ICONOCLAST DIRECTOR ROBERT EGGERS MEETS HOLLYWOOD HALF WAY WITH RIP-ROARING VIKING SAGA, THE NORTHMAN.
WORDS AND INTERVIEW BY CHARLES BRAMESCO ILLUSTRATION BY TAVO MONTAÑEZ
From a colonial-era New England village of 2015’s The Witch to a gusty coastal island in the 1890s as seen in 2019’s The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers is cinema’s chief excavator of the past. On his new film, The Northman, he goes farther than ever in space and time, travelling back to Iceland at the turn of the 10th century for a Viking fable of vengeance. Working with the highest budget of his career and a full stable of bona fide movie stars, this is his most ambitious undertaking yet — not that levelling up will keep him from indulging in his obsession with obscurity.
LWLies: What was the first thing you did to make The Northman?
Eggers: Several years ago, as Brooklyn hipsters were wont to do, my wife and I took a trip to Iceland. The landscapes completely blew me away. Having had no interest in the Viking Age before that, I suddenly had to make a Viking movie, and do it in Iceland. My wife was into the Old Norse sagas, and I started reading them as soon as I got home. A couple years later, I had a general meeting with Alexander Skarsgård, and he mentioned to me that he’d been trying to get a Viking movie made for a while with my friend Lars Knudsen, who produced The Witch. I told him, ‘I’ve got an idea for a Viking movie,’ which wasn’t completely true. So I went home, wrote a pitch, and the rest is history. Their history.
The other big piece of this is that, at a dinner party, I met the Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón. We got along, because we realised we shared a love of early-modern witchcraft while chatting at this party. I was completely blow away.
When you were first developing this knowledge base, what’d you learn that you didn’t know beforehand? People seem to have this broad idea of the Viking, horned hats and whatnot.
I was not particularly interested in Vikings, I just thought they were big and brutal and that was it. So to start understanding the richness and sophistication of their culture and literature, that was really inspiring. And their mythology, how cool is that? Evidently cool enough that Marvel Comics made a whole thing out of it. It was also clear that, because so many of these Viking epics are revenge stories, a good revenge movie always works. Even if you don’t personally believe in the idea of vengeance, you know it’ll be fun to watch.
The broader contours of this story come from ‘Hamlet’, and so many revenge stories end at the same moral about digging two graves. Did you
