ERIK THE VIKING
The Director’s Son‘s Cut.

The Origin of the Film
The film Erik The Viking is based on a children’s book of the same name that I wrote for my son Bill in 1984.
I’d written a book of Fairy Tales for my daughter Sally when she was five, so I thought I ought to do the same for Bill. But he said he wanted a continuous story, so I constructed a string of stories around the adventures of a band of Viking warriors who set off in search of the Land Where The Sun Goes At Night.
I’d read some of the Icelandic Sagas way back when we were making the Monty Python TV series (see Njaal’s Saga in the thirds series), but I’d been surprised that they weren’t more full of magic and monsters. Instead they tend to be fascinating (but rather pedestrian) accounts of which family moved into which valley and who murdered who as a result. Scarcely any magic at all. So I decided to construct my own version of the Sagas - more in line with how I’d expected them to be.
The film doesn’t follow the stories in the book, although some do appear (in different forms), and the aim of Erik’s quest is no longer to find the Land Where The Sun Goes At Night. Instead, Erik is a Viking who is disillusioned with the life of raping and pillaging - “where does it get us?” he asks his grandfather.
He discovers that he is living in the Age of Ragnorok, when Fenrir the Wolf has swallowed the Sun. It is an axe-age, a sword-age, when brother will fight against brother until the world will finally be destroyed - unless he can cross the Bi-Frost the Rainbow Bridge, and go to Valhalla to wake the gods.

How This DVD Is Different from the Original Film
When the film of Erik The Viking came out in 1989 I was not at all happy with it. With the Monty Python movies, The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, I’d been a hands-on editor, and we’d spent many months re-cutting and getting the comedy to work. With Erik the Viking I didn’t get involved in the editing until quite late in the process, and then I discovered - to my horror - that we were locked into a London release that was sooner than I’d expected. As a result there simply was not enough time to experiment with the cut and hone the comedy.
Even worse, I learnt that in the US they’d already made 250 prints and couldn’t release the slightly shorter version that we produced for the UK.
When I was doing the Director’s Commentary for this DVD I happened to mention that I’d like to get my hands on the film again and re-edit it, and Alex Agran, who has produced this DVD for Arrow Films, very generously volunteered to fund a re-edit.
The bulk of the re-edit has been done by my son, Bill Jones, for whom the stories were originally written. He has re-organized the order of the scenes and managed to produce a film that now lasts 77mins instead of 100mins, and is all the better for it.
The sound has also been immeasurably improved by Andre Jacquemin, who has worked on most of the Python films and records. The sequence of the Dragon of the North Sea, for example, has been re-dubbed and now, I think, carries a lot more impact. Likewise, the appalling ‘singing’ on Hy-Brazil has also been augmented and now starts to make me laugh.

I’ve always felt there was a better film in here, waiting to get out, and this is, I believe, as near as we can get. Unfortunately it can only exist on DVD since all the original material has been lost, and we were unable to choose other takes or extend shots.

I hope you enjoy it.

Terry Jones

(Erik The Viking - The Director's Son's Cut will be available in the US December 4th, 2007)