Robert Eggers on ‘The Northman’: Directing Is an ‘Insane’ Job

Is Robert Eggers an endangered species?

The 38-year-old director cut his teeth making stylized art-house films like the horror-tinged fable “The Witch,” which won Eggers the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival, and “The Lighthouse,” a black-and-white mind-bender that starred Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. This is normally the inflection point when an idiosyncratic filmmaker either smooths out his sensibilities to make a superhero movie or decamps to a streaming service in search of creative control at a bigger budget.

Instead, Eggers has mounted “The Northman,” a $70 million Viking saga that debuts Friday in theaters. The film stars Alexander Skarsgard as Amleth, a sword-wielding prince seeking revenge on the uncle who killed his father (Ethan Hawke) and absconded with his mother (Nicole Kidman) to a remote Icelandic village. Though the narrative is more straightforward than in Eggers’ previous films, the filmmaking is no less high-end.

“You have to have hubris to be a director,” Eggers told me over coffee in Los Angeles. “It’s an insane occupation: You have to deny reality and make your own.”

Certainly, nothing was easy about making the“The Northman,” from staging its large-scale, outdoor battles to the director’s clashes with production company New Regency about creative control. Even when the film was ready to shoot in March 2020, the pandemic delayed the production by several months.

Still, that last setback came with a few small advantages: The outdoor sets were allowed to weather in a realistic way, and the Viking beards had time to grow longer, though Eggers didn’t let his own carefully manicured facial hair get out of hand: “The director should never have the longest beard,” he told me. “I learned it when I was shooting ‘The Lighthouse’: You need to have the alpha beard.”

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

On my way to this interview, I passed two billboards for your movie. I’ve got to imagine that’s a new experience for you.

It’s definitely surreal. I didn’t expect in the past 10 or 15 years of my life that I would make the kind of film that would have a billboard like that.

Why not?

Because ever since I took up less mainstream interests around 10 years old, I didn’t think that I would be making a film for a broad audience. I’m excited to have done it, and it was a deliberate choice.

Were you surprised by the audience that found your first two films?

I felt that “The Witch” [2016] would get some distribution and hopefully get enough good reviews that maybe someone would let me make another movie. I didn’t expect a boring pilgrim horror movie to be successful, that’s for sure.

You find your movie boring?

I hate “The Witch,” but that’s another story. But in theory, no, I don’t find a movie like that boring. In fact, I watch movies that are much, much more boring than my two films with great pleasure.

But it does sound like you have the self-awareness to be able to say, “This is how my work might be perceived by a mainstream audience.”

“The Witch” got a lot of [expletive] for false marketing of a horror movie. I mean, I think it’s a horror movie, but I can understand how people looking for a certain formula weren’t satisfied. But with “The Northman,” it’s challenging because I’m trying to do both.

So how do you thread that needle? Where do your sensibilities intersect with the mainstream?

You want something to be familiar enough that people can get it, but different enough that it’s something new, and I think that’s what everyone was after with this film. And what was great for me is that the source materials are really readable and approachable texts. I know that kids aren’t flocking to Barnes & Noble to get their copies of the Icelandic sagas, but a lot of medieval literature is pretty weird and mystical and out there, and this stuff isn’t.

Still, it’s increasingly rare for a filmmaker with your background to graduate to such a big-budget film unless they’re taking on some pre-existing franchise.

I knew I wasn’t going to have final cut because of the size of the film. That was a risk that I was willing to take, but postproduction was hard because I had a pressure and a voice from the studio that I’ve never had before. On “The Witch,” I had notes from the investors — good and bad — and same with “The Lighthouse” [2019], but here, there was a lot of pressure. Sjon, my co-writer, said, “It’s our responsibility to interpret the studio notes in a way that we’re proud of. And if we can’t do that, then we’re not working hard enough.”

I also think that without pressure from the studio, I couldn’t have delivered what I pitched, which was “the most entertaining Robert Eggers movie,” because entertaining is not necessarily my first instinct. In fact, with my first two films, it was my fifth or 15th priority, whereas here it was No. 1. In the end, even though it…