If you’ve seen eitherThe Witch(TheVVitchfor the real stans) orThe Lighthouse(The Lighthouse, Ye Salty Sea Dog!for the real stans), you know just how exacting filmmakerRobert Eggers' visions are. He got his start as a production designer, and these lower-budget art-horror freakouts pop in large part because you can feel Eggers' literal fingertips on every surface. But for his next film,The Northman, that type of process has to change. Because, as he explained to Film Independent Coffee Talk (viaIndieWire), it’s the largest-scale film he’s made yet.
For the past five months, Eggers has been hard at work in pre-production onThe Northman, helping with sets, prosthetics, costume pieces, and more. Typically, Eggers himself would have done all of this kind of work on his own. But for a film of this scale, that was simply impossible: “The scale is so huge and there are so many more locations and things that I couldn’t do everything or know every prop myself. That’s been a challenge with the new movie.”
While Eggers is no secret to “production challenges” while making his movies (i.e. filming in period accurate puritan America inThe Witch, filming in a damn lighthouse inThe Lighthouse),The Northman, a military epic about a Nordic prince on the quest to avenge his father’s murder, is a whole ‘nother ball of wax:
There’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films. There’s a lot more storyboarding. Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time.
I gotta say – moving from a two-hander to a film where no scene isn’t either “on a boat” or “have a lot of extras” is quite the move for Eggers. But he and his crew (many of which are returning from his previous films) were all set and ready to start shooting. His actors, includingAlexander Skarsgård,Nicole Kidman,Bill Skarsgård,Willem Dafoe, andAnya Taylor-Joy, began showing up for costume and makeup tests. And then, as we all know, the coronavirus shut everything down a week before shooting. In the mean time, Eggers and a small crew continue to work: “Armor makers are working on armor for the characters. Prosthetics are being made. I’m doing my work with the DP [Jarin Blaschke] and the storyboard artist. There are things that need to be happening. Our location manager is constantly checking in on the locations, some of which are just now semi-built sets.”
Once all of this blows over, we’ll be excited to keep you updated onThe Northman, Eggers’ most ambitious project to date. For more on this maestro, check out ouranalysis of its wacko ending.
