Please don’t watch The Northman on your phone. It would break Robert Eggers’ heart to see his Viking epic confined to a six-inch screen. The director, with his pale green eyes and all-black attire, looks deadly serious. It really would break his heart. “Look, if the apocalypse happens, I’ll be doing street theatre in front of a garbage fire,” he says. But for now – Armageddon narrowly avoided – if you can, go to the cinema. “It just… it needs to be seen theatrically.”At 38, and after just three features, Eggers is making a name for himself as an auteur: first with the nightmarish 2015 Puritan horror The Witch – a debut that won him best director at the Sundance film festival – and then with the surrealist, weather-lashed drama The Lighthouse. And now The Northman, a brilliant blood-and-guts Viking entry born from the sagas of Icelandic folklore. In it, Alexander Skarsgård is Amleth, an exiled prince out to avenge the murder of his father (Ethan Hawke) and rescue his mother (Nicole Kidman) from his evil uncle Fjölner (Claes Bang). In some ways, The Northman is a very Eggers film. It is, after all, a macabre fable that spirals into terrifying bedlam. But in other ways, The Northman is the last thing audiences expect from this big indie name.For one thing, it is just so manly. In a swashbuckling, chest-pounding way that feels unlikely from a writer whose most aggressive scene previously was… Click below to read the full story from Yahoo Movies UK
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Robert Eggers: ‘The Northman is the movie I’m proud of and the one I wanted to make’
