs seem to be okay, so it doesn’t fit into this [attitude of] looking at Arabs as evil people. It wasn’t the Arabs that persecuted the Jews, it was the Christians, with a couple of thousand years of anti-Semitic thinking. In the year 1000 this was common thinking. Even the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, are permeated by anti-Semitic thinking. So I think we wanted to express that without hitting it hard.” Goldman recalls that the script was an indictment of the Crusades specifically, but, more generally “it was an anti-war statement, basically saying that the Christians had no business going there. That’s not how Hollywood would do it,” he concludes, “but at Carolco we were free to do what we wanted.” Verhoeven, for his part, wanted to do for the Crusades what Oliver Stone, among others, had done for Vietnam, and revisionist Westerns had done for the ignoble conquest of the American West. “If you see other movies about the Crusades,” he explains, “Christianity is saving the world in Jerusalem, and there is this absolute claim of Christianity that that city should be their property. So for the last four hundred years they have desperately tried to get it, and [they believe] that if it’s not to be in Christian hands, at least it has to be fully in Jewish hands.”