REVENGERS ASSEMBLE

After establishing himself as a true visionary with The Witch and The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers is amping up the scale and the action for Viking epic The Northman. Here, the director and his starry cast, including Alexander Skarsgård and Anya TaylorJoy, tell Total Film how they raided Hollywood to make such a vast, brutal, uncompromising saga of cold-blooded revenge.

- JAMIE GRAHAM

When I first thought, ‘I want to make a Viking movie,’ I knew three things,” explains writer/director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse), with the hint of a smile. “I knew it needs to take place mostly in Iceland, it needs to be a revenge story, and it needs to have a naked sword fight on a volcano.”

Well, that’s us sold. And so was star/ producer Alexander Skarsgård, who met with Eggers back when he’d made only The Witch. Their lunch was to discuss other possible projects, but all that was shelved when they discovered their shared passion for Norse mythology. Eggers had only immersed himself recently, after visiting Iceland with his wife, clinical psychologist Alexandra Shaker, who then used her spouse’s admiration for the VistaVision landscapes to bombard him with Icelandic Sagas and Old Norse literature. Skarsgård, meanwhile, had dreamt of making an epic Viking movie since he was a boy growing up in Stockholm. He’d bounced ideas with Danish producer Lars Knudsen (The Witch, Midsommar), and read Prose Edda, an Icelandic 13th-century textbook that is considered the most detailed source for modern knowledge of Norse mythology.

“We were trying to find the perfect story,” explains Skarsgård. “A lot of the Icelandic Sagas revolve around a family drama. It’s a lot about revenge. So we knew that we wanted something big and epic, but at the core of it, it had to be a family drama.”