Following on from his success with his period horror tales “The Witch” and last year’s “The Lighthouse,” filmmaker Robert Eggers aims to go bigger with his next feature – the viking revenge story “The Northman” at New Regency.
Speaking with Film Independent Coffee Talk (via Indiewire), Eggers revealed that he and his crew were just a week away from beginning production on his third film when it was shut down indefinitely due to the global pandemic.
He tells the outlet his ensemble cast and crew were pretty much all assembled in Belfast and ready to go when it happened, and a handful are still at work on it:
“There’s a very small crew that is continuing to work on things. Armor makers are working on armor for the characters. Prosthetics are being made. I’m doing my work with the DP [Jarin Blaschke] and the storyboard artist. There are things that need to be happening. Our location manager is constantly checking in on the locations, some of which are just now semi-built sets.”
The latest film is said to be such a massive production that it has required a big change to his preparation process, bringing in key collaborators to help find the look of the film before they shoot:
“There’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films. There’s a lot more storyboarding. Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time and we’re continuing to do that now on this hiatus.”
Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgard, Bill Skarsgard, Willem Dafoe and Anya Taylor-Joy co-star in the film which Eggers will direct from a script he co-wrote with Icelandic novelist Sjon.
