“I can hardly believe I made such a macho movie,” says Robert Eggers. “I really can’t believe it.” The 38-year-old American – dressed in black pants and a black sweater, large gold rings on his fingers – is in a Hamburg hotel for the European promotion of The Northman† Anyone who had told him about five years ago that he would direct a very expensive Viking film, full of action scenes and with a star cast, had been treated to laughter. ‘Vikings to me equaled that macho stereotype. And then there’s this right-wing misinterpretation of Viking culture, something I’m allergic to. No, I was absolutely not interested in that!’
Eggers broke through in 2015 with his alternative horror hit The Witchset in the strict religious New England of 1630.’The Witch scared the hell out of me,” tweeted writer and fan Stephen King. Then he made the delusional psychological sort-of-thriller The Lighthouse, with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two lighthouse keepers in delirium. Two oppressive films full of delusions, which certainly do not conform to the usual Hollywood pattern. Something that would also appear in Eggers’ Viking film: the first version of The Northman caused so much surprise among the test audience during the week that the studio promptly proposed all kinds of adjustments: with a budget of 90 million dollars, the film had to appeal to a wide audience. The assembly of the final version then became a dragging process.
“I’d never shot an action scene,” Eggers says, “and my… director of photography Neither does Jarin Blaschke. In fact, we just weren’t suited for a film of this caliber. It took a lot of preparation to succeed. And… well, maybe we didn’t really succeed either.’ With a serious look: ‘It was so hard.’
The director had changed his mind about Vikings after a visit to Iceland. Because of the mythical landscape there, the ubiquity of the sagas and Björk. The singer had invited Eggers to dinner at her home, where she paired him up with the Icelandic poet Sjón, the eventual co-writer of The Northman† ‘It was only in Iceland that I realized how much Viking culture is connected with poetry, with art and music. Yes, Vikings were as violent as the cliché goes and also terribly patriarchal. But there was more than that. And as for that violence: if you look at the world today, it is clear that we have not made any progress since the Viking Age.’
Björk can also be seen in The Northman, as a priest; it is her first film role in seventeen years. In the two-hour long revenge epic, based on the old Scandinavian saga that also includes Shakespeare’s Hamlet inspired, the ferocious Viking and king’s son Amleth returns to his family after twenty years; he wants to avenge his murdered father and free his mother, who has been abducted by the new king, Uncle Fjölnir. In addition to Björk, there are also roles for Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke.
The Norman Amleth is played by Alexander Skarsgard, who is also interviewed by the press in Hamburg. When the tall Swede steps into the room, it is striking how much his huge muscles have shrunk again and how friendly, yes, gentle he actually looks. Very different from the sword-wielding brute who in The Northman also takes a bite out of an opponent just felled. “When I was little I dreamed of playing a Viking one day,” says the 45-year-old actor, known for his roles in series such as True Blood† Big Little Lies and the third season of succession (in which he plays a bored Scandinavian billionaire). ‘We have a family house on Öland, an island in the Baltic Sea with about 160 runic stones. They are a thousand years old and have beautiful inscriptions about the journeys of the Vikings. If you see it every summer, you automatically become fascinated.’
Alexander Skarsgard, the eldest son of actor Stellan, grew up partly in the United States. “When Americans hear you’re from Sweden, they always want to talk about the Vikings. I realized that I had never actually seen a great, epic Viking film that did justice to the Icelandic sagas. Together with a Danish producer friend, Lars Knudsen (Midsommar), I started looking for a suitable filmmaker.’
Eggers: ‘It had to be the Viking film. My pitch to the studios was: I’m going to make the most entertaining version of a Robert Eggers movie. Entertaining people wasn’t the ultimate goal of my first two films, but it was here. Or one of the main goals, anyway. I wanted to make a movie where you can eat nice popcorn. Although I hope that there are also moments in which you eat less fine popcorn. There is, uh… something dark in it.’
Eggers had to make some compromises with the studio. ‘And I don’t like all of them. That I wasn’t allowed to show dicks, for example. At the attack of that berserkers (showing the ecstatic fury of Viking fighters, who dress like animals for battle, red.) I wanted some of those men to be completely naked, which makes the scene even more terrifying and powerful. But yes, the film must also be able to be shown in airplanes, so: no dicks. I had no say in the final version, and I found that really painful and heavy at times. But I have to say: without the intervention and interference of the studio I would not have delivered what I promised beforehand: the most entertaining version of this film.’
There is a clear line observable in The Northman and Eggers’ earlier films: the obvious way in which the director weaves the supernatural through his stories. ‘I think that’s completely logical. As with those religious English settlers in The Witch the supernatural or spiritual is as real to Vikings as anything else in the world they live in. So that’s what it should look like in a movie: as if it were real. Here I place the viewer in the mind of a Viking.’
Eggers filmed The Northman different from the average adventure film: with long and uninterrupted shots. Skarsgard: ‘So there is no extra image of the environment to fit in during the editing. That means you can never cut a corner, or cheat or correct for a moment during a fight scene. If even a fraction of a second isn’t perfect, you have to go all the way back to the beginning. We replayed that Viking raid on that village about 27 times, all the way from start to finish. And that is… pretty fucking exhausting. After the first time you squeal with adrenaline, you are panting. And then you have to do it again, and again. But hey, that’s just the way Rob works. There are no cuts. Cinematographers will probably notice that, but I hope that people who are less familiar with the film business at least feel it, even if subconsciously. That dragged us through the shooting days: that we were making something that would look different later on.’
For The Northman the actor worked with the same trainer who had primed him for The Legend of Tarzan† ‘Magnus, a Swede. He knows my body better than I do. As a fighter, Amleth was supposed to be a cross between a bear and a wolf. So I had to gain weight, get bigger: bear-like. Bee Tarzan they insisted that I not have an ounce of body fat, so no beer or pasta on the weekend, I wasn’t even allowed to drink a glass of orange juice, because of the sugar. For The Northman luckily we did: a hamburger, a glass of wine on Saturday evening.’
Amleth seeks revenge throughout the film, is consumed by it; it forms the narration of The Northman† “There’s something about revenge stories that always works,” Eggers says. ‘By Conan the Barbaraa movie I occasionally refer to in The Northman, to the Jacobin revenge tragedies. In real life, revenge isn’t satisfying, I guess. My commentary on revenge, as given, is in the film. I don’t want to say too much about that.’
Skarsgard: ‘In Amleth’s own eyes his revenge is just, he is the hero of his own story. A man who had to flee at the age of 10 after his uncle killed his father and abducted his mother. But it becomes uncomfortable once he realizes that his view of the past may not be entirely accurate. Then the dividing lines shift: who is the hero here, who is the villain?’
The dosage of the amount of graphically depicted violence in The Northman kept Eggers awake every now and then. ‘It had to be a real epic action movie, with all the trimmings. Really exciting, gripping. And while those Vikings celebrate violence, I, as a filmmaker, didn’t want to glorify it either. I try to stay on the right side. Well, I kind of regret that moment when the intestines fall out of someone’s dissected stomach. It feels a bit too much like a slasher movie. But other than that I believe it worked out well.’
Vikings in movies and series
The Viking genre is not as big as the western, but in recent years it has mainly made its way into TV series: Vikings† Vikings Valhalla and the parodying norseman (all three on Netflix). The most famous Hollywood film in the genre is The Vikings (1958), an epic of debauched robbery and rape Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Other highlight: Valhalla Rising (2009) by the Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, with Mads Mikkelsen as the one-eyed Viking slave.