The Hardest Day on Set: The Northman

Dozens of extras, nonstop rain, and a village full of animals— what could go wrong?

- Nate Jones

WHEN THE DIRECTOR Robert Eggers announced that his next film, The Northman, would be a loose adaptation of the medieval Icelandic saga that inspired Hamlet, fans knew they were in for an exhaustively researched Viking epic: nasty, brutish, and long. Eggers’s first two films were chamber-piece time capsules. The Witch (2016) takes place in Puritan Massachusetts, while 2019’s The Lighthouse is a psychodrama about turn-of-the-last-century lighthouse keepers. But shooting The Northman across Ireland and in Iceland meant working at a scale he never had before. As Eggers puts it, “We did not have the experience to be making this film.” Besides the painstaking period detail and battle sequences that demanded everything from Alexander Skarsgård, who plays the lead, Eggers’s aesthetic added to the complexity. He and his cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, prefer long takes, dense with action, to make the audience “feel like the world exists well beyond the limits of the frame,” Blaschke says. If something went wrong, they just had to start again from the beginning. Another hurdle? It was one of the first movies to start production under covid protocols. And they did it all while navigating one more treacherous obstacle: Irish weather.

The Day We Raced Against the Tide

Eggers did not grow up a Viking fanboy. Warriors were a little too macho for a kid who loved history and the theater. As he got older, he says, the “right-wing misappropriation of Viking culture” was an added turnoff. But then he took a trip to Iceland and became fascinated by the landscape. That led him to the sagas, and those led him to making The Northman.