When The Northman director Robert Eggers asked the poet-novelist Sjón to co-write his Viking epic, the single-named Icelander was apprehensive.
Eggers wanted to draw on Old Norse sagas written hundreds of years ago, and deeply embedded in the lives of Icelanders.
“We learn from a very early age that this is the prized possession of this nation, of the people who have lived here since the settlement in the late 9th century,” Sjón says. “I must admit I was hesitant, because the sagas have been written so much about here.”
They have been widely adapted not only in Iceland, but by the likes of William Shakespeare.
“They have been rewritten as poetry, as plays, as novels,” Sjón adds. “And while it is interesting to see foreigners fail at it, it is tragic to fail at it yourself when you’re from here.”
But he was impressed with Eggers’ feature debut, The Witch, a historically accurate, slow-burn horror film about a 17th century Puritan family. It stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a young girl accused of witchcraft.
“So I said to Robert that I loved The Witch so much that I would be ready to fail tragically with him doing The Northman,” Sjón says.
The Northman is Eggers’ third feature, and a huge departure from both his debut and his second film, 2019’s The Lighthouse, a two-hander shot in one unforgiving location with Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. The cast of The Northman includes Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, Taylor-Joy and Dafoe, as well as scores of extras who feature heavily in enthralling battle sequences — most of which are lensed in long single takes.
Eggers was ready for the leap.
“If you can’t be single-minded enough to not get caught up in the noise going on around you, directing should not be your vocation,” he tells MovieMaker. “The amount of pressure on your shoulders and the risk of failure is so extreme with making a film this size, you have to let it roll off your shoulders. If you recognized the reality of the situation it would be beyond crippling.”
The Northman tells the story of a prince, Amleth (Skarsgård), who adores his father, King Aurvandil War Raven (Hawke). Aurvandil is murdered by his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who then claims Aurvandil’s wife, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), as his own. Amleth’s quest introduces him to Olga of the Birch Forest, played by Taylor-Joy.
His life’s purpose is punishingly simple: “Avenge father. Save mother. Kill Fjölnir.”
Actor Claes Bang and director Robert Eggers on the set of The Northman. Photos by Aidan Monaghan / Focus Features
Windows
Following his pattern on The Witch and The Lighthouse, Eggers threw himself into research. For The Witch, he even consulted experts on 17th century agriculture. He told BFI in a 2016 interview that one of his few concessions to moviemaking was allowing the cottage windows to be a third larger than they were in real life, to accommodate enough natural light to shoot interiors.
For The Northman, Eggers read the sagas themselves, books on Old Norse language, academic papers and children’s books. He also visited museums and consulted with Viking historians — and embraced more modern resources.
“There were some great academic podcasts I listened to religiously, but I also learned some things from simplistic YouTube videos. Sometimes it’s nice to hear or read broad strokes when you return from a deep dive to decontextualize what you’ve been learning,” he says.
Sjón was a perfect partner. Although he also prizes accuracy, he felt more freedom to fictionalize.
“Maybe because the material in a way belongs to me as an Icelander and as someone from the culture that produced the sagas… I feel more relaxed in taking liberties with it, because it’s been explored in so many different ways over the centuries here,” Sjón says.
“So it was quite exciting for me when Robert started correcting the stuff that I was doing and said, ‘Oh, we would not talk about a crown here, we would maybe talk about an old helmet from the period before them,’” Sjón adds.
“He brought this absolute demand for historical accuracy in the execution of the visual world, while I was ready to take the liberties.”
Eggers re-enlisted his department heads for The Witch and The Lighthouse, including editor Louise Ford, costume designer Linda Muir, production designer Craig Lathrop and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke.
Blaschke says all Eggers projects start with a long email from the director, “sometimes before he’s finished writing the script.”
“In that email, there’s a list of a few dozen films that correlate to various things that inspire or influence his thinking. They are roughly prioritized in the relative influence they have,” Blaschke continues.
At the top of The Northman email was Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 Soviet epic, Andrei Rublev.
A three-and-a-half hour meditative film about the mysteries of faith might seem like odd inspiration for a bloody revenge tale. But religion is a key component of both films — and the sagas that inspired The Northman.
Andrei Rublev also includes an iconic Mongolian raid sequence that inspired a sequence in The Northman set in the Land of The Rus, in which Amleth and his compatriots, dressed as wolves, ransack a Slavic village. (Have a look at the sidebar on the right for more about this sequence.)
Fate has it that Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) and Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) will cross paths in Iceland in Robert Eggers’ The Northman
Hamlet
The beats of The Northman may sound familiar, because Shakespeare drew on the same source material for Hamlet.
“The story of Amleth survived as epic poems for a long while. It is possible that it was written as an individual saga, but by the time it was written down in Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus, it had more or less been lost,” Sjón explains.
“So there were just traces of the basic storyline. And so we worked with the same material that William Shakespeare worked with, and just as he made his own Elizabethan tragedy from it, we took it and we made a new saga from it,” Sjón continues.
Eggers and Sjón pulled inspiration from all of the sagas, not just Amleth’s story, as recorded by Grammaticus.
“We really wanted to incorporate the major elements and the major beats from the sagas in the story, and that’s what we did,” Sjón says. Because of this, The Northman can confidently be declared “an original saga,” he says.
Sjón is clear that audiences will enjoy The Northman just as much if they are unfamiliar with the adaptation’s Norse roots. But he notes that the film includes a few elements that will especially resonate with those who know their sagas.
“You want to have at least one good encounter with the undead for example, so let’s have that,” he says. “You want a great vision of the world beyond ours, so let’s have that. And you want a good, proper betrayal.
“You want somebody mutilated, and having to live with that mutilation and being laughed at for the rest of his life by his peers,” Sjón adds (Not to spoil too much, but Eldar Skar plays a character called Finnr the Nose-Stub.)
Sagas are also often notoriously bloody, but Sjón and Eggers took special care with their devastation.
“We were very clear from the beginning, that we would never depict the violent part of this world as romantic or titillating in any way. When there is brutality — and it is brutal — there is no beauty in it,” Sjón says.
For example, Sjón explains, when the wolf-warriors attack the village and take the few remaining survivors as slaves, “There is no beauty. … It is the cruelty of war.”
One of the slaves is Taylor-Joy’s Olga, who comes to complement Amleth’s brute strength with her own sorcery. This is just one supernatural element of the tale.
Robert Eggers and DP Jarin Blaschke lensed both The Lighthouse and The Northman on film
The Witches
Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, The Northman includes three witches.
The first, Heimer the Fool (Dafoe), is a court jester who moonlights as a shaman. The second, Seeress, is played by Björk. (Sjón, who was born Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, was in a two-person band with her before she broke out as the lead singer of The Sugarcubes, and has often collaborated with her since.) Seeress reminds Amleth of his mission and foretells parts of his path.
Later, Amleth encounters the He-Witch (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who further narrows his fate: “You must choose between kindness for your kin or hate for your enemies.”
Also read: A Day in the Life of Nicolas Cage, From Feeding His Pet Crow to Watching UFO Shows
Like all good heroes, Amleth struggles with fate. He must answer the question: Can we escape destiny?
“It’s possibly the only question we have in our lives,” Sjón says. “We don’t ask to be born — we’re here. And if someone tells us, Well, it was your fate to be born into this world, then the next question is: Can I do something about it?
“In our innocence, not only as kids, but at many points in our lives, we all think the narrative has been set, we think the narrative has settled. OK, this is how my life is going to be more or less, with little changes here or there. But my basic narrative is set,” he continues.
“So little Amleth, at the beginning, just expects to become king, like his father. … But then he realizes, No, I was not born into that narrative, and he escapes. And then, he tries to get away from that narrative and he is brought back into it by the Seeress.
“We will all lose the battle in the end — our stories will end. That’s what we know. So how do we deal with it while we’re here? This is a story we love, because we are all in it.”
Tech Box:
Camera: Panavision Millennium XL2, Panavised Arriflex 435ES, Arriflex 235
Lenses: Altered Northman lenses from Primo base lenses (21, 24, 27, 35, 40mm), 35mm and 58mm Petzval lenses. Special high-speed
Lighting: Video bit-mapped 500w bulb arrays (60 to 180- bulb units) for fire, Arrimax 18k into a custom curved mirror for moonlight, zero red-transmission gels and LEDs for moonlight
Color: Goldcrest in London
The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers, opens in theaters on Friday
Main image (above): Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) prepares for battle and the possibility of death in The Northman, from Sjón and Robert Eggers. Photos by Aidan Monaghan / Focus Features
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