The first part of the book, until Frederick drowns, has roots in historical reality. The second part though is populated with mythic places and creatures. In my movie, I had divided this second part into two: a “real” pilgrim through places of religious and philosophical thought, rendered with “real” characters, and the arrival at the border of the Universal Religion realm populated with those mythic skiapods, blemmyae and satyrs. And that’s a challenge for the movie. I need to distinguish the “real” from the mythic characters, say by rendering the latter digitally. But why distinguish? Well, because Baudolino keeps embellishing the “reality” with the nuggets of his imagination. And that’s why in the last scene, in Constantinople, he is suggestively shown writing the story. The good thing for the movie structure is that in both the beginning and ending scenes he is shown writing, mixing “reality” with imagination. As the synopsis says “…it is hard to tell reality from fiction in those times.”