Sword Play, Foul Weather & Good vs. Bad Knights

It was no easy task bringing Sir Walter Scott’s sweeping 1819 novel “Ivanhoe” to the small screen.

The ambitious six-hour miniseries, premiering Sunday on A&E;, was a mammoth undertaking. “It was like making three movies,” says producer Jeremy Gwilt.

“Ivanhoe” was shot over five months last year in numerous locations in England and Scotland. Not only did the cast and crew battle the elements, the actors also had to learn to ride, joust and handle a sword convincingly.

“It was grueling,” says Steven Waddington (“The Last of the Mohicans,” “Carrington”), who plays the title role.

The actors, quips Gwilt, “really suffered for their art. But they were all terrific people. They really pulled together.”

Produced by A&E; and the BBC, which scored a great success last year with the Jane Austen miniseries “Pride and Prejudice,” the swashbuckling epic is set during 12th century England and focuses on Richard the Lionheart’s return from the Crusades to fight against factions who are loyal to his treacherous brother John.

Waddington’s Wilfred of Ivanhoe is a gallant, honorable Saxon knight who is loyal to Richard (Rory Edwards). He is trying to regain his honor after having been unjustly accused of betraying Richard during the Crusades.

Ciaran Hinds (“Persuasion”) also stars as the powerful, arrogant knight templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, who actually betrayed Richard and is now aligned with John (Ralph Brown). Both Ivanhoe and de Bois-Guilbert fall under the spell of the beautiful and kind Jewish healer Rebecca (Susan Lynch). Ivanhoe, though, is betrothed to his childhood sweetheart, the radiant Rowena (Victoria Smurfit).

Robert Taylor, Joan Fontaine and Elizabeth Taylor starred in the Oscar-nominated 1952 film version, and Anthony Andrews headlined CBS’ three-hour adaptation in 1982.

The extreme weather conditions caused havoc with the production. Last May, shooting had to be canceled in a remote valley in Northumberland, England, because of a sudden snowstorm.

“We had to reschedule and came back to it three weeks later,” Gwilt says. “That day we got rained off. A couple of days later there was too much mist around.”

But during the tournament sequences, the actors were wilting from the heat. “They had to dress in the real stuff,” Gwilt says. “They were wearing thick chain mail and they have velvet on top of that and wigs and, in some cases, beards.”

The performers were put through their paces by the sword master and horse master who worked on the feature films “Braveheart” and “First Knight.”

One of the reasons Waddington took the role of Ivanhoe was the physical aspects of the part. “I had done a little riding in ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and they retrained me to ride again. I did a lot of my own stunts. All the horse riding stuff was me, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and the sword stuff.”

Waddington and Hinds rehearsed extensively for the climatic combat sequence in which Ivanhoe and de Bois-Guilbert battle to the death with broad swords. “It was wonderful,” Waddington says with enthusiasm at the memory.

“It’s a very carefully choreographed sequence,” adds Gwilt. “We shot with several cameras to get the best coverage over several days.”

Gwilt had read Scott’s novel many years ago, “and it was one of those things that stuck in my mind.” He believed “Ivanhoe” needed to be told in a minimum of six hours because “the ideas Sir Walter Scott plays around with in the novel have never really been properly developed.”

Though a “great admirer of what the Hollywood script department did in 1952” with the original movie, it was rendered “a very simple love story,” he says. “It was skating the issue of anti-Semitism and so on, which is quite strong in the book.”

None of the other adaptations, Gwilt says, captured the complexity of de Bois-Guilbert’s “passion.” In A&E;’s version, de Bois-Guilbert redeems himself when he falls in love with Rebecca.

At the outset, Hinds says, de Bois-Guilbert is “pretty mean, uncouth, brutal and arrogant. He has a hatred of Jews, a hatred of Saxons and he doesn’t have much respect for John. He uses Rebecca to get at Ivanhoe and then, slowly, her natural humanity works on him.”

Gwilt acknowledges there are many weaknesses dramatically in Scott’s novel. “It’s a 570-page novel, and [for] 105 pages of the novel, Ivanhoe isn’t even mentioned by name,” he says. “What Scott could have done with, really, is a good script editor.”

Even in this adaptation, Ivanhoe spends a lot of time nursing his wounds. “It was difficult being a hero and being injured in jousting and spending a lot of time out of action,” Waddington says. “He doesn’t instigate a lot of things until the very end.”

Still, Gwilt believes they have improved upon the novel’s shortcomings. “We have invented parts of the narrative and strengthened it. We have created opportunities for Ivanhoe and Rebecca and Ivanhoe and Rowena which perhaps don’t exist in the novel and increased the intensity of the characters.”

Part 1 of “Ivanhoe” airs Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m.; Part 2 airs Monday at 6 and 10 p.m.; Part 3 airs Tuesday at 6 and 10 p.m., on A&E.; The first three hours repeat Friday at 6 and 10 p.m. and the final three hours repeat Saturday at 6 and 10 p.m.