Filming Prehistory: Getting it Right

Films set in prehistory are few and far between and often by no means based on scientific insights. In this episode of the EXARC Show our new host Noah Melton chats with filmmaker Maarten Peels about what he deems essential for a truthful depiction of life in the upper Paleolithic. In Maarten's short film De Poten van de Bizon (The Bison’s Legs), released in 2024, he introduces his characters as human beings interested in music and art rather than hunting and violence. Maarten recounts the many aspects that informed the process of making this film. He also lifts the veil on a new movie he is working on which, again, aims to portray the connection between people and nature during the prehistoric era in a more profound way.

Transcript

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You're listening to the EXARC Show run by EXARC, the International Society for Experimental Archaeology, Open-Air Museums, Ancient and Traditional Technology and Heritage Interpretation.  

Noah: Welcome to the EXARC Show. My name is Noah Melton, and today we are joined by an EXARC specialist, Maarten Peels. He's a philosopher and a filmmaker from Utrecht in the Netherlands, and he recently directed a film about prehistoric Europe, inspired by the Chauvet Cave and the Hohle Fels flute. Hi Martin, how's it going?

Maarten: Hi, good to be here.

Noah: Great. I just wanted to start us off by talking a bit about your background. You did your bachelor's and your master's in philosophy, specifically applied ethics. That's quite interesting for someone who's coming into the realm of prehistoric archaeology and also filmmaking. How did you gain your interest in prehistoric Europe and the medium?

Maarten: Yeah, so, I went to Utrecht University. As you say, I did philosophy. I always had this curiosity about prehistory. I remember in ‘middelbare school’, in high school, we would get history lessons and then you had a book of a hundred pages about world history, and only the first two pages would be about prehistoric life. But it's hundreds of thousands of years of the human past. It's such a long period. Why does it only get two pages? I’d be very curious about that. At some point I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, very popular book. Definitely the spark at some point came when I saw the Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog, which is about Chauvet Cave and the flute from Hohle Fels. That just fascinated me so deeply, and especially this one drawing he highlights at some point, the bison with seven or eight legs, which became the subject of my film. He says, in the typical Werner Herzog film, ‘it seems the maker wanted to suggest movement, like a type of proto cinema’. That just really caught me, that just really sparked my curiosity thinking what was the thought process behind that drawing? Then I read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow and when I read that, I had the feeling like, okay, this is a kind of world I can bring to life in the cinema. I decided I'm gonna devote my time to making a film.

Noah: It's certainly a very interesting story of how you came to this, and I'd say certainly with your goals of realising… both that book, but also the concept of Werner Herzog, you came out with quite a good outcome. The film is honestly so fascinating. I would recommend everyone listening to this to go and watch the film immediately, maybe even pause the podcast. I wanted to ask you, your very first film, De Poten van de Bison, came out late 2024. How was the experience of creating it and how has the reception been, in your opinion?

Maarten: The experience to make it was fantastic, honestly. It was one of the most fun things I've ever done. I did about a year and a half of preparation before the days of shooting. We had five days of shooting in May of 2024. And then during the six months after I did the editing - somebody helped me with the editing and the sound design. It took plenty of time to get to a good result. It was so much fun, the process of making it! I remember when I started out thinking, okay, I wanna make a movie and I'd made short films before with friends, it's always been a hobby, ever since I was like 10 years old. But I realised this is gonna be the first serious film I make. It's gonna be way more complicated than just go somewhere with some friends and get the camera rolling. Luckily, I do have some friends that have worked professionally in the film world, they gave me a lot of advice. Freek Donkers is a very good friend of mine. He works for public television now. And I realised right from the start, okay, I gotta do a thousand things before we can actually start rolling, literally hundreds of little things that need to be done.

In the meantime I was studying, so how do I get that stuff going? I would have the rule to try and do something at least every day. At least try to do one little thing each day. And that could be writing an email or just reading a paper. Once a week I would take a bit longer, let's say go to a forest and find some shooting locations or meet up with an archaeologist, try to find an actor. I would just keep it going, have lots of little steps towards the final realisation. There's been so many adventures setting that up and so many valuable lessons and fun people I met. It's been a great process, really fun process. Reception's been really good. I haven't gotten into any sort of big or famous film festivals. I got to one small one in Austria that's gonna be this October, and maybe there's one in France in the Peche Merle Centre. I still need to get the results from that. But generally the archaeologists were very enthusiastic.

They thought the film was beautiful and liked the atmosphere and engaged with it in a way that they appreciated my effort to make a scientifically accurate film. The response would be like, you did a lot of stuff really good and maybe one or two points that happened here they’re not accurate or don't match up with my research. But yeah, the reception has been great. I made the film also as a business card or like a proof of concept for the next film I'm gonna make. And in that sense, it's working. It's really working. Yeah.

Noah: That sounds great. Of course, making a film that's no small feat. Even if you haven't made it to the quote unquote big film festivals, I'd say it's quite an accomplishment. And of course, since the film you've been on a big trip around Europe visiting all these different archaeologists, we'll talk about that in just a bit. But first, a bit more about the film, De Bison, I find it's quite fascinating in how it approaches an aspect of prehistoric life which is both familiar to us in the modern day, but also is almost invisible, realistically, in the archaeological record, specifically that being art. As you mentioned before, the cave art of Chauvet and the Hohle Fels flute, those were both inspirations for your film. But what sort of processes went through your mind in attempting to portray actual music and poetry in prehistoric Europe?

Maarten: Concerning music and poetry I had this one thought process. We find evidence of music, we don't find the tunes, but we know there's flutes and very likely people also had drums and other things made of wood and leather that we don't find. The thing with the music, which kind of gets me as much as the paintings, is that by reconstructing one of those flutes, for example, one made by Wulf Hein for example, with Anna Friederike Potengowski, they made reconstructions of these flutes. We actually used a recording of one of these reconstructions in the film, which was very nice that we were able to use that. The fascinating thing there is that you don't know which tunes they played, but you do know the notes and in a sense, you can then directly hear what people heard back then because we have the same audio-sensory capabilities. I figured, you don't know exactly what happened, but with the right scientific approach, you can get closer to what it was like back then. There's a lot of filmmakers in the past, they've put science a bit in the background of the whole making process. You got films like One Million Years BC, very famous, but it also has like dinosaurs and these models in fur bikinis. It doesn't make sense because they're making the movie with more of a focus on making money or selling this interesting story or whatever. But I really wanted to take it more strictly. I felt that by incorporating science very closely, like I don't want anything that science says wasn't in a certain era. I think by doing that you get a very coherent world building. The world that appears on the screen is gonna be more immersive. So the music is part of that. Music was part of people's life back then and if you try and incorporate that the right way, then the world's gonna be more complete and more interesting to watch.

And concerning poetry I had this line of thought. There's a lot of discussion about what were the linguistic capabilities of people, let's say, 35,000 years ago, which is when the film is set. I've spoken to archaeologists that believe people only had the most basic sort of signalling capabilities, very simple use of language. Other people thinking that they must have had linguistic capabilities as good as ours. It's hard to say because all we can find is like the skeletons and reading the science on objects it's pretty difficult. But my line of reasoning was, and this is not as a scientist, but more as as an artist or maybe a philosopher: if they had paintings and they had music, they must have also had poetry. It's a line of reasoning you can give some doubt, but if you consider the basic arts that we have now, that is sort of how I got there. That's how there came to be a poem in the film, partly because of this line of reasoning and partly because I thought it would really enhance the mood of what I wanted to portray, this sort of peaceful, spiritual mood. As a fun fact the poem that ended up in the film, it's actually written by the actor that's reciting it. He actually wrote it himself. He came to me with a couple of poems when I said I wanted to put one in the film and it just really fit very well with what we wanted to do.

Noah: That's really cool. You just talked a bit about how past prehistoric films…, how people have been portrayed, how life in the Stone Age has been portrayed in filmmaking so far. You yourself have written an essay on the epistemology of prehistoric filmmaking. One idea that you bring in there is the observation that in many films of prehistoric Europe that have come so far, there's a large focus on violence in prehistoric societies and that you find it actually quite important to try to counter this narrative. For example, in your film, not only do you exclude this whole idea of violence, but in some ways you turn it on its head in focusing on the idea of bringing the inanimate, the dead cave painting or the dead bison to life through art and through, in general general art, music, et cetera. Was this a conscious, thematic decision on your part, or did this naturally derive from the theoretical approach you had entering this?

Maarten: Right, I really like the analysis. I haven't thought about it exactly the way you formulate it here. I was making the film and I thought, okay, I want it to be peaceful, I wanted to diverge from those cliches of violence. To rest at that point for one bit I undertook it as this side project to actually watch every Stone Age film that's ever been made. It's a bit of a side project… sometimes it was a very tough watch. There's been around 30 films made since the start of cinema, depending on how you count. The very first is from 1912, made by DW Griffith. It's called Man's Genesis, actually a very interesting film.

But some of those 30 films, they're really obscure, they're just awful to watch. I wouldn't actually recommend watching most of them, but I did discover some interesting things, and that is that each and every one, every single one has violence as a theme. There's no exception except for my short film, De Poten van de Bison, the Bison's Legs. I would also say that in maybe 80% of the films that's been made, women get molested, dragged into caves or otherwise molested. So that's a theme as well. I thought, it's just not necessary that you tell a story that's so much focused on violence but I was also thinking, it cannot be just an idyllic scene, an idyllic story. There's got to be some sort of grim part of it as well. That came to me…, how I wanted to fill that in at some point, through the Rangers of the Dutch national Forestry Association association (Staatsbosbeheer) that helped with the production. At some point we had this exploratory walk in the nature reserve where we're gonna film, de Maashorst, in the neighbourhood of Uden in Noord-Brabant. They told me they had this carcass, or at least, like a skeleton lying somewhere that was from a bison they had to shoot around two years before, that was old and sick. When they shoot a bison or another large mammal, they usually take the skull, because people steal it, they want to leave a carcass as much as they can in the reserve and let it decompose naturally. It was a very gripping image, just seeing these bones lying around. A couple days later I was actually jogging, I was on a run and I figured that's gotta be in the story. It's gotta be in his dream. That's like an image of death that tells him his drawings are dead. It sort of came together in that way. And then later we came back again for a second walk to explore some other shooting locations and they said, oh, by the way, this time we actually recently had to shoot a bison. It was an old female bison and she was also old and sick. There's no predators there, so it was like a mercy shot. That was actually two weeks before we were there. And they said, it's in a very highly decomposing situation now, so you wanna film that? And I'm like, hell yeah, I wanna film that. And it became this very visceral, very intense image of death, in that sense, with all the maggots and stuff, it was all there. In that way, there was this image of death, which is naturally part of daily life back then as well, without showing the violence.

For my next film, which we're gonna talk a bit about later, I'm actually gonna incorporate a tiny bit of violence. There's this sort of synthesis that's happening in my head right now that you gotta have a bit, but the right kind. In terms of De Poten van de Bison film, my line of thinking was that, in a person's life, there's gonna be days that are peaceful and beautiful and idyllic. I have days that are beautiful and peaceful and idyllic. I have bad days. I have experienced days with some violence, I guess less than maybe in the past on average. But my point was that it should be scientifically valid, so to speak, to show at least one day in a person's life where there's no mortal violence happening. No mortal fight with your enemies or with wild animals. That's in a sense realistic because we're not showing life on average across a time span of thousands of years, we're showing a slice of time. There's a choice you can make in the subject of that slice of time. You can show a person's fight with his enemy, or you could follow a shaman on a spiritual quest. That was the choice I made.

Noah: Well, I think it was a very good choice in the end for the film. That's the thing that kept coming back to me during the film in comparison to many other, both historical films, but especially Stone Age films, how much you bring in the humanity of the characters. You could really imagine them being someone today because functionally they were of the same species. As you said we most likely have many more shared experiences than we might think. Of course, in your paper on the epistemology of prehistoric filmmaking - which is freely available on his website, so please go check it out - you also talk about, in the same vein, how many different factors influence the role of the filmmaker in creating an accurate piece. Really going further into the science communication realm of things. You mentioned before that the film is a proof of concept for your coming film, but would you even say perhaps that you're trying to set a new benchmark for prehistoric filmmaking through your work and through your writing?

Maarten: In the past there are films where people really took the science seriously and did it well. I think the film Alpha is from 2018 or 2019. They did a really good job of showing the clothing, the setting where people lived. The film is about the first human-dog or human-wolf friendship or relationship. They got the timing about that one right. They do show a bison cliff run, which if I'm not mistaken, did not happen in Europe. It was only a thing among native Americans, in North America. But apart from that, they did a really good job. People often cite Quest for Fire as a really good example. They took a couple of liberties with science, I think. Jean-Jacques Annaud, he took science very seriously, but took a couple of liberties to make this sort of large poetic picture. Also Out of Darkness, which is from 2022. They also really got it well with the outfits. They did a reconstructed language by a linguist, based on the Basque language. These films are kind of clever, but again, they’re all in this cliche still of violence. If I'm making a benchmark, I would say that there's just way more topics you can show in relation to the Stone Age that would work scientifically and would work well as a movie. I mean, you gotta have an interesting and entertaining film, of course, but there's just so many themes you can do. Given that there's only been made 30 films about this era, right? Just as a comparison, in terms of Western movies, there's around 4,000 Western movies made, which is insane to think. It's only a period of a hundred years or something, so, I want to broaden what's possible in terms of storytelling about the era.

Noah: I further wanted to ask you, because you talked about how a lot of the preexisting films have had several issues, where even the most accurate ones have had a few points where they weren't necessarily the best. There is one aspect of prehistoric… not necessarily just filmmaking, but science communication in general, artistic representations, things like that, with regard to the ethnicity, or not so much the ethnicity as the skin colour of prehistoric Europeans, that becomes a bit of a hot topic. You go with more tanned actors for your film itself. What was your thought process behind this and how does this factor in into your idea for more accurate prehistoric filmmaking?

Maarten: Right, we talked about this on the phone before. I don't think we should be squeamish about this topic and the representation of people back then. For me, the question is this simple: it's that I read in a paper about what the probable skin colour was of people in the Paleolithic and that's what I am gonna portray. So I remember this one paper - I forget the author's name but we can look it up later - I remember just the sentence where he writes ‘the skin colour was dark but not maximally dark’. Okay, then you get people from let's say, central Africa that have like very darkened skins and you got people from more Mediterranean areas that have light brown…. I got a bit in between and people tell me that I'm just got to do it. A lot of films in the past though they've just shown white people. There's the film Iceman about Ötzi and they got white people to act in that. I think that was before it was known or certain that in fact Ötzi had probably a bit more of a darkened skin. I visited the Ötzi museum that was the Archaeological Museum of South Tirol, if I remember the full name correctly, anyway the museum where Ötzi is housed, and the guide there told me that the reconstruction they have right now there, it's still with a white skin. I think it was made by the two brothers that make all the reconstructions, I forget their names, and he said, we know we would have to update it, but we're not actually sure how dark it's gonna be. We just know it's dark and people are working on it.

Interestingly, I showed my film to quite a few archaeologists and some people thought that the actors I had there were not dark enough. One of the actors is from Morocco and one is a descendant from people from Pakistan. One thing about making De Poten van de Bison was that I was happy to find actors at all. The film came out well, I'm proud of what happened, but when I was gathering the casting crew, I was happy to find people at all. The next film's gonna be called The Eternal Seasons, that's the name right now. I met a French documentary maker who gave me some advice on the casting process, because she had made documentaries for French television. She said, if you want to find the people with the right type of face and the right type of skin colour, probably best people from India or descended from people from India, so that's what I'm gonna try. I might try and look for actors in England, because there's a large Indian sub-community there and a large acting tradition. So I reckon I’ve got statistically a bit more chance there. That's just briefly my approach.

Noah: It's probably a good way of going forward with it. The next question: taking into account already your background and then the things you've said in your theoretical writing on the epistemology, your work really seems to operate at the intersection of many different fields. How would you yourself characterise your projects?

Maarten: Yeah. So it's on the intersection of archaeology, there's a bit of geology in there for the background. There's philosophy of science, just determining what's true and what's not true. There's anthropology, there's the filmmaking side of course, the whole creative side. I would say that my education helps with this. If you're doing academic philosophy, during the master's you specialise but during the bachelor's it's very broad. You'd get philosophy of science, but also about politics, you get it about ethics, you get it about all different sorts of philosophers and things. And my experience, it was great. Each seminar, each paper I read, it would give me this new way of thinking. I really like the interdisciplinary approach that that facilitates. Once you get to the master’s, you're probably diving into this very specific academic stream. And to me, that was in a sense, problematic. I like broadening my horizon and during the master’s can be the opposite. So yeah, it's a very interdisciplinary project.

Noah: Cool. Now to move forward a bit from the film itself, let's talk a bit about what you've been doing ever since the film came out. Since September of last year, you've been travelling all across Europe on your ‘Grand Tour Préhistorique’, visiting sites and meeting experts in the field. Could you tell us a little bit about how your experience was on this journey?

Maarten: Well, this journey also was just amazing. I'd finished my master’s early in the summer of 2025. Then I'd been working a lot and saving up, bought an old Ford Mondeo and I got together all my stuff and went on a big trip.

I got a tour past the big museums and some very interesting prehistoric sites. I emailed everybody I could find… also the EXARC network. Just a big shout out to you guys, because my project got shared around a lot in your network. And I had some very interesting meetings because of it and some people that are actively contributing to the project now, Markus Klek for example, great guy. I had so many great meetings. I first went to Schöningen, near the border of former East Germany, where the famous Neanderthal Spears had been found. And the excavation leader, Jordi Serangeli, I called him up and I was like, hey, can I come? And he said sure, where are you gonna stay? Yeah, I think I'm gonna just pitch a tent somewhere. He's like: a tent, you're crazy, you can stay over at my place, it's fine. People were so welcoming. I went on to the Czech Republic to Brno, where I met Neruda... I was at Vienna, the Naturhistorische Museum Wien, where Carolina Posch received me. I went to Slovenia, to Italy, to France, Spain, Germany again. People were very welcoming and very interested in the project, you know. I would go around and I would ask for scientific support and just a conversation to exchange some thoughts, like how do you translate science into public communication?

The things museums run into turn out to be similar to what I was doing. Museums, they have a whole pile of recent archaeological papers and they have some finds and somehow you have to make it into a story that appeals and what they do is they sometimes let go a bit of the certainty in order to make this engaging story. So if people go to a museum, they want to see a Neanderthal in clothes, they don't wanna see just skulls and these assorted bits of flint, like they did in the 1900s. It was Peter Neruda at the Moravian Museum who said ‘scientists construct their theories with arguments, but people don't come to museums for arguments, people come for a certain story’. That's kind of similar to what I'm doing, the value of making a prehistoric film is that it brings across just a load of information and it makes for an engaging story. It brings to life this era and this way of living that otherwise just remains on paper. Things on paper are interesting, but it gets this broader appeal.

But yeah, the experience of the trip, it was great. I didn’t have a lot of money, I was just living very simply. I stayed over at people. Like in Austria, I stayed over at a farmer's place for two weeks. I just drove to a farmer and was like, hey, can I stay here? And he is, sure, ‘ist mir egal’. It was fun, yeah, I can't wait to travel again. I'm working on getting an online job right now. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll have the first project, then I can go again.

Noah: That sounds quite the prehistoric odyssey, I'd say, more than a grand tour. You also mentioned already on this podcast and in your blog back in October that you have your second film that's currently being realised The Eternal Seasons. In that blog you mentioned the theme of the circle of life and perhaps covering the relationship between man and nature, in particular following a pregnant woman and a hunter going after his prey as a sort of duality or showing both ends of the cycle. Are you willing to share any more information about your coming project, have you developed this idea further since the blog post?

Maarten: Yes. Since the blog post, I've written the first version of the scenario, a description of the story and what's gonna happen in the story and also three more pages of scientific footnotes. I made this scenario to share around with all the archaeologists so that they can give some feedback and say ‘I'm not sure if that should be in there’, or ‘maybe you can add this’. It's a version that is meant to be improved upon. I expect in the coming year or something to have many new versions of it. So the story is about a pregnant woman. The idea of the circle of life is embodied by that. Nowadays you might say that having kids, it's this sort of choice, you might choose a new car or a hobby climbing, it's something you like doing, so you choose it. But it's a very deep biological drive within us. The whole thing about reproduction, it gets lost if you have a nine-to-five job and live in cities. It can be in the background, but if you're right in the middle of nature, if you're part of the everyday struggle for life and see the changing of the seasons happening all the time around you, it's very deeply connected. The idea of showing the connectedness between humans and nature, to me, it would be the perfect setting to portray that. The story follows a pregnant woman, at first her struggles to get pregnant at all. And then later the difficulties of the pregnancy, just like the biological stuff that happens there.

There's gonna be a hunting scene as well. I feel that, like you said, there's this sort of opposition happening there, these two sides of the same coin, right? There's a lot of ethnographic accounts, also it's described really well in the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kilmer. The idea of giving thanks for the life that you take. If a hunter kills an animal, he normally thanks the animal for the life he has taken, because now he can feed himself and his family. It's a life for a life. On, let's say, the reproductive side, where the hunter is the taker of life, the woman will be the giver of life. It's these sort of oppositions that I'm trying to put into the story. You got life, death, you got birth, youth, maturity and then old age and death. Those are the kind of themes I'm putting into the film. 

I don't want to give shape to the story all on my own. It's very much about the role of women in prehistory. There's been a lot of discussion about that. I think in France alone, in the last five years, three books just about that question alone have been written. I am actively looking for people that want to contribute to the story. I've had a really great meeting with a Dutch actress that had some very interesting suggestions to the plot. So far, women I'm talking to about this story… they really like it. They're quite enthusiastic about the idea of emphasising that aspect of femininity, of autonomy in reproduction. The point I emphasise in the scenario as well is that she actively chooses herself to have that child. It's not this external pressure. I'm not gonna say too much about the plot because it's still very early in development, but it's the sort of approach I take. I very strongly believe in co-creation, partly because I just don't know everything myself and partly because I think that would make for a richer and better film.

Noah: After having seen your previous film about five times I cannot wait to see what you come out with next. Of course, I understand if this is a bit of a difficult question to answer because you're still relatively early in the process of making your second film. But I was wondering: what is your plan once you've put out your second film and you've gone ahead, you've gotten the feedback from that. Do you have any idea of how you might continue from that point?

Maarten: Yeah, maybe first it's good to say something about the way to the next film because there's a lot that still needs to be done. My plan, if everything goes well, everything goes smoothly, you would have the first day of shooting in 2028. So that's two years from now. My friends in the film world tell me that's a realistic prospect. I'm going to work a lot on the scenario, during my travels. I'm gonna ask for more support, find shooting locations and then find a producer. The main thing is of course, the money. I'm hoping to get something like a hundred thousand euros, just as a long shot, just a rough estimate of something…, the kind of money I would need. Filmmaking is a very expensive thing. You gotta have the costumes, you gotta pay the people that work on there. You gotta have housing and food and transport. It's a lot of organisation. So if everything goes well in two years, we'd have the first day of shooting. Then several months of post-production and editing. And then maybe in 2028 or 2029, we'd have The Eternal Seasons in cinemas or maybe streaming services. I'm not sure yet. It's gonna be a long, long process.

After that, if it all works out well and the film turns out well, I'm hoping to keep on doing films. Definitely the historical periods really draw me in. There is this one topic I think would work really well in a movie… it's very different. It's, actually, the one Dutch pope we had, it's ‘paus’ Adrianus. He lived in the 15th-16th century. He was a very interesting guy. He was only pope for one year. And people think they killed him. It's a rumour, but I think that will be a very fun topic for a film.

I definitely would wanna do ancient Greek society. If I would turn into a successful filmmaker and I managed to move budgets and people, then I would continue making the historical stuff. There's one dream project, actually, I would really wanna do if I'd have millions and millions of dollars… I would do an epic Stone Age movie. I would do a Stone Age movie with a large gathering of tribes. Maybe something like that happened at Gunnersdorf or other places where you'd have 150 people, maybe 200 people. You got a large location with all the housing the people would need. That'd be an insane production. But if I'd have my dream project, that will be it.

Noah: It's also interesting to hear that clearly the Upper Palaeolithic is your, say, proverbial bread and butter. But you're not necessarily tied to it. You are interested in many other historical periods and prehistorical periods. It would certainly be interesting to see, because of course, if we're talking about ancient Greek history, for example, represented in film, is similar to the situation with prehistoric films. You have one very inaccurate movie that dominates the discourse, 300….

Maarten: Oh god, yeah...

Noah: So I think that could also be very interesting and, of course, the Odyssey. It could be very interesting to see your epistemological approach put in practice also with other periods.

Maarten: There's a work I'm reminded of… a book by the Canadian scholar, Kevin McGeough. He wrote a great book called Representations of Antiquity in Film, also got a chapter on prehistory. It's shaped a lot of my thinking about how to approach this whole thing. He writes about, for example, Roman movies from Hollywood that predominantly have this sort of political theme. It's always focusing on war and politics and those sort of things. There's of course a lot of, let's say, biblical movies about the Roman era, also about ancient Egypt. What really happens in the Roman movies is that the filmmakers project these contemporary American values on Romans. You often get this sort of liberalism or individualism projected onto these ancient societies, which wasn't part of sort of common Roman thinking or ethics at all.

I'm not sure where I got the metaphor, but somebody had a metaphor that people in older societies, they were more shaped like cookie dough, into a certain shape. You were part of a collective. That was very much the case in ancient Greek society. People were part of the ‘polis’ and you conformed, that was how things went. What I would show, from ancient Greek society, I wouldn't show something like 300 - oh God, that's such a bad movie… something like 300, it's a great example. You can almost take it as propaganda for how America operates in the Middle East. That's almost how people have interpreted it. I would go more for like the philosophers, the way they had discussions and how those kind of things went. And maybe the interaction between politics and philosophy. I would also be very interested in the religious aspect. You would almost never see that in films. You almost never see them performing the religious rituals or praying or going to the oracle of Delphi. Oracle of Delphi would be very interesting. You had these pilgrimages going to Athens, maybe people even using psychedelics doing those pilgrimages, would be very interesting.

I'm currently as a filmmaker, I think, in these sort of medium-sized budgets. If I would start on ancient Greek society, like a proof of concept on that era, I would go for a Greek gym, like a Greek gym, because of course gymming is very popular nowadays, and you have a philosophical discussion in a Greek gym, that would be perfect.

Noah: That's really cool. I really do hope that you'll get the funding to do this sort of stuff in the future, I know I would love it, but I'm also sure that there's a big market for it among both archaeologists but also just historically interested people, which makes up a very large portion of modern day society. So Maarten, that was a really interesting conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Maarten: Just if you're listening to this and you're thinking like, hey, it sounds like an interesting project, I'd wanna contribute in some way or another, I'm always looking for people sharing their views that wanna think about the story or the production. I'm also looking for artefact makers that would be interested in helping out. As I said, I'll be travelling, we could meet up and, who knows, just let me know. You can contact me through my website. Yeah, should be nice!

Noah: This has been a wonderful podcast with you, Maarten. I wanna say to the listeners one last thing. If you haven't watched the movie by now, go immediately onto his website. You hear me? And also, there's plenty of other things on there, his interesting blogs, the essay we talked a bit about, just plenty of food for thought if you're interested at all in this this topic.

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