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If you’re going to watch The Northman at the cinema
this weekend you are already braced for the ride. Reviews consistently describe
the experience as visceral, primal and raw – which is of course just the ticket
director Robert Eggers was aiming for.
His own script called for scenes “that should smell of
mildew and rot, with human bones sticking out of the mud,” according to an
extensive New Yorker interview which tracked the film’s progress during post production.
The Guardian
judged the $70m Viking epic “ambitious” and “preposterous” and a film “that
comes on like a head-smashing mashup of Beowulf, Hamlet and
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, told in growly tones that
are more Dark Knight than Green Knight.”
Another writer in the same paper calls the feature “vast,
bonkers and exhilarating” led by a hulking Alexander Skarsgård as an
exiled Icelandic prince out to avenge his father’s murder and reclaim his
kingdom.
But this is not a revenge movie in the mould of Gladiator
or Braveheart, which Eggers admits he could never make if he tried.
“My best intention of doing ‘Gladiator’ or ‘Braveheart’ is
still . . weirder,” he said to the New Yorker interview.
Eggers wrote the script with Sjón, an Icelandic novelist and
poet, to whom he was introduced by Bjork who has a cameo in the film alongside
stars Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy, with Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Claes
Bang, and Willem Dafoe.
The filmmaker himself says, “this is in some respects me trying to do Conan the Barbarian by way of Andrei
Rublev” by which he means a battle with himself to make “the definitive Viking
movie” – while not pandering to the nihilistic violence that appeals to those
with right wing sensibilities.
“I can’t believe I made something that insanely macho,” he
told Dazed. “Sometimes the violence needs to be thrilling because that’s the source
material and worldview of Viking culture. Also, it needs to perform
like Gladiator at the box office. But I don’t want to glorify
violence as a filmmaker. How do I walk that line? I don’t know.”
The trade press has been obsessed with another battle too,
this time of the auteur against the studio. Eggers previous two movies were
critically well received, his debut The Witch, made $40m on an indie
budget. That attracted New Regency to invest heavily in the project with Focus
Features distributing in the US and a degree of attention to his vision that he
was both eyes-open about but still unwilling to compromise – much.
That included working with his regular set of core
collaborators including editor Louise Ford and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke
whose “frostbitten cinematography allows the
film to flatten mud-and-shit history into the stuff of ‘Elden Ring’ high
fantasy until they feel equally true.”
It meant shooting on 35mm rather than the supposedly cheaper
digital and taking an ambitious approach to shooting action scenes with a
single camera eschewing second units, handheld cameras and not doing pickups.
“We’re trying to propel the story and keep people totally
immersed in the world. That’s the main creative reason,” Eggers told Indiewire “Also, my fetish or obsession with the detail of verisimilitude of the physical
world is something that cannot be a distraction from the story. If it’s a
single-camera, then you’re always focused on the story. You’re not cutting away
to how cool the hunting dogs look.
But it is hard. When we were in prep, I was like, ‘We are
never going be able to do this. We are never going to be able to finish
storyboarding this movie, we’re going to get completely behind, and we’re going
to fail.’ I know why people shoot movies like this multi-camera because this is
just impossible. But we stuck to it.”
To a large extent the studio indulged Eggers’s
idiosyncrasies, resulting “in a textured aesthetic and a hurtling, immersive
perspective that you rarely see in today’s carefully vetted, committee-made action
movies,” says The Guardian. “It’s anathema to mainstream studios with an eye on the clock and a hand on the
purse strings.”
The long takes brought their own challenges in the edit
since Ford was left with very little spare footage or flexibility that might
get them out of a jam—or a tough set of studio notes—later on.
“Like, there’s not a lot of alternatives,” Eggers told the
New Yorker. “The stakes are really high, and without, you know, coverage.” He
said the word with big air quotes.
To The Guardian he added, “I hadn’t had to do test
screenings before. My first two films were all tested for marketing, but I
didn’t have to change anything. So this was new, and as much as I didn’t like
that process, I did learn something from it.”
Indiewire noted that Eggers “is so focused on the emotional fidelity of [the film] that
he seems afraid of making any concessions to melodrama. He seems afraid of
leaving any openings that a studio might have been able to exploit in order to
manufacture a certain audience response.”
He handed the studio final cut and is candid that was a risk he was willing to take.
“The studio took a big risk on letting somebody made two
sensationalist arthouse movies to make a big fucking Viking movie single-camera
with all of his heads of departments. Frankly, our resumes did not warrant us
making this movie, and they let us do it, which is amazing. I promised them the
most entertaining Robert Eggers movie I could make.”
In the New Yorker article Eggers had stated that the postproduction
on the film “was the most painful process of my life”, and clarifies this with
Indiewire.
“I think if I’d had total control and was left alone, I’d be
in a really bad position right now in the marketplace. I needed the pressure of
the studio to make the most entertaining version of this movie. This is the cut
I’m proud of, but my instinct is not to make entertainment. I mean,
entertainment was seventh on the list of “The Witch” and fifteenth on “The
Lighthouse.”
He added, “If I slavishly took the studio’s notes, the film
would suck, because they’re not filmmakers. That’s why they hire filmmakers to
make the films. But I think how we survived is that [myself] and all of my
collaborators [were] determined to make the film we wanted to, and we were not
going to stop until we were proud of it. It would’ve been so easy to say, “Fuck
the studio, they’re giving me all these notes, I hate this! They’re ruining my
movie!” That’s the easy way out. What made it so hard was to stick with it
until we were happy.”
He is on record as being in the frame for big budget studio
projects and says he’d like “to make a film this big. I’d like to make one even bigger. But,
without control, I don’t know. It’s too hard on my person.”
Eggers’ might be seen by Kevin Feige as another in the line
of indie directors who lend fresh eyes to a Marvel film.
Eggers’ response, “I’ve only done self-generated work. I
understand how fortunate I am to be in that situation. Even though I didn’t
have final cut, we went into this knowing it was a Robert Eggers movie, and all
of what that’s going to be. I don’t see how that could be beneficial on a movie
where I’m a director for hire. Everything I’m at doing is antithetical to
making a Marvel movie.”
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