ENCOUNTER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
From a colonial-era New England village of 2015’s The Witch to a gusty coastal island in the 1890s as seen in 2019’s The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers is cinema’s chief excavator of the past. On his new film, The Northman, he goes farther than ever in space and time, travelling back to Iceland at the turn of the 10th century for a Viking fable of vengeance. Working with the highest budget of his career and a full stable of bona fide movie stars, this is his most ambitious undertaking yet — not that levelling up will keep him from indulging in his obsession with obscurity.
LWLies: What was the first thing you did to make The Northman?
Eggers: Several years ago, as Brooklyn hipsters were wont to do, my wife and I took a trip to Iceland. The landscapes completely blew me away. Having had no interest in the Viking Age before that, I suddenly had to make. I told him, ‘I’ve got an idea for a Viking movie,’ which wasn’t completely true. So I went home, wrote a pitch, and the rest is history. Their history.
