OUT 08 APR
Water, water, everywhere… Director Robert Eggers braves the elements while making his new movie.
ACCORDING TO THE Northman’s official synopsis, Robert Eggers’ third film after the one-two, wham-bam, holy-shit attack of The Witch and The Lighthouse is “an epic revenge thriller that explores how far a Viking prince will go to seek justice for his murdered father”. “It’s Viking Hamlet,” says Eggers, when we ask him to expand. “That’s the simplest way to put it.” Although it’s not quite that simple.
Eggers’ films are always steeped in research, all period-accurate, and all feel something like time-travel. The Witch was like a medieval artefact, The Lighthouse was like a weird piece of film unearthed from the 1890s. And from everything he tells us, The Northman will follow suit. Its roots are in Amleth, a 12th-century Norse story that inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet — although Eggers has dug even deeper, explaining that Amleth was itself inspired by “a lost version much earlier that would have been written in old Icelandic — and then there was a verbal tale even before then. We’re not trying to do that exactly, but it is something more ancient-feeling, hopefully.”