If animals are giving you messages from the beyond, if everyone is speaking in painstaking period-specific dialogue, if the weather is always terrible, and if a palpable sense of dread is all-encompassing, then you might be in a Robert Eggers movie.
The director, who made his name with the atmospheric indie horrors The Witch and The Lighthouse, returns this week with The Northman. The big difference here? A $90 million budget that allowed Eggers to pour his sensibilities for obsessive historical preparation into a sword-swinging, blood-pounding, proper Viking epic. Which is to say: it goes extremely hard.
The Northman is based on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, which also inspired Hamlet. It tells the story of a berserker warrior (Alexander Skarsgård) on a quest: as a child, he saw his king father (Ethan Hawke) killed and his mother (Nicole Kidman) kidnapped by his uncle (Claes Bang). He disguises himself as a slave to gain access to his uncle’s farm and, with the aid of a captured Rus woman (Anya Taylor-Joy), plots how to execute his revenge. (There’s also an assist from the legendary Björk, in her first film role since 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, and a mysterious Valkyrie, who appears to be wearing braces.)
Eggers spoke to GQ from Los Angeles, where he was stationed in the midst of the press tour for the film. He was dressed like Robert Eggers: all black everything, with an assortment of gold rings on his fingers, his beard trimmed and flecked with gray. “I didn’t have this much gray hair when we wrapped photography,” he says. “It’s all from post-production.”
GQ: The first thing I have to ask is: how did the Valkyrie end up with braces?
Robert Eggers: So, the Valkyrie is not wearing braces. Many Viking skulls have been excavated that have horizontal grooves carved in their teeth. The current favorite theory is that perhaps those grooves were filled with colored enamel. And that it was just to look cool. We chose black. Maybe we should have chosen blue or something. There’s a famous Viking king, Harald Bluetooth. Maybe he was named that for this particular dental adornment.
You set out to make the definitive Viking movie. Do you feel as if you’ve accomplished that?
You’d think if I had the hubris to say that was my goal, I would be able to say whether I did it or not, but I guess I feel like that’s for other people to say. But the thing is, I had an opening. I couldn’t possibly say, “I’m going to make the definitive Western or the definitive science fiction movie.” That’s beyond madness. But because the last classic Viking movie is from 1958, there was an opening.
This is the first time you’ve worked in a setting outside of New England and the first time you’ve gotten a budget of this size. Most movies of this type don’t get the $90 million budget these days—that’s going towards more CGI-heavy productions.
Yeah. And so, please, even if you don’t like this movie, root for it, because there should be more. I mean, Alex’s dad, Stellan [Skarsgård], put it very well. Nothing wrong with comic book movies, but we need other movies as well. It’s amazing that the studio gave me and my collaborators the opportunity to make a film at this scale.
It was incredibly daunting because there’s so much responsibility and pressure. But also, I got to make a big Viking movie. We built a Viking village and a Viking city and a Slavic village and warships and merchant ships. It was wild, what we got to do.
On a totally different note, I’m not sure if you saw this, but in some of the New York subway ads, The Northman posters didn’t have the movie title on them. Do you know the story there?
It’s called a fuck up, but it got some attention. I talked to some marketing people who are like, “They did that deliberately. I bet my career on it.” But whatever, they have the titles on them now.
Man’s hubris in nature is a running theme in your work. What was it like living that out on set when filming in Iceland?
I have a 19th century romantic landscape painter’s relationship [with nature] where I’m in awe, and I’m very cognizant that it could kill me. There’s something thrilling about that, of course. We were looking for the most punishing, brutal landscapes we could find, with the worst weather available and the most mud and rain and misery. I’m not a masochist towards myself, nor a sadist towards my collaborators, but it is what’s needed to tell a story.
I mean, drizzle doesn’t photograph. So virtually any scene that’s overcast, it’s raining, whether it looks like it’s raining or not. It was raining the entire time. I had to do, for Vanity Fair, the hardest day on set, and I was like, “There were one or two days that weren’t hard.”
Alex can tell you about how miserable it was shooting the naked volcano fight at night. But that’s the thing. If you’re not shooting a raid of a village, you’re shooting a storm at sea, at night on a Viking ship. Everything was pretty intense.
In all of your movies, animals serve as messengers and symbols. Goats in The Witch, seagulls in The Lighthouse, foxes and ravens in The Northman. Which were the easiest to work with?
The Arctic fox was easier than we expected. But I would say, honestly, ravens and seagulls are really easy. They’re super smart and easy to train. In fact, the seagulls in The Lighthouse had more precision than any dog I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.
How did you get Björk for her first film role in almost two decades?
It was a familial environment for her. I was introduced to Björk by Robin Carolan, who’s one of the composers, and he’s also one of my best friends. And then Björk introduced me to [Icelandic novelist and The Northman’s co-writer] Sjón. She’s known Sjón since they were teenagers. My wife and I have developed a relationship with Björk over the years, and she liked the role.
Did you write it with her in mind?
Of course. Yes.
You seem to do that with most of your roles.
Yes. Which could be fatal, and I should probably stop doing it.
Has there ever been a time where it just really didn’t pan out?
No comment.
You did reunite with Anya Taylor-Joy, whom you gave a breakout role to in The Witch. And she was going to be in your Nosferatu remake too. What draws you to her and makes her particularly well-suited for your movies?
I think it’s her ability to be ethereal and grounded at the same time, which makes her particularly good in these witchy roles. And also, for what I do, she has an incredible facility for language as if she was a classically trained actor—whether she’s doing early modern English in The Witch or speaking an ancient Ukrainian dialect in this movie.
The Witch was a special film, and it was the first real movie for both of us. I got to cast whoever I wanted in that film. It didn’t matter about names and stars. I was trying to cast good people, not just good actors, because we needed to be able to support each other in this challenging environment. We did become family. So, Annie and I are also just literally friends.
I was reading about how, in early test screenings of the movie, you had people walking out and saying things like, “you need a master’s degree in Viking history to understand it.” What was the structure at that point that led to those responses?
The film didn’t really change that much. First of all, it’s shot in single camera with all these long takes. So, there’s not that much that can be really changed. But I would say that some scenes were just cut, to focus more on Alex’s story. I think that there were more aspects of Viking mythology in the earlier version. We needed to keep it to a smaller palette of Odin, Valhalla, Valkyries, whatever.
Are there any specific ways that your fundamental creative process was changed, going from your smaller movies to this big budget one?
Not really. To some degree, the studio was cool enough to understand that if they wanted a “Robert Eggers movie,” a Robert Eggers movie means a Robert Eggers, Jarin Blaschke, Linda Muir, Craig Lathrop, Louise Ford movie. It’s all these collaborators, these like-minded people who we know how each other thinks. We can be really super honest with each other. So here we are now, with this incredibly experienced crew, who’s done Game of Thrones and Ridley Scott and Harry Potter and James Bond and Star Wars. And we’re making them do it in a stupid indie way. But that’s really cool, I think.
Where things were really new was in post-production and just the pressure that comes with not having final cut and making a movie that needs to be entertaining. I think without the studio pressure, I don’t know if I could have gotten there, frankly, because entertainment is not my first instinct.
What is your first instinct?
I can only sound precious if I answer that honestly, but when we were shooting The Witch, there was some Tarkovsky retrospective at Lincoln Center that I missed. And I felt like I didn’t get to go to church that year.
All your projects are rich with religion, spirituality, and the supernatural. Do you have any sort of practice in your own life?
Back to your other question, I do that in my filmmaking.
I hesitate to apply modern concepts to historical time periods, but The Witch is read as a movie about female ascendancy and The Lighthouse, about toxic masculinity. I know you’ve talked about how you don’t sit down with those concepts in mind when you’re writing, but both of them do reappear in The Northman. In this case, did you write them in?
No. I really do try to present this stuff without judgment. I was doing press in Paris. The first journalist who I sat down with, challenged that idea by saying, “Well, you only allude to sexual violence. You don’t show any sexual violence, which tells me, as an audience member, something about you.”
But then when we’re talking about other violence, that was another thing that was tricky to consider. Because again, it’s based on Icelandic sagas, which read like ’80s action movies sometimes—complete with one-liners like, “That’s what I call a headache.” It’s a culture that glorifies and celebrates violence. And I’m making a big action set piece tentpole movie. So there’s times when the violence needs to literally be thrilling. But I don’t want to be condoning violence or glorifying violence. So how do I walk that line as a storyteller?
I was curious about that, because it is extremely violent but the most visceral, brutal moments do seem purposefully fleeting. You just get a flash.
Yeah. When Hallgrimr, the really tall henchman, when his guts fall out, I think that was unnecessary. Everything else, I stand behind.
Do you have any interest in ever making a movie set in modern times?
No thank you.
What’s the next historical setting you’re looking into?
Well, The New Yorker said I was writing something Elizabethan. So there you go. But I’ve written all kinds of things that haven’t gotten made. And I’ll write a lot more that will and won’t get made. I mean, every time period interests me except for the one we’re living in.
Why’s that?
I get enough of the kitchen sink in my kitchen sink. But let me just say this. I’ve established a routine for telling stories that is about doing all this historical research. I literally like the act of researching. It’s not just for me, it’s for an end, but I love it. And it occupies a massive amount of time and brain space for me when I’m making a film.
If I was making a contemporary film, what am I supposed to do with myself? Obsess over wallpaper swatches, until my eyes fall out? It’s just not interesting. For whatever reason, it just does not inspire me. And you can’t shoot something that doesn’t inspire you.
It was hard for me and [cinematographer] Jarin [Blaschke] to get into the Knattleikr [an early Viking ball game] sequence, because we were the losers in school, and we didn’t play sports, and we never were interested in it. We got there, and I like the sequence, but I could never get passionate about photographing a cell phone.
Are you marinating in a bunch of historical periods at once? Or is it more like, “I’m obsessed with the Late Bronze Age collapse right now. I’m just going to read everything I can and maybe there’s a story that comes out of it”?
It’s sort of the latter.
So you’re in the Elizabethan phase right now.
My wife is really, really sick and tired of Tudor and Stuart music playing in the house. I’ll say that.
Lots of lutes?
Lots of lutes. Lots of lutes.
Are you dead set on doing something indie for your next film?
Right now, I definitely want to do something smaller, where it won’t be as painful, or I’ll have full control. There’s always give and take and studio notes. There always is. There was on The Witch. I didn’t have this much gray hair when we wrapped photography. It’s all from post-production.
So are you pleased with the final cut?
In a word, yes. But I think this movie was so big compared to my experience level, that there’s things I didn’t execute as well as I wished I could have, just because I didn’t have the skills to do it.
Now that you’re three features in, looking at your career long term, are there directors whose careers you admire and want to emulate in any way?
The times are so different now, compared to the directors that I particularly admire. So, no. I mean, yeah, but I can’t say any of that shit. You know?
Why not?
Because I like all these dead people. But also, everyone has to find their own path. When King Arthur’s knights go to find the grail, they all have to take their own path through the woods and you’re not allowed to take another knight’s path. Also, take Bergman—got to make a ton of movies that didn’t do well. They kept letting him make movies, because there weren’t that many people who wanted to make movies in Sweden at the time. How different is that to how I came up in the industry, where everyone wants to be a filmmaker?
What would your advice to young filmmakers be?
Work so hard, you can’t believe it. So much of this career is luck, so you have to work hard enough that luck can happen. And then relationships are really important. I don’t mean that in a fake, shallow, LA way. I mean, find people who you like working with and work with each other and listen to each other and respect each other and be honest with each other. Then, finally, find your own voice and stick with it.
When you have spare time, what are you reading and watching and listening to?
Antiques Roadshow helps me go to bed, so that’s cool. But I’m always chasing something. I’m always trying to find some obscure movie that hopefully has some bit of gold that I’m looking for.
You recently became a father. How has that changed how you work or the stories you want to tell?
When I made The Witch, a lot of people said, “You would never have killed the baby in the first 10 minutes and photographed it like that if you had been a father.” And I would like to say that, as a father, I like it even more, because I’m certain it works now. It was only hypothetical before.
I mean, it changes everything, doesn’t it? It’s hard to articulate. I can tell you that I cry at fucking car commercials now. But I can still make a brutal movie.
This interview has been edited and condensed.