Robert Eggers: ​‘This is me try­ing to do Conan the Bar­bar­ian by way of Andrei Rublev’

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 10^th 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 blown 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 set out to put your own inflec­tion on these famil­iar narratives?

The moral­i­ty of that is in the eye of the audi­ence mem­ber more than the sto­ry­teller. But yeah, it is indeed based on the sto­ry of Amleth, which is the source mate­r­i­al of Shakespeare’s ​‘Ham­let’. But more than that, it’s a clas­sic sto­ry that every­one knows on some lev­el and can get behind.

I can indulge in the world-build­ing and trans­port audi­ences in a more vis­cer­al way when I know I have the frame­work of a sto­ry that everyone’s able to access.

Did work­ing with Sjón give you and the film a keen­er sense of the local colour in Iceland?

One hun­dred per­cent. There are plen­ty of Ice­landers who don’t want to talk about Vikings at all, and will make that clear with a great many excla­ma­tion points. At the same time, every Ice­lander knows which char­ac­ter in these Viking sto­ries they’re lit­er­al­ly relat­ed to, direct­ly. Hav­ing an incred­i­ble writer like Sjón, who’s so wed­ded to and embed­ded in this world and tra­di­tion of sto­ry­telling – I mean, that’s why we hired him! It’s his imag­i­nary play­ground. These are his people.

Was he instru­men­tal in get­ting Björk on board with the pro­duc­tion and back in the world of film? It’s my under­stand­ing that they’ve known each oth­er for a while.

Oh, yes. But it was actu­al­ly Björk who intro­duced me to Sjón in the first place. Friend-of-a-friend sit­u­a­tion. Because the two of them are close, and because we devel­oped a friend­ly rela­tion­ship, tied togeth­er by our com­pos­er and one of my clos­est friends [Tri Angle Records founder] Robin Car­olan, there was an alto­geth­er famil­ial atmos­phere that I think she knew would make it fun to come in more than any­thing else.

It looks like con­di­tions on loca­tion in Ice­land and Ire­land were intense. How was this a depar­ture from your past shoots, which were much more spa­tial­ly contained?

Björk liked to say that Ire­land was in drag as Ice­land. [Laughs.] But yeah, the scope of this film is so much larg­er than any­thing I’ve done before, in every way pos­si­ble. It’s an epic, by def­i­n­i­tion. I thought of it as mak­ing a movie like my oth­ers, except now I’m mak­ing what amounts to six of them at the same time. The wind on Cape Forchu, where we shot The Light­house, was unlike any­thing I’d ever expe­ri­enced. But that pales in com­par­i­son to the wind on Mount Hekla, the vol­cano where we did a lot of shooting.

Were some aspects of a pro­duc­tion this large and intri­cate alien to you?

At every lev­el. I went from scout­ing on a bor­rowed lob­ster boat to scout­ing by heli­copter. I had my same heads of depart­ment that I’ve always had – I like con­sis­ten­cy in col­lab­o­ra­tors. It’s just that we were for­tu­nate enough to be work­ing with these incred­i­ble crews who have worked on Rid­ley Scott movies and Game of Thrones, and were able to help us actu­alise our visions.

When scal­ing up, the chal­lenge is always to retain what makes your art per­son­al and unique while you’re answer­able to more peo­ple. Did you ever feel that ten­sion about assert­ing your own creativity?

It was nev­er an issue of me assert­ing my own cre­ativ­i­ty. It was just about mak­ing sure peo­ple lis­tened to those asser­tions. But look, the col­lab­o­ra­tion with the stu­dio was great, in the end. They sup­port­ed our ambi­tion to do an inter­est­ing Viking movie. We shot this epic sin­gle-cam­era, with sin­gle-take bat­tle sequences. That’s uncommon.

What was it like to reunite with Anya Tay­lor-Joy, with so much hav­ing tran­spired for both of you since you made The Witch in 2015?

It was won­der­ful! We’d both got­ten bet­ter at our respec­tive jobs since The Witch. But the rea­son I stick with my col­lab­o­ra­tors, and par­tic­u­lar­ly actors, is you’ve got to have a trust­ing rela­tion­ship. And we already had that by the time we got start­ed on this, so we could dig even deep­er into the work more quick­ly. For [Willem] Dafoe, some of me and my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jarin’s meth­ods on The Light­house would frus­trate him once in a while. He came to under­stand what we were doing and why, and on The North­man, he’d be like, ​‘Ah, we’re doing this again.’ That recog­ni­tion that you’re all on the same page, that’s a great feel­ing for everyone.

What were some unan­tic­i­pat­ed chal­lenges to the process? Were there any prob­lems you had to fix on the fly?

I knew enough to be aware that every­thing I planned on doing was a bad idea. [Laughs.] We had a small amount of boat­work in The Light­house, and it was an impos­si­ble headache. You can’t do a Viking movie with­out a lot of ships, and you could prob­a­bly fit in more than we did, but I knew full well how dif­fi­cult it would be. I learned that the tricky thing about shoot­ing major action sequences is the back­ground. Birds, those I’ve worked with before. I can han­dle birds. But this time, we had so many! It’s like I was just deal­ing with much big­ger ver­sions of all the same prob­lems. There were days when I was like, ​‘What the hell have I got­ten myself into?’ Though you always have a few days like that. When Sjón and I had the idea, we were just stand­ing in his kitchen. And now we’ve got to build a whole village.

You’ve shown an inter­est in lens­es and the equip­ment of cin­e­matog­ra­phy in the past – how would you describe the look and tex­ture of this film, and how did you achieve that?

We’re shoot­ing on film again, 35mm, but we’re going for a rich­er and clean­er fin­ish than I’ve been after in the past. More colour, more con­trast. As much as I love black-and-white, when you go to Ice­land, you got­ta shoot in colour to trans­port your audi­ence to these incred­i­ble landscapes.

The only mod­ern Viking movie that springs to mind is Val­hal­la Ris­ing, did you draw on others?

There’s a lot of Conan ref­er­enc­ing, I have to admit. Many tips of the hat. I’ve been told by my PR team to keep it light, but this is in some respects me try­ing to do Conan the Bar­bar­ian by way of Andrei Rublev. Just to be clear, the Russ­ian medieval peri­od movie is more in terms of the world-build­ing dis­ci­pline and not the sto­ry­telling itself.

Among some pock­ets of online fan­dom, your first two films have become syn­ony­mous with this move­ment in hor­ror gen­er­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the US indie stu­dio A24 [who pro­duced Ari Aster’s Hered­i­tary and Mid­som­mar]. Have you devel­oped a new under­stand­ing of your own style as you’ve moved away from the genre and that studio?

It’s main­ly in the world-build­ing, and the insane notion of recre­at­ing the past. It’s impos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly for an era from 1,000 years ago, but it gives me and my col­lab­o­ra­tors a north star. We were lucky to be work­ing with lead­ers in the field of Viking stud­ies to advise on this. I’m sure his­to­ri­ans will find plen­ty of things to pull apart, and in ten years, it’ll all be moot. But there’s nev­er been a Viking movie as focused on accu­ra­cy as this one.

Do you have the men­tal space to think about your next movie right now? You’ve talked a lot about remak­ing FW Murnau’s silent clas­sic Nos­fer­atu – is that still on the cards?

Not too much to say on that front right now, aside from that I’ve spent so much time on Nos­fer­atu, it would be very infu­ri­at­ing if it nev­er happened.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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