Alexander Skarsgård & 'The Northman' Director Break Down Amleth's Return as a Viking

As Willem Defoe reminded us

when we were doing press with Ben Rome...

Don't bitch.

You're not coal miners.

[both laugh]

'Cause we're like, Ooh, it's so hard.

Our jobs were difficult.

And he's like, Nah. [Robert laughs]

Good point Will.

Hi, I'm Robert Eggers,

the director and co-writer of The Northman.

And I'm Alexander Skarsgård,

I play Amleth in The Northman.

And this is Notes On A Scene.

I will save you, Mother. [waves sloshing]

I will kill you, Fjölnir. [waves sloshing]

I will avenge you, Father. [waves sloshing]

I will save you, Mother.

I will kill you, Fjölnir.

Young Amleth is an 11 year old rowing away

and he has this mantra and it's clear that he wants to

avenge his father, save his mother, kill his uncle.

But then, over the years, he's lost his way

and he's become this mercenary.

This is the Hakuna Matata part of The Lion King,

only with a lot more killing and blood.

I will avenge you, Father. [waves sloshing]

I will save you, Mother. [waves sloshing]

I will kill you, Fjölnir. [waves sloshing]

And that shot is done completely practically,

it was shot in a parking lot in front of the ocean,

because the sea conditions were so bad

that we couldn't put him safely in the water.

So we just cheated it.

I did not know that.

You didn't know that?

No. Yeah.

So there's guys,

you know, at first it was basically water guns

and shit and buckets, like throwing water and spraying.

Wow. Yeah.

To make it look cool.

I will avenge you, Father. [waves sloshing]

I will save you, Mother. [waves sloshing]

I will kill you, Fjölnir. [waves sloshing]

Pay attention to this necklace. [laughs]

We were working with the finest historians

and archeologists in the field of Viking studies

on this movie

and this is the most historically accurate

Viking movie ever made.

Viking jewelry. So this is a piece

of Viking jewelry

that is made from an Arab silver coin.

And one of the things that really fascinated me about

Viking culture when I started to learn about it

was that it's a culture of cultural fusion.

And that is a kid who knew how to row really well,

way out in the ocean.

[dramatic music]

The second act of the film takes place

in the land of the Rus.

And originally,

when I wrote my first treatment and sent it to Alex,

the second act took place in the British Isles.

And Alex said...

No! [Robert laughs]

He said, We've seen it a lot.

You know?

And If we can go East it will be a lot more interesting.

But when Alex suggested it, many years ago,

I was incredibly excited.

I love Ukrainian and Transcarpathian folklore,

so this was really interesting to explore.

The Rus were Swedes that came over

to what is now modern day Ukraine and Russia

and spent time there and,

over generations,

kinda became a new kind of Viking.

From an area called Roslagen,

which is just north of Stockholm,

so, at least the theory,

is that Rus is derived from Roslag's men,

Rusen from that area basically.

[intense music]

Right here,

the commander of this group of vikings is a woman.

You might have seen History Channel's Vikings,

which has hordes and hordes of female warriors,

which is rewriting history, it is not true.

There's one grave of a female Viking commander,

so we based this character on her.

But to think about what this woman must have been like,

to have the ego strength and the command

to be a female commander

in this insanely patriarchal society

where it's illegal

to wear the clothes of the opposite gender,

she must have been a pretty spectacular person.

These flowers I think are like milkweed.

This kind of composition is based on

an Ivan Shishkin painting,

a 19th century Russian painter.

Not a lot of allusions to classical art in this movie,

but here is one.

'Cause we were tryna find a way to make this

sort of not particularly stunning landscape

be a little special,

and those flowers did something for it.

But you'll see that this scene

is shot in one long take

and you'll see how it develops

into something potentially more interesting.

[intense music]

These longships are very much the size

of the kind of longships that would've been

in these Eastern European rivers.

A little smaller than war ships for the sea.

[intense music]

And here are our berserker warriors, for the most part,

in the berserker ship.

This is a Robert Eggers movie,

so we're not being told everything.

Like literally everything here on the ship

is as historically accurate as it could possibly be.

The type of wood, the way it was built, the nails,

everything is authentic.

It's quite a shallow boat,

so it's surprisingly fast and easy to row.

Doing it in sync? [Robert laughs]

Not easy.

And also, as you see in the beginning of the shot,

it's quite an elaborate move,

it's on a crane and it comes out and it swoops around

and it finds us.

And also, the relationship between the two longships,

to time that and get it right,

while trying to sync the rowing

was monumentally challenging.

[Robert] And also, we were tryna to fit a camera dolly

on a Viking longship,

which is not easy.

So, this guy right here,

'cause this shot ends up with a closeup on Alex,

this guy had to duck out of the way

and throw his oar-

Throw himself into the water.

Into the water [laughs]

in order to make this shot work as it continues on.

Fun fact: mostly actors here, but this guy,

Jacques from Poland,

gonna do a little heart here,

because he is an incredible stuntman

and we also worked together on Tarzan

many years ago

and Jacques did a lot of the stuff that I couldn't do,

which was quite a bit. [Robert laughs]

Jacques, together with Mark Slaughter,

who is also on The Northman and Tarzan.

He's a very handsome man

and an incredible stuntman.

[intense music]

[Robert] This dude's getting nervous,

you can see it in his eyes 'cause he's gotta duck,

there you go,

you can kinda see him duck now that I've mentioned it.

And I'm just thinking,

Don't fuck up, don't fuck up,

don't fuck up, don't fuck up.

And I'm just lookin' at the oars around me.

But when the guy in front of me ducks

and throws his oar into the water,

I'm lost, I can't really... [Robert laughs]

'Cause that was the one I was lookin' at, to time it.

So right here,

well you can almost see the confusion in my eyes.

[Robert laughs]

I'm terrified.

Because, again, you don't wanna mess up.

It's such a long, difficult shot.

It takes a while.

'Cause you've got two longships, with no engines obviously,

they have to kind of

turn around and get back and then camera,

it took three days to reset.

And if you notice, in case you weren't sure

by the card that said- Who is this guy?

Many years later.

Oh, it's the same amulet.

Whoa.

He stole the amulet from the young boy.

[Robert laughs]

This piece of music was one of the hardest pieces

for me and Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough

to get on the same page about,

those are the composers.

It's really tricky to find the right energy

because it's this really slow-moving shot,

but we need to have it feel really muscular and intense,

but also we're about to do two high-octane scenes

right after this,

so we can't also go too far.

But I should also mention that the lead instruments

in this cue and all the others

are Viking Age instruments.

Alex's tunic, based on a tunic that was found

in a grave site in Eastern Europe,

I believe.

And Nille Glaesel, who was the Viking clothing expert,

who was working with Linda Muir,

said, Even in the living history

and experimental archeology community,

this particular tunic would be incredibly rare.

This is quite a new piece of Viking archeology

and we were very excited to have it in the film.

This headband is made out of

something called tablet weaving.

I asked Nille,

Could any of the beserkers have leather headbands?

And she was like, Yeah, if it was fucking Woodstock.

[laughs]

And she was very insistent that it would be tablet weaving

and that was what is accurate.

If there is one thing that is like the least accurate

in the movie,

it might be the hairstyles,

not the beard, but the hair.

Basically, the hairstyles

from Iceland to Eastern Europe

would be kind of similar,

but I really needed to show these different cultures.

We had this Oseberg carving from this burial in Norway.

There's Vikings with beards and bowl cuts carved into it.

We kind of know that this bowl cut style

was something that they really did.

We gave this a valiant try.

We didn't end up with that look.

No. 'Cause it just wasn't working.

It looked too silly on Alex.

Did some Vikings have long hair like this?

Absolutely.

But it's not as ubiquitous as it is in this film.

You don't have to work hard to suspend disbelief,

as an actor when you step into this world,

onto this longship,

or onto Fjölnir's farm,

which also is very historically accurate.

[Robert laughs] Built the right, exactly,

with four, five Viking scholars, historians, archeologists.

Which type of wood would they use?

What would the positioning be between the longhouse

and the other houses?

And the fact that nothing is, even by a decade,

nothing is anachronistic,

it's all legit.

So, you throw this on,

and then you step into this world,

and it's not a set,

it's all real,

you walk around it.

And again, these scenes are shot

in one long, continuous take,

which means you move around 360

and you're very much immersed in that world.

So I basically didn't have to act in this movie.

You're just out there,

you're doin' it.

[intense music]

[Vikings yelling]

It was really hard

for the stunt guys who played the fishermen

who fall over here,

because they're all stunt guys

and they're used to doing cool stuff

and they wanted to like,

they were like, Phwoar,

and do these like pirouettes

and stuff off the boat.

And I kept saying,

Pretend like you've never seen a movie before

in your life.

Pretend you've never seen anything.

You've never seen your reflection before.

Like, Don't, you just need to die like a peasant.

[laughs] You know?

It was difficult.

But I think that that death was really nice.

And that young man, who also got shot,

he's a very good sailor.

Was he the one who was rowing in the-

Yeah, he was the one who was rowing in the wide shot

of the other scene, yeah.

And so, for that, he's rewarded by a swift death.

[Alexander] Yeah.

[intense music]

These shields were all made

like the way the shields would've been made.

A lot of time, usually Viking shields in TV shows and movies

are made out of fiberglass,

but this was made out of wood and hide

and constructed just the way it should've been,

all the shields were

done that way.

All these guys are huge.

Real Vikings definitely,

the skeletal remains tell us

they had really broad shoulders,

but they were probably, in reality, leaner

than we made, like our beserkers.

[Alexander] It's not very efficient to carry that.

[Robert] Yeah, it's not efficient.

[Alexander] This scene was obviously very important

because it's the first time you see Amleth

as an adult,

so you meet him for the first time

and it's been 20 years since he was a little boy.

This technically long, difficult shot, with a crane

and, again, us trying not to hit the oars on each other,

and fumbling, like, Oh God.

And make sure that we're kinda somewhat straight line,

because the camera would end up in a very specific spot

on the river,

so that we didn't drift.

[Robert] They need to look like the elite warriors,

like they've been doing this their entire lives.

They needed to look like a well-oiled machine.

When the shot starts, we're all scramblin'

and we're like, Hey [mimics stressed chattering].

And then when we feel a camera come out,

we're like, Okay. [grunts]

And then we're just like, Okay, hope it works,

hope it works, hope it works.

And then-

From my perspective, the thing that was really frustrating

was that because it was so tight in that boat

with the camera dolly,

is that a lot of times,

all these guys would be doing such a great job rowing

but because it was just so tight it was so easy

to get a camera bump and to mess up the shot,

even if these guys were doing a perfect job.

It was really, this was a really hard shot

to camera operate.

'Cause usually, we're working on a technocrane,

which is like a telescopic crane,

or on a rigid crane arm,

with a remote control camera head.

But here, it was just a guy, on a piece of wood,

pushing the dolly,

operating old school,

so there was a lot more room for

human error.

Jarin Blaschke, my DP,

is very much an authorial voice.

For this film we storyboarded every scene to death.

Sometimes, it can be just a sketch,

but with this movie,

most of the movie is like graphic novel level specificity,

because this scene demands the stunt guys

all knowing what they're doing,

the marine department all knowing what they're doing.

On this boat is a mixture of actors, stunt guys,

and then professional rowers,

all mixed together.

And an idiot. [Robert laughs]

There's a tremendous amount of coordination,

everyone needs to be on the same page,

so the storyboards help communicate to everybody

what we're doing.

This shot in particular,

is really Jarin's.

Jarin was like, Do you think we can start on the shore

and then land on a boat?

I was like, Ah, no. But-

But let's do it. Let's do it.

[both laugh]

Every day was the hardest day on set.

I second that. [Both laugh]

But that's what we signed up for!

Exactly!

[Robert laughs]

It's a god-damned Viking movie, so,

yeah, it's supposed to be hard and painful,

but quite exhilarating.