The story’s been around for nearly 1,300 years and is familiar to almost anyone who had to read it in high school or college English class, but put “Beowulf” into the hands of Robert Zemeckis and it suddenly becomes “all kinds of strange,” Alison Lohman chuckled. “I didn’t know what I was getting into!”

Lohman’s anxiety doesn’t come from the story itself, obviously, but from the revolutionary techniques Zemeckis is pioneering to bring it to the big screen, a motion-capture process the Oscar-winning director first utilized on “The Polar Express.”

There’s a method to his madness, but also some madness in the method, Lohman revealed.

“It’s kind of a foreign idea to most actors to put dots on your face and wear a bodysuit and pretend that you have a beautiful gown on,” she said of the motion-capture process, which uses the dots as reference points for animation. “I have many scenes with Robin Wright Penn. We’re in a black-box studio kind of sound stage, acting with real actors and real horses. But they all have dots on them! It’s kind of strange.”

So strange, in fact, that Lohman admitted to being initially thrown by the process. Asked if it was hard to take Robin Wright Penn seriously when she had dots on her face, Lohman confessed that “it [was] hard. The first couple of days were very strange.”

But, for me at least, insanely cool. Are you anticipating “Beowulf” as well? Sound off below.