The Northman’s Robert Eggers on giving in to digital effects: ‘I whip myself every night’
Anyone who’s looked into the behind-the-scenes processes on Robert Eggers’ movies knows that authenticity and strict realism are paramount obsessions in his work. 2015’s The Witch required five years of research into period dialogue, clothes, tools, and architecture, and Eggers had his craft team build the primary set using hand tools and materials his 17th-century characters would have used. For 2019’s The Lighthouse, he used actual camera lenses from 1912 and the 1930s and built a period-authentic lighthouse to get the tight, suffocating spaces he wanted.
And his new drama The Northman, billed as “the most accurate Viking movie ever made,” involved meticulous research into everything from helmet styles to what kind of animal leather actual Vikings would have used in clothing. This is one reason a shot from the trailers, in which warrior protagonist Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) catches a spear thrown by an enemy from atop a fort palisade and throws it back, is particularly startling to see. As ridiculous as it might be to assume any other director would actually pull off that stunt in reality, Polygon had to ask Robert Eggers whether he actually did it.
The answer is no; that spear trick was handled with CG. “Somebody threw a spear from the palisade onto the ground,” Eggers tells Polygon. “And then Alex, in some takes, had a spear the whole time that he would hold up and then throw. And then with CG, you take one out and put the other in. That kind of situation. So there was some physical reality to the shot.”
Talking about the use of digital effects in The Northman, Eggers sounds a bit frustrated and defensive, as if these kinds of questions could only be accusations that he’s somehow violated his ethic. “I do get on
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