Robert Eggers on Understanding the Viking Mindset in The Northman

Robert Eggers has established a unique and identifiable lane as the foremost contemporary purveyor of mythological, folkloric storytelling on screen. An obsessive penchant for period-specific detail provides a unique grounding to the archetypal narratives that he stages actross these olden settings. And after bringing to life the folk horror of 17th-century New England in The Witch and Melville-tinged maritime terror in The Lighthouse, Eggers now goes both bigger and broader in The Northman.

This big-budget Viking epic marks Eggers’s grandest canvas to date. That financial support enables him to delve deep into the particularities of Nordic culture in all aspects of production. It’s a captivatingly realized vision of what will feel like an otherwise familiar narrative. After all, the saga of Alexander Skarsgård’s Prince Amleth, who’s hell-bent on avenging his father’s death and reclaiming the throne from his covetous uncle, is quite literally the stuff of legend. With Eggers martialing such gigantic scale and scope on screen, the story feels larger than life—just like the long cultural shadow of its animating myth.

I spoke with Eggers prior to the theatrical release of The Northman in the United States. Our conversation covered how he came to comprehend Viking mentality and morality, as well as how he executes his meticulous method on set.

You’ve talked about how your films depict people who think and behave differently than we do. How do you make that intelligible and emotionally resonant for contemporary viewers?

I honestly just try to get inside the heads of these people who think and behave differently than we do and understand why. I don’t understand how, if I was alive back then, I could think and believe that way too. I think if you present it without judgment, then we can see ourselves in that. Like, I don’t condone human sacrifice, but I can understand how it made sense to these people. I can understand why in the Viking funeral they sacrifice an enslaved young woman because the guy who died didn’t have a wife, and he needs to have a wife in the afterlife.

The Northman doesn’t sanitize the way Vikings glorified violence and celebrated patriarchy. Do you think seeing folklore like Amleth in this original context like this helps the story make more sense than when it’s contemporized, even in things as great as Hamlet and The Lion King?

Well, this is certainly not a better story than Hamlet, and I won’t even say it’s a better story than The Lion King. But I think the reason why that story works, and why it keeps being retold, is because it’s archetypal and it’s human. We all can connect to it. This Viking version is a way of telling it where the Hamlet character knows exactly what he wants, and he’s after vengeance. And that takes a toll on him, emotionally, whereas in the Jacobean, Shakespearean Hamlet, just the idea of whether he’s going to do it or not takes a toll on him. I think they’re all valid, and there will be more Hamlets. Even after Shakespeare is nearly forgotten, maybe there will be futuristic cyborgs doing their own contemporary version of a Hamlet-like story.

All three of your features end with the protagonists transfiguring and entering into some kind of liminal state. Is that saying something larger about how story elements of myth and folklore remain stable across time and culture?

Everyone ends up naked and crazy. Maybe that says more about me than mythology. [laughs]

Given how far removed the worlds of your films are from the present day, how do you direct performances inside that framework?

It depends. I mean, Alex [Skarsgård] really was obsessed with Neil Price’s lectures—Neil is the Viking archaeologist who consulted on the film—and his book Children of Ash and Elm. He was really wanting to dig into that and just get into the mindset. But sometimes, you just need to say, “Don’t blink, don’t move your eyebrows, say your line faster.” It depends.

Is your insistence on historical accuracy in everything from design to dialogue mostly for you and the crew, or does it also have an effect on the actors?

Of course. I mean, the hope is that they don’t have to use their imaginations; they just get to be because they’re surrounded 360 [degrees] in the Viking age. I remember on The Witch, a pocket in the early modern English and New English culture was like a pouch that’s outside of your clothing. And I made sure that everyone’s pocket was filled with what exactly would have been in their pocket so that they can really be the character. But after about a week, everyone was just carrying cigarettes and cell phones around.

Does your background in sets and costumes from the theater days still exert its influence over your directing style?

I think it just helps me collaborate more closely and easily with my production designer and costume designer. I mean, I’m interested in it more than some other directors. But another director could have the same quality of production design and costume design being less interested in it if they’re working with Craig [Lathrop] and Linda [Muir].

At what point in the development of The Northman was it decided that this film was going to necessitate more mobile camerawork than your prior features?

I think we knew that pretty much from the beginning because this was like a natural progression of the work that [cinematographer] Jarin Blaschke and I were doing. And, also, we knew that this film wasn’t going to have the kind of slow arthouse pace of the first two films. Part of that was going to be a more mobile camera to keep the energy going.

When you peel back all these layers of civilization and socialization, what has that revealed to you about the essence of people?

The Viking Age and culture is interesting, and I learned a lot of stuff. They’re incredible poets, incredible visual artists, and—from what we think—incredible musicians. They were a culture of cultural fusion. Alex’s character wears a piece of Viking-made jewelry where the medallion is an Arab coin. Because of their technologically advanced ships and trade roads, the world of “Dark Age Europe” and Eurasia, the globe was much smaller than we would have imagined. But yeah, it is, as you’re suggesting, a patriarchal society that just completely obsessed with horrible, inescapable violence. And clearly, we have not changed in a thousand years.