The Day We Raced Against the Tide
Eggers did not grow up a
Viking fanboy. Warriors were a little too macho for a kid who loved history and the theater. As he got older, he says, the “right-wing misappropriation of Viking culture” was an added turnoff. But then he took a trip to Iceland and became fascinated by the landscape. That led him to the sagas, and those led him to making The Northman.
“Funnily enough, sometimes it was the smaller scenes that we didn’t really spend any time preparing for which were the hardest to shoot,” he says. Take a simple moment of Skarsgård and co-star Anya Taylor-Joy approaching a beach on horseback: Off the coast, there is a ship; onshore, two sailors are tugging a rowboat out of the water. It’s a relatively basic shot, yet it required around 35 takes to get right.
The first issue was the horses. “Horses are very smart and very trainable, but they’re not going to hit their mark with absolute precision,” Eggers says. The second was the tides. As the water went out, the crew had to continually reblock the scene to get closer and closer to shore. To add to the stress, the slope of the beach dropped off precipitously, placing a limit on how far they could push. If they didn’t get the shot by the time the tide went out, they wouldn’t get it at all.
“Most people are shooting 18 to 25 setups a day; we shot between one and four,” Eggers says. “When it’s not in knee-deep mud on a windy mountainside with horses, it’s shooting a Viking ship in a storm at sea.” (The latter scene was done on a soundstage. Even so.) And this was in Northern Ireland, where the good-weather days were still a little bit crap. “You can see when it’s pouring, you can see when the wind is whipping, but what you can’t see is the drizzle,” Eggers says. He’s not complaining. “For us, we needed that misery.”