Filming
Filming started at England's Shepperton Studios in October 1980, with Schwarzenegger, made up to look like Conan as a king in his old age, reading an excerpt from "The Nemedian Chronicles", which Howard had penned to introduce his Conan stories. This footage was initially intended to be a trailer, but Milius decided to use it as the opening sequence of the film, instead. According to Cobb, Laurentiis and Universal Pictures were concerned about Schwarzenegger's accent, so Milius compromised by moving the sequence to the end. Schwarzenegger trained with voice coach Robert Easton and with Milius in order to eliminate his accent, but their efforts proved to be unsuccessful, so the planned narration which was intended to begin with this scene was not included in the final film.
The initial location for principal photography was former Yugoslavia, but because of concerns over the country's stability after the death of its head of state, Josip Broz Tito, and the fact that the Yugoslavian film industry proved ill-equipped for large-scale film production, the producers elected to move the project to Spain, which was cheaper and where resources were more easily available. It took several months to relocate; the crew and equipment arrived in September, and filming started on January 7, 1981. The producers allocated $11 million for production in Spain, of which about $3 million were spent on building 49 sets. The construction workforce numbered from 50 to 200; artists from England, Italy, and Spain were also recruited.
A large warehouse 20 miles (32 km) outside Madrid served as the production's headquarters, and it also housed most of the interior sets for the Tower of Serpents and Doom's temple; a smaller warehouse was leased for other interior sets. The remaining interiors for the Tower of Serpents were constructed in an abandoned hangar at Torrejón Air Base. A full-scale, 40-foot (12 m) version of the tower was built in the hangar; this model was used to film Conan and his companions' climb up the structure.
The crew filmed several exterior scenes in the countryside near Madrid; the Cimmerian village was built in a forest near the Valsaín ski resort, south of Segovia. About one million pesetas ($12,084) worth of marble shavings were scattered on the ground to simulate snow. The Wheel of Pain scene took place in the province of Ávila.
Shooting in Valsaín, Segovia, on 23rd February was interrupted by the Civil Guard paramilitary police.
At the same time, other members of the Civil Guard and the Spanish Army were carrying the 23-F coup d'etat.
The shooting continued when the situation in Madrid became clearer.
Conan's encounter with the witch and Subotai was shot among the Ciudad Encantada rock formations in the province of Cuenca. Most outdoor scenes were shot in the province of Almería, which offered a semiarid climate, diverse terrain (deserts, beaches, mountains), and Roman and Moorish structures that could be adapted for many settings.
Conan's crucifixion was filmed in March 1981 among the sand dunes on the southeastern coast of Almería. The Tree of Woe was layers of plaster and Styrofoam applied onto a skeleton of wood and steel. It was mounted on a turntable, allowing it to be rotated to ensure the angle of the shadows remained consistent throughout three days of filming. Schwarzenegger sat on a bicycle seat mounted in the tree while fake nails were affixed to his wrists and feet. The scene in which Valeria and Subotai fought off ghosts to save Conan and the final battle with Doom's forces were filmed in the salt marshes of Almerimar. "Stonehenge-like ruins" were erected and sand piled into mounds that reached 9 m (30 ft). The changes to the landscape attracted protests from environmentalists and the producers promised to restore the site after filming was completed.
The Temple of Set was built in the mountains, about 12 km (7.5 mi) west of the city of Almería. The structure was 50 meters (160 ft) long and 22 meters (72 ft) high. It was the most expensive of the sets, costing $350,000, and built out of various woods, lacquers, and tons of concrete. Its stairway had 120 steps. Milius and his crew also filmed at historical sites and on sets from previous films. Scenes of a bazaar were filmed at the Moorish Alcazaba of Almería, which was dressed to give it a fictional Hyborian look. Shadizar was realized at a pre-existing film set in the Almerían desert: the fort used for the filming of El Condor (1970) refurbished as an ancient city.
It was expensive to build large sets, and Milius did not want to rely on optical effects and matte paintings (painted landscapes). The crew instead adopted miniature effect techniques (playing on perspective) to achieve the illusion of size and grandeur for several scenes. Scale models of structures were constructed by Emilio Ruiz and positioned in front of the cameras so that they appeared as full-sized structures on film; using this technique, the Shadizar set was extended to appear more than double its size. Ruiz built eight major miniature models, including a 4-foot-high (1.2 m) palace and a representation of the entire city of Shadizar that spanned 120 square feet (11 m2).
Cobb's direction for the sets was to "undo history", "to invent [their] own fantasy history", and yet maintain a "realistic, historical look". Eschewing the Greco-Roman imagery used heavily in the sword-and-sandal films of the 1960s, he realized a world that was an amalgamation of Dark Age cultures, such as the Mongols and the Vikings. Several scenarios paid homage to Frazetta's paintings of Conan, such as the "half-naked slave girl chained to a pillar, with a snarling leopard at her feet", at the snake cult's orgy. David Huckvale, a lecturer at the Open University and broadcaster for BBC Radio, said the designs of the Tree of Woe and the costumes appeared very similar to those used in Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung operas at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876. Principal photography was completed in the middle of May 1981. The film crews burned down the Cimmerian village and the Temple of Set after completing filming on each set.
Several action scenes in Conan were filmed with a "minijib" (a remote-controlled electronic camera mounted on a motorized lightweight crane) that Nick Allder, the special effects supervisor, had devised when he worked on Dragonslayer (1981). The stunts were co-ordinated by Terry Leonard, who had worked on many films, including Milius's previous projects and Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Leonard said that Schwarzenegger, Bergman, and Lopez performed most of their own stunts, including the fights.
The three actors were given martial arts training ahead of filming. From August 1980, they were tutored by Kiyoshi Yamazaki, a karate black belt and master swordsman, who drilled them in sword-fighting styles that were meant to make them look proficient in using their weapons. They practiced each move in a fight at least 15 times before filming. Yamazaki advised Leonard on the choreography of the sword fights and had a cameo role as one of Conan's instructors.
Tim Huchthausen, the prop maker, worked with swordsmith Jody Samson to create the sturdy weapons Milius thought necessary. Particular attention was paid to two swords wielded by Conan: his father's sword ("Master's sword") and the blade he finds in a tomb ("Atlantean sword"). Both weapons were realized from Cobb's drawings. Their blades were hand ground from carbon steel and heat treated and left unsharpened. The hilts and pommels were sculpted and cast through the lost-wax process; inscriptions were added to the blades by electrical discharge machining. Samson and Huchthausen made four Master's and four Atlantean swords, at a cost of $10,000 per weapon. Copies of the Atlantean sword were struck and given to members of the production.
Samson and Huchthausen agreed the weapons were heavy and unbalanced, thus unsuitable for actual combat. Lighter versions made of aluminum, fiberglass, and steel were struck in Madrid; these 3 lb (1.4 kg) copies were used in the fight scenes. According to Schwarzenegger, the heavy swords were used in close-up shots. The other weapons used in the film were not as elaborate; Valeria's talwar was ground out from an aluminum sheet.
The copious amounts of blood spilled in the fight scenes came from bags of fake blood strapped to the performers' bodies. Animal blood gathered from slaughterhouses was poured onto the floor to simulate puddles of human blood. Most of the times trick swords made from fiberglass were used when the scene called for a killing blow. Designed by Allder, these swords could also retract their blades, and several sprayed blood from their tips. Although the swords were intended to be safer alternatives to metal weapons, they could still be dangerous: in one of the fights, Bergman sparred with an extra who failed to follow the choreography and sliced open her finger.
Accidents also happened in stunts that did not involve weapons. A stuntman smashed his face into a camera while riding a horse at full gallop, and Schwarzenegger was attacked by one of the trained dogs. The use of live animals also raised concerns about cruelty; the American Humane Association placed the film on its "unacceptable list". The transgressions listed by the association included the kicking of a dog, the striking of a camel, and the tripping of horses.
Carlo De Marchis, the special make-up effects supervisor, and Colin Arthur, former Studio Head of Madame Tussaud's, were responsible for the human dummies and fake body parts used in the film. The dummies inflated crowd numbers and stood in as dead bodies, while the body parts were used in scenes showing the aftermath of fights and the cult's cannibalistic feast. In Thulsa Doom's beheading scene, Schwarzenegger hacked at a dummy and pulled a concealed chain to detach its head. The decapitation of Conan's mother was more complex: a Plexiglas shield between Jones and Nadiuska stopped his sword as he swung at her and an artificial head then dropped into the camera's view. A more elaborate head was used for the close-up shots; this prop spurted blood and the movements of its eyes, mouth, and tongue were controlled by cables hidden beneath the snow.
Allder created a $20,000 36-foot (11 m) mechanical snake for the fight scene in the Tower of Serpents. The snake's body had a diameter of 2.5 ft (0.76 m), and its head was 2.5 ft (0.76 m) long and 2 ft (0.61 m) wide. Its skeleton was made from duralumin (an alloy used in aircraft frames) and its skin was vulcanized foam rubber. Controlled by steel cables and hydraulics, the snake could exert a force between 3.5 and 9.0 tons. Another two snakes of the same dimensions were made, one for stationary shots and one for decapitation by Schwarzenegger. The immense size of the mechanical snake meant that it did not fully fit onto the set, so only the front of it could be shown in the film. To create the scene at the Tree of Woe, the crew tethered live vultures to the branches, and created a mechanical bird for Schwarzenegger to bite. The dummy bird's feathers and wings were from a dead vulture, and its control mechanisms were routed inside the false tree.
According to Sammon, "one of the greatest special effects in the film [was] Thulsa Doom's onscreen transformation into a giant snake". It involved footage of fake body parts, live and dummy snakes, miniatures, and other camera tricks combined into a flowing sequence with lap dissolve. After Jones was filmed in position, he was replaced by a hollow framework with a rubber mask that was pushed from behind by a snake head-shaped puppet to give the illusion of Doom's facial bones changing. The head was then replaced with a 6-foot (1.8 m) mechanical snake; as it moved outwards, a crew member pressed a foot pedal to collapse the framework. For the final part of the sequence, a real snake was filmed on a miniature set.
Few optical effects were used in Conan the Barbarian. Milius professed ambivalence to fantasy elements, preferring a story that showcases accomplishments realized through one's own efforts without reliance on the supernatural. He also said that he followed the advice of Cobb and other production members on the matters of special effects. Peter Kuran's Visual Concepts Engineering (VCE) effects company was engaged in October 1981 to handle postproduction optical effects for Conan. VCE had previously worked on films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Dragonslayer. Among their tasks for Conan were adding glint and sparkle to the Eye of the Serpent and Valeria's Valkyrie armor. Not all of VCE's work made it to the final print; the flames of Valeria's funeral pyre were originally enhanced by the company, but were later restored to the original version.
For the scene in which Valeria and Subotai had to fend off ghosts to save Conan's life, the "boiling clouds" were created by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, while VCE was given the task of creating the ghosts. Their first attempt filming strips of film emulsion suspended in a vat of a viscous solution—elicited complaints from the producers, who thought the resulting spirits looked too much like those in a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, so VCE turned to animation to complete the task. First, they drew muscular warriors in ghostly forms onto cels and printed the images onto film with an Oxberry animation stand and contact printer. The Oxberry was fitted with a used lens that introduced lens flares to the prints; VCE's intention with using the old lens was to make the resultant images of the ghosts seem as if they were of real-life objects filmed with a camera. The final composite was produced by passing the reels of film for the effects and the live-action sequences through a two-headed optical printer and capturing the results with a camera.
