The American film-maker behind arthouse hits The Witch and The Lighthouse on how he came to create The Northman, a blood-soaked Viking blockbuster starring Alexander Skarsgård
In his first film, the $4m Sundance sensation The Witch, Robert Eggers etched a human battle between Puritanism and the occult in 17th-century New England, written entirely in early modern English. He followed it up with The Lighthouse, a surrealist survival nightmare, soaked in sea salt and maritime slang, jumbling toxic masculinity, fart jokes and octopus-punching. This is the kind of film-making upon which auteurist cults are built; but it does not, conventionally, inspire Hollywood studios to write the director in question a fat cheque for a blockbuster.
And yet. The Northman, Eggers’s vast, bonkers, exhilarating third feature, was made for the price of several Witches and Lighthouses, but hasn’t come at much cost to the 38-year-old film-maker’s strange, distinct sensibility. A pounding, weather-lashed, brutal Viking revenge tale rooted in the Scandinavian folk legend of Amleth, it significantly ups the action ante for a director whose previous most elaborate set piece in that regard was a homoerotic wrestling scene between two crazed lighthouse-keepers played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.
