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As Eggers puts it: We did not have the experience to be making this film.
If something went wrong, they just had to start again from the beginning.
Being one of the first movies to start production under then-novel COVID protocols.
At first glance, the style of the Icelandic sagas is well suited to cinema.
As in a screenplay, Sjon said, characters are only developed through their words and their actions.
They never reveal anything of the inner life of the characters.
His and Eggerss shooting script matched the sagas dry, emotionless way of storytelling.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be a case oftoo muchhistorical accuracy.
Test audiences were baffled by early cuts of the film.
The studio, of course, had notes.
Everything from Amleths motivations to the concept of Valhalla needed to be more legible.
However, the film had already been shot.
The solution was found in the recording booth.
Sjon called it the toughest crossword puzzle you’re free to imagine.
Youre like, Okay, weve got 18 syllables.
The fifth syllable has to be a T because he enunciates that T so well, Eggers said.
Still, rewriting was painstaking work.
But to Sjon, the difficulty was the point.
Lathrop had worked onThe WitchandThe Lighthouseand was used to Eggerss exacting standards of historical realism.
By early March, Lathrop had spent nine months diving into the world of the Vikings.
It was nice to see it, and smell it, he said.
We built everything, Lathrop said.
A man in the Czech Republic constructed working Viking longships.
Some of the locations were so remote, they even had to construct their own roads.
Lathrop had never built a turf house before, and barely knew where to start.
No one in Ireland cut the thick pieces of turf the way they needed.
Then, on March 12, the film went on hold, with no immediate plans for returning.
There was a real possibility Lathropsmonths of work were for nothing.
There wasnt any rain, Lathrop said.
It was all dying.
Fortunately, Lathrop got permission to hire a greensman.
This turned out to be money well spent.
By the time we got back, it had really settled in.
It didnt feel as fresh as it did before, Lathrop said.
Hell of a way to get there.
I dont recommend having a global pandemic to allow your sets to mature.
You could ask a Viking, What is your religion?
They wouldnt have understood, he said.
Because to them there is no such thing as the supernatural.
If you asked, Do you believe in elves?
its like saying, Do you believe in mountains?
Of course you do.
Price specializes in material culture, the physical objects that give us a clue into the Norsemens daily lives.
Its a very vibrant world, he said.
They decorated everything, including human skin.
Their burials are like little plays, and every one is different.
Repeating the level of accuracy asThe WitchorThe Lighthousewas never going to be possible.
Its 1,000 years in the past.
We simply cant get that resolution of detail, Price said.
Theres always this gap between what we all want, and what we can do.
He pointed to something as basic as a banquet scene, a tropeThe Northman does not spare us.
Theres one fundamental problem: We dont know what Viking tables look like.
Obviously there are legs, presumably theyre flat on top.
But exactly how do people sit?
Do they have an order of precedence around a table?
If we left blank everything that we didnt know, theyd be wandering out in a fog.
But were fencing in those guesses as tight as we can, Price said.
The Day We Battled the Tides
Robert Eggers did not grow up a Viking fanboy.
But on a trip to Iceland in 2016, he became fascinated by the landscape.
That led him to the sagas, and those led him to makingThe Northman.
On the shore are two sailors lugging a rowboat out of the water.
Its a relatively basic shot.
And yet it took around 35 takes to get right.
The first issue was the horses.
The second was the tides.
(That scene was done on a soundstage, but still, not easy.)
So many of the shots where it doesnt look like its raining, its raining.
If that sounds suspiciously close to a complaint, know that its not.
You cant make this movie in L.A., Eggers said.
He pointed to the opening of 1958sThe Vikings.
They might as well have shot it in California, Eggers said.
For us, we needed that misery.
It was the job of the visual-effects team, led by supervisor Angela Barson, to stitch them together.
Her work began well before post-production.
Whereas Im on set going, you’re gonna wanna decidenow.
They may get a take and go, Brilliant, loved everything.
And then Im like, No, doesnt work for the blend, Barson said.
I had to know I could make every stitch work seamlessly once we got back into the office.
Understandably, this is not what a director wants to hear.
Even more stressful was the toll resetting would have on the cast and crew.
The raid begins with the berserkers running towards the village wall, then climbing over it.
They needed to find a stitch point.
I was quite impressed with what the artists did, Barson said.
The biggest compliment for us is that nobody really knows what weve done.
I come from the school of Ridley Scott and Tony Scott; wed chuck cameras everywhere, Smiff said.
With a single camera, and long takes, his job became much more complex.
On a safety level, more takes meant more opportunities for injuries.
It livens the whole page up.
Step one of the Knattleikr scene was coming up with the rules.
Precious little information exists about the game, but the version in theNorthmanisa mix of field hockey and rugby.
As originally envisioned, a player needed to be on the ball to be hit.
That got boring, so we just started smashing everybody, Smiff said.
The sequence was filmed on a remote location high up in the Morne mountains.
(Other, luckier people got to helicopter.)
When they got up there, they had to deal with the rain.
One day, the flooding got so bad they couldnt shoot.
We were washed out, Smiff said.
We lost our pitch.
I thought waterfowl were going to come down on it.
When the cameras were rolling, it didnt get much easier.
A stuntman got injured on the very first day of shooting.
There was a COVID scare.
Because of the rain, the ball kept slipping out of the players hands.
And, being on top of a mountain, it was also bitterly cold.
At times Smiff sounds like a coach ruminating on the big game.
I think if we had a little more time … he said, before catching himself.
I think it still sold well.
I just wanted a few more hits and turns.
Maybe thats where I wanted my inserts a head here, legs going up in the air.
I wanted to go the whole nine yards, didnt I?
Technically, it wasnt the most difficult scene, Skarsgard said.
But what made that one tough was the transformation.
The characters go into a trance and then they turn into their spirit animals.
He compared it to a Frances Bacon painting: They revert back to something primal.
Over the course of a nights shooting, the actor and his co-stars powered themselves on pure adrenaline.
Finally, after more than 20 takes, they got the shot.
They would have to go back.
On the walk to the set, Skarsgard remembers the 12 drained berserkers crying like children.
But they didnt have a choice.
They stepped back into the pelts, and prepared to go again.
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