How The Northman director Robert Eggers balances being a family man, and a Viking visionary

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Filmmaker Robert Eggers has dealt with vengeful witches, howling mermaids and, with his new epic The Northman, bloodthirsty Vikings. But, like any parent, sometimes all it takes is a child to throw you off.

During my first attempt to interview Eggers the other week, a Zoom call held just before The Northman hit theatres, our conversation was interrupted by the cries of Eggers’s young son – the filmmaker had just returned from an intense publicity tour and my questions were interrupting some much-needed quality time. Which was a dilemma I completely understood – my own baby daughter was just going down for, or fighting against, her morning nap at the same time. So Eggers and I did something unheard of in the highly controlled, tightly scheduled world of Hollywood publicity – we took a rain check, despite being aware of the possibility that the conversation might never pick up again. There are more important things in life, after all.

But to my surprise, Eggers was eager to talk again – perhaps an indication of just how committed a filmmaker he is, perhaps an acknowledgment that artistic creativity and parental responsibility can co-exist, if all parties are on the same page. Either way, it was delightful to juxtapose Eggers, the family man, with Eggers, the Viking madman. Now, as The Northman has carved out a space at the box office and inspired all manner of Alexander Skarsgard memes and fan-fiction along the way, I spoke with Eggers about myth, murder and what happens when a filmmaker becomes a father.

Viking epic The Northman is bloody, ferocious, Nordic-ulous fun

The Northman feels like a continuation of a theme you’ve explored in your previous films The Witch and The Lighthouse: the permeable border between our natural world and the fantastical. How long have you been fascinated by fantasy, the otherworldly? And do you see yourself ever making a film told firmly in our “real” world?

Yeah, I would never make a contemporary film because I just couldn’t find it inspiring. If you’re not passionate about something, you can’t shoot it. I could never find the passion to photograph a car, or even worse, a cellphone. Folk tales, the occult, religion, mythology – that is what is most interesting to me. And it’s probably been that way to me forever. I’m particularly interested in these periods of time when the real world and the supernatural are wholly the same thing. If you believe in something, it exists.

The historical detail in this film is remarkable – but the film is also a large-scale epic, grand and overwhelming. How do you force yourself to both focus on the small stuff and concentrate on the larger picture?

It’s a story that came from us, my co-writer Sjon and me, and therefore it’s personal, so I have a clear understanding of the entire film. In the development and the prep process, that’s when I can indulge in the minutiae and the verisimilitude of the period details. I can get sucked into what the handstitching on a cuff looks like. But when you’re on the set, you need to be focused on the story and the actors. And my director of photography Jarin Blaschke and I use a single camera, so there are these long unbroken takes. You have to place the camera where the story is, you can’t place it anywhere else. And all these cool details are on the periphery of the story, so I can’t fetishize them then.

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On the question of logistics, do you now regret setting out to film that village raid scene in a single take? It is magnificent, but I can imagine the migraines it may have caused.

Absolutely not. How could I possibly regret that? Nothing easy is worth doing. I regret that since I had a kid, I have turned to Nespresso because it’s just so easy. I used to hand-grind all my beans every morning, and that took a lot of time because it was a ritual and the coffee was better and I was proud of it, and it was more satisfying. Shooting a Viking raid of a village shouldn’t be as easy as making a coffee.

So, you’re now a father, and have all the responsibilities associated with that, as we both experienced briefly. Do you feel having a child has already changed your perspective or approach to what films you want to make going forward?

Yes and no. Certainly there is a different kind of responsibility. This interview was initially cancelled because I had finished five weeks of being not at home, with my son only able to join a little bit. When I came home and locked myself in the study to do interviews, he was angry, and rightfully so. You need to reprioritize your life when you have a child. And the films I’m going to make, I have to think about him and his well-being. But when I made The Witch, everyone said, “If you have a child, you would’ve never killed the baby in the beginning like that.” But having a child, I am more proud of that moment, and I think it works better knowing exactly how horrific it is to have a child killed.

This interview has been condensed and edited

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