The Northman (2022)

Hello, I am Robert Eggers, the director and co-writer of The Northmen. I wrote it with the Icelandic novelist and poet, Sean. I watched Melius's Conan the Barbarian too many times as a kid, and the beginning of this is incredibly... reminiscent, with the sorcerer speaking a voiceover with ominous drumming. This is Mount Hekla, a volcano in Iceland, which early on in my research I found was referred to as the Gates of Hell, and thus became a large story point.

That actually says Hropsey, not the North Atlantic. Hropsey means Raven's Island, and that is the name of this fictional North Atlantic island north of Scotland that we actually photographed in Northern Ireland. Most of this film was shot in Northern Ireland, and here we built part of our Viking city

So we worked very closely with many Viking historians on creating the most accurate version we could of the Viking world, which is fairly difficult because it happened a thousand years ago and there's only so much archaeological evidence and so much written evidence. But we tried our best.

There's very few Viking helmets from the period in which this movie takes place, so you have to kind of look at some helmets from other periods close to it and try to imagine what a variety of helmets could look like so that you could have a more complete, rich world. If we only used what we had archaeologically... people would be dressed so similarly that it would be boring to look at and hard to communicate the story. This procession features a bull who carries that big cart up but you don't see him very well, which was very disappointing because it was quite a feat to get that bull to climb that hill. Those are enslaved people from the Baltic region, which we can tell by their clothing. This holding up of the arm rings is something that we see on Swedish picture stones. We don't really know what it means, but thought it might be nice here. Like a battle dog returning to its master, I've come to be fettered by my queen's fair locks. Vikings did not wear crowns, but we wanted Ethan to have a golden headband that would suggest a crown to a modern audience so we would immediately know that he's a king.

Hail, Lord King. But. Nila Gleisel, who was an expert on Viking clothing and worked with us to make the clothing and is part of the experimental archaeology world and dresses and lives as a Viking for part of her life, she cried when she saw this great hall for the first time.

Those trunks were incredibly heavy and broke the floor on a take when they were dropped. The gentleman that's holding that hawk is Robin Carolyn, the composer of this movie. The music that we just heard, you don't really see the musicians in the hall with the way we've edited it. But that is meant to be diegetic music that's playing here. And all the diegetic music is our best understanding of what Viking Age music might have been, which is a little bit more hey-nani-nani sounding than you might expect. Robin. Carolyn and Sebastian Gainsborough worked with a musicologist from Denmark named Paul Hogsbrough, who was very inspirational in what that might have been. There's Robin with the hawk. And here's Defoe. His outfit and his red leather phallus is very much based on the work of Terry Adrian Gunnell, who is interested in mumming and fools and sort of theater in the Viking Age. Performance is maybe a better word. I keep him as a deep sworn friend. Come, brother. Here's one more in need of your safekeeping than myself. Nicole's headpiece is Finnish, so this would have been something that perhaps Orovindil got on one of his raids and brought home. You also notice the king and queen have glass horns, which is not something you think of as super Viking, but shows their status.

Nicole is doing a kind of weaving called tablet weaving. All of the kind of trim on their clothes is this kind of fine weaving called tablet weaving. Craig Lathrop, the production designer, and his team created these beautiful murals in this room, which sadly you don't see them all that clearly, but they were quite beautiful to see. Watch this innocence tonight. He must be awoken to what awaits him. He is a puppy. It's the same age as my grandfather when he took the throne. That was different. He had to kill his uncle first. You have not seen your queen in a season. Come. Let me take you to her bed. Nicole and Ethan are both very good in this scene, and it was a difficult scene to... choreograph with the camera you'll notice that there's a lot of long unbroken takes which are you know difficult things to achieve technically because to talk about it in a cliche way it's a bit of a dance and everyone all the actors and the camera operator everyone really needs to be in sync and it's not easy and it's also a kind of discipline that's not done a tremendous amount these days particularly with this kind of scale of an epic you would generally shoot it multiple camera and and put it together and post and that's not how we did it this is the same path i walked with my father and he was his now it is our path to walk There is a role called a hovgidia, which literally translates to hov, we'll say, temple. And gidia is priestess. And so we have these temple priestesses. This older woman is wearing the keys. of the temple, and we're saying they sort of keep track of everything. And these wooden idols, I'm very pleased with, of the pantheon of Nordic gods and Odin on a large stone, which Neil Price, one of our historians, feels pretty confident it would not have been stone, but Craig, the production designer, wanted to have some different textures. But another one of our historians thought it would be fine, so there you go.

gold shimmery things are gull gubber which are these little tiny golden slivers that have images of all kinds of things and we don't really know what they were before but they're found on around post holes so we have them on the posts of the temple

And this underground ritual chamber is actually based on a burial chamber in Orkney that's from a much earlier period than the Viking Age. The idea being that this was a place of religious importance to people who were here before the Vikings. And so they felt its significance and built a temple on top of it. But then underground, they're doing some more secretive rituals.

to learn what it is to live and die in honor. And this vision mead of knowledge has henbane in it, which is a hallucinogenic that is found in at least one Viking grave of someone that we believe to be a sorceress. You are dogs. This mask that Willem Dafoe wears is a replica of a Rus Viking mask. It has a little beard and mustache scraped into it like the finding has, but you don't see it very well. Some of the text here comes from the Hauwamaal, or the teachings of Odin. Shion wanted to get some bits of absurdity and humor in here, and there's not. a lot of humor in the film, unfortunately. One should turn his eye around. One should spy around. For a foe might be crouched within upon the floor. Wise in measure should each man be, yet wise enough to be the fool. Wise enough to be the fool. Tell me, how did Orden lose his eye? to learn the secret magic of women. Never seek the secrets of women, but heed them always. Joanna Katrine Friedrichsdottir, another one of the consultants, when Shona and I were talking to her, was kind of saying how interesting the mythology is where women are the norns of fate, know all of what's going on, and the Valkyries seem to be able to foresee some things, and Freya is a sorceress, and... Odin is doing all kinds of stuff, hanging himself from trees, poking his eye out, trying to get the knowledge that the female goddesses have inherently. And that conversation with Joanna was very inspirational in some of the text in this ritual. I swear.

Oscar Novak, who plays young Amleth, has a very striking resemblance to Alex as a kid, but he also is, he just seems sensitive and gentle, and he was. But I think when you see Alex as a complete beast when we first meet him, it is a nice juxtaposition. I think that's something that we did succeed with. A pearl. So this, which we're about to see, which Ethan calls the Tree of Kings, is based on a tree from the Osseberg Tapestry, which is... tapestry from the most lavish Viking burial that we've found in Norway, and there's this tree with hanging figures on it, which could probably be interpreted in many different ways other than what we have, but we have all of... These ancestors and their costumes. Oh, by the way, there's a werewolf back there. Maybe you can see. There's a nice little Easter egg. But because in many of the sagas, Vikings who are berserkers have some werewolf blood in the family. But in any case, the Osseberg Tapestry is, you know, one of the few stories that's actually from the Viking Age, not a story in the sagas that has... been written after the fact but is something that actually exists from the the viking age so it was a way to kind of talk about lineage in a visual way that uh hopefully is cohesive i don't know how i feel about it in the end we went for it

You barely catch the runes on that rune stone. The necklace that he's wearing is an Arab coin with a hole poked in it, which is, you know, definitely something that we find archaeological evidence of. And this helmet that Fjellner is wearing is the... most accurate to our period of all the helmets in the film and it looks pretty damn cool and these masks i don't remember these felted wool masks i don't remember where they were found archaeologically but there is these sort of semi-animal looking masks that have been found but there was a polish viking reenactor who hypothesized that maybe they were just you know balaclavas to keep warm and were not for any kind of ritual purpose and so i liked that idea and thought that they also looked quite creepy so it would be good for fjolnir's henchmen to wear them in this scene pity you never paid a bastard's eyes heed before now and his cloak which is often called the chewbacca cloak is a verifelder which is a very time-consuming garment to make, but it sheds water much better than furs and was a sought-after Viking export. Ethan's quite great here. This is, I think, one of the only one-sided blades in the film, Filner's sword, but it seemed good for chopping a head off. A small percentage of Viking Age swords are single-edged. Vengeance gorges on your death. Strike. Strike! To Valhalla!

There's good performances overall in that scene that I'm quite proud of. Clace, Oscar, Ethan, everybody. This shot was incredibly difficult to do. It was raining while we were shooting it. The snow is artificial, but you can't see the rain. But we were pushing the dolly down the hill, and then we had to then, at the very bottom of the hill, push it forward. And it took a whole lot of muscle to make that work. And then this camera move here... required a special head an oculus head which just does not perform well outdoors particularly in the rain and was constantly short-circuiting so that was quite tricky it was pretty much raining virtually all the time and because You can't photograph drizzle unless it's backlit and it's mostly gloomy. You can't tell that it's raining, but it was pretty much always raining while we were shooting this. And, you know, this location is very dramatic and very windy and a pretty brutal place. King Fionnir has found himself a queen.

but certainly it pays off when you see that ocean out there. Sank like a stone was improvised, and Eldar Skarr, who plays Finner, is the first person to have improvised dialogue one of my movies that has stayed. This was shot in a parking lot with a boat on tires and we're just rocking it and the ocean was in back of him and it's, you know, all practical effects. Very successful, I think.

The land of the Rus would be present-day Ukraine, but also shot in Northern Ireland. We built a couple of Viking ships for this film. One... warship and one merchant ship so these two ships are actually the same ship redressed and shot with multiple passes because we only had one warship actually you know what it was nice this day it was warm we took our jackets off this day

This was also a very difficult shot to achieve, and putting a dolly on a Viking longship is not easy. And the guys behind Alex had to, like, duck and throw his oar out of the boat in order to achieve this shot.

because now we're in his seat, right? So that headdress is based on images mostly from earlier than the Viking period. But there are some images that we think are Odin that have that, and there is a sort of horned headdress like that on the Asseberg tapestry. But his getup and the way he's holding his spears is based on mostly earlier stuff that we think is images of people participating in a Germanic spear dance. And these berserkir, which means bear shirts or bear warriors, and uvjednar, which are the wolf warriors, You know, they believed that they were literally turning into bears and wolves so that they could be virtually invincible on the battlefield. And some people hypothesize that they used hallucinogens, but I think that you couldn't fight if you were stowned out of your mind. And I think that just a shamanistic dance could be enough to get there if you truly... believe in this, and it was a very difficult thing to sort out. We worked with Marie-Gabrielle Rohde, a Butoh choreographer, and all these berserkers and old hithnars, and I'm trying to get there. And I mean, Alex is really great and ferocious. We went for it. I got to say, we went for it. Those guys went for it. It was not an easy thing to ask of them, especially in the pouring rain, take after take.

is from a saga, throwing a spear back at the person who threw it at you and nailing them. And there's a lot of spears and javelins, which is nice, because I think a lot of Viking movies go too crazy with swords, and only really wealthy people had swords. That's what the archaeology is telling us. There are some ships full of swords in Estonia at the very beginning of the Viking Age, which is a little bit raises some eyebrows but in general it seems like swords were really just for the wealthy so this raid of the slavic village is one of the sequences that i am proud of and do think is successful it took a lot of hard work cc smith the stunt coordinator worked so hard with me and Jaron Blaschke, the DP, on being able to articulate our vision. And with the horse falls and all this stuff, I mean, it was a nightmare. And we spent, I don't know how many times we visited this location with a viewfinder, restaking all these buildings so that they would all be built in such a way that we could achieve this shot and move the dolly through it and have enough room for the horses and see down the different alleyways to get enough depth. Yeah, it was difficult to achieve.

in Ale's saga rips someone's throat out in battle with his teeth. Seemed like a good choice. And here's the Berserkers. You know, after you're in your Berserk rage, you have a comedown, which is in the sagas. The intention here you know, hopefully it works, is that you find the raid sort of thrilling and are swept up in the violence. But then when you see this scene, you're made to feel guilty about enjoying that sequence because, you know, it's not a good thing. When we found you as a cop, I knew then that you had a heart of gold and iron. Magna, the berserker shaman, was a really kind guy. And Katie, who we're calling the shield maiden, is a female Viking commander, is based on a contested grave in Birka that is a woman buried with lots of weapons and game pieces. And the consensus is, with the historians, Neil Price included, that that was the grave of a female Viking commander. So we have one here. But that would have been a very rare thing.

We didn't have anyone in the barn, of course, and the special effects team made a sort of hydraulic something or other that would pound on the door to make it look like people were pounding on the door. One of the Berserkers at the very beginning is Tag, who plays Eryker Blazize holding a chicken, which is mist.

And also you can see some tattoos on this guy's hand. Ibn Fadlan, who was an Arab ambassador who visited Rus Vikings, talks about them being very heavily tattooed. But elsewhere, there isn't a lot of talk of Viking tattoos. And because of the ubiquitousness and coolness of tattoos in contemporary culture and the fact that they really, in other... Viking TV shows and video games and stuff, they go really crazy with the tattoos because they look cool. I wanted to tone it down, and we only gave it to ruse Vikings. But they're so dirty, you don't even see the tattoos, which is a little bit of a shame because they were pretty cool, even in a more toned-down way than I've seen in other places.

Unsurprisingly, this temple is our best understanding of a Slavic temple. No surprise there. I think you're starting to hear a repetitive theme. And of course, Arsiris is played by Björk, who had some input into her... her costume, which is probably the most theoretical costume in the movie. This headdress is based on bridal headdresses from a later period in Ukraine, but we tried to do our own spin on it and make it more primitive. And these cowrie shells I suppose that where they're found in burials near skulls could suggest that they were over the eyes. But if you'll notice, the women in the village, when it's being raided, are wearing them on their headbands. But it was important to Bjork to have some kind of a third eye. So this idea of hanging the cowrie shells in front of her eyes, I think, is pretty cool.

We shot our moonlit scenes with the same cyan filter that we used in the lighthouse to create an orthochromatic look in the lighthouse. And here to have a very silvery, monotone look that is hopefully fairly unique seeming. But there is no red light in the color spectrum, no warmth at all. I will drown my father's killer.

to the dwelling of the ancient one, to seek the fated sword that matches your brutal rage. Why speak ye my fortune, witch? For where your path of ashes ends. The scenes with the witches tend to be shot, reverse shot, breaking from our long takes, so there's an occasional ping-pong match of coverage here and there. The norms have spun. There is a scene that was cut from the film of this war party dragging their ships onto the shore and hiding them with tree branches. This branding the slaves is something that there's zero historical evidence about, but it didn't seem too far-fetched and helps later on with a story point. I know of him. Why are his slaves bound for Iceland? Fjolnir rules over Rapse. He fled to the backwater from... The offerings around that sort of portable Odin idol are, again, based on Ibn Fadlan's description of Rus Vikings.

Ravens are very well-behaved birds. Very smart. Very easy to work with. This little one-liner here is very... reminiscent of antiheroes and sagas. And there's times when the sagas can kind of read like 80s action movies where they have pithy one-liners after they cleave someone's head in. Like, you know, that's what I call a headache. Now, it's a shame. Alex actually did in reality climb all the way up the side of this boat in this shot. but it was just taken too long, so you don't see it. The old Slavic or old Ukrainian was done by Ukrainian poet Yuri Andrukovic, and I can't know how great it is, but it does sound beautiful, and Ania does it very well. I use the water. This is our merchant ship, of course And there it is the sea this was then unsurprisingly shot on stage with a replica of that same ship but we only built two-thirds of it and so this is on a gimbal and that tent is sort of cheated to be on the wrong side of the boat but i don't think you can pick up on it what say you spell speaker You wish to be a slave. Hide your cunning. Show the shepherd you are his sheep. I'll show the shepherd his death.

Again, this is another kind of sequence that would usually be, like, a big montage of a whole lot of quick shots, so it was difficult to, like, not be boring, have a lot of drama, show the storm, have the gimbal not look like a gimbal and really sell that water in the background so that it really feels real, see everybody struggling, but really it's just a shot that's slowly dolling in from wide into Alex's face. I think with the music and the sound effects, we just about get it to work the way it needs to, but it was tough. That spindle is the thread that Björk is spinning there with her distaff, suggestive of Alex's thread of fate.

Craig Lathrop built a very large woodland set for that shot, and you just see a bunch of swirly, shimmery somethings. This one title card says Iceland. I-S-L-A-N-T. You can kind of see it, Iceland. This, unfortunately, though, is not Iceland. This is Ireland again. Those rock formations that were way on screen left were some rock formations photographed in Iceland and comped in. And then this background, of course, is Iceland that we comped in. And the sand was made black. And this is basically because of COVID. We couldn't shoot main unit in Iceland until after we were in post-production because the insurance company wouldn't let me and Alex and Anya and Jaron go to Iceland. So we were constantly trying to find ways to find Ireland looking like Iceland.

Now this little montage is Iceland. And so we had an aerial unit that Jaron and I were like working with remotely. This thing was, we shot ourselves. We came back to Iceland in post-production to get that shot. But yeah, so we were working with this aerial unit remotely to achieve what we needed. Why would you stow away to such a hellish place? This scene is really crucial narratively, but I hate it to death because it's frontlit. There just should not be any frontlit exteriors. It's borderline not professional. But when we were in Iceland, we had an incredibly small schedule, and also the head of the studio was there, so I couldn't just sit around and wait for the light to be right. And it was a shame, too, because when we arrived in the morning, it was very gloomy and... It had rained recently, so all the colors of the hills were sort of richer and darker. And throughout the day, it all kind of dried out. And it looks like, you know, we shot this thing in Spain with a bunch of fog machines. But this is actually an actual sulfurous Icelandic landscape. But what can you do? That's one of the problems with making a large movie is that you can't. react quickly and change course because you have horses and extras and dolly tracks and cranes and that's one of the downsides of making a larger movie. Why are we doing this? What? This. What? This is also, of course, Ireland. And I think this doubles quite well for the south coast of Iceland. And we always knew that this main location was never going to be in Iceland. And so it was one of the first things was working with location manager Naomi Liston on finding something that would look like Iceland for Fjolnir's farm for the majority of the film. And I do think we succeeded. I think that this hill would be taller in Iceland, but I think you pretty much buy it. That's C.C. Smith, the stunt coordinator, as the sword master back there. These shackles, you guessed it, are reproductions of something that was found, actually in Ireland, I believe. And this longhouse is based on the longhouse in Stoink in Iceland, and it has... sort of low chimneys, which is a hotly contested issue by some of the Viking experts on the crew. But they have it there at the reproduction in Stoink and also in Landsoe Meadows in Newfoundland. And it just is another thing that can make this place in Iceland look different from Hrapsi and different from the Slavic village in the land of the Rus. We've kept to us.

I'm not impressed. Here you can see a little bit of water on the lens around Claes' face. You know, again, it was constantly raining. We tried to desaturate the grass. I'm watching a uncolor corrected version right now as I speak to you, but we... Tried to desaturate the grass because I feel like that green grass really makes the film seem less miserable. There you go. There's that water on the lens. Boy, I hate it. But this was the best take and there was water on the lens in every single take. We keep this one. The rest can go.

This was the first or second day of photography also. So we were all getting our footings. And choose two males for the fields. And her too. Anya's hair was so blonde that it was like shockingly bright and we had to use a lot of brown and black hairspray in the scene to dirty her up.

Those extras, stunt guys back there, really look like they're having a conversation, which is nice. Yeah, we don't know where slaves were kept, but, you know, probably some slaves that would be doing household things would likely have slept in the floors of the house, but it's also very likely that some slaves were kept with the animals, and certainly that was a choice that I liked because it seems quite primitive and harsh.

Volander the Smith, played by Kevin Horsham. Kevin was a cool guy and a former cop, and considered making him like an aged berserker, but I think we did well in making him the blacksmith. Hit! This arctic fox is played by a fox named Blizzard, who seemed to be the only arctic fox in the UK who was domesticated and trainable, and she was a delight as our vixen. Mark Huffam, the producer, was the fox master and was able to get that performance.

This little hoedown song I like quite a bit. And it was actually, the melody was a rejected melody for the berserkers rowing in the land of Rus, but it works great here. I really liked the jaw harp. That yoke style is kind of Russian. We have no idea what a Viking yoke would have been like. Go take a piss. In there.

And as dark as it is in here, it would have been even darker. You know, those windows on the gable end in the kitchen are really just intended to be smoke holes because there were not windows in Viking Age architecture, much to Jaren's displeasure. Here is a recreation of the tree that's on the Asseberg tapestry. You! Get on with it. On with you now. But yeah, that sort of skylight is much larger than the amount of light that would be coming from the central smoke hole or chimney in the longhouse. Where's your wits? Turn around. Seamus O'Hara, who plays Oithin the Irish, is really good as the enslaved Irishman who really can't stand Alexander Skarsgård. Shut the door. Did he find it? What he lost? in the house today, was it there? It was great to have Kate Dickey with us. You know, I wish she had more to do, but it was a pleasure to work with her again after The Witch. It's a nightmare. Then you must wake up. It's their nightmare. Eldar Scar, who's finner is really good and he was a real team player i mean so like obviously anya i've worked with a lot and so well anyway i worked with her on the witch and we've been friends over the years and you know we have a rapport and the trust is already there and she was a real leader to everyone because it was so cold and miserable and she never complained it was always showed up with an incredible professional positive attitude and of course she's an incredible actress and a perfectionist and we're lucky to have her but it was also you know aldar was new to the ensemble and he was often you know when we had these scenes with a lot of extras like what are we doing here and and was very helpful to me in kind of like rallying the troops so to speak

That looks like a 2D animation of a fox, but it is in fact a real fox. This is also, of course, Ireland, and it is not even a cave. It is just a rock with a bit of a divot in it that was dark enough to look like a cave. Thank goodness. Because we had a really hard time finding a cave. And this is a cave that was built on the soundstage in Belfast. And Ingvar Egert Sigurdsson plays our He-Witch. And look, I mean, he is up against Willem Dafoe and Björk. And he's great. All of his get-up, the toe rings, is based on burials. And this is not probably very obvious to audiences, but those brooches he's wearing are something that only women wear, and he's wearing a dress. And there is this idea that men that practiced Sather, which was a kind of dark magic, perhaps... lived as women or dressed as women. There's some depictions of Odin that we think is him dressed as a woman. And these kinds of sorcerers were on the fringes of society and were thought of as taboo, but were often used by Jarls and warlords when they needed their help. Fjolnir cut out his tongue, plucked out his eyes, before killing him. But I made him once anew. Kind friend, know that I will avenge you, too. I fear you must address me. The symbol on his birch bark on his hat is, if I was making a Viking museum, I probably wouldn't include it the earliest. Evidence of that comes from the 17th century, but I think it could have been earlier, so I didn't mind using it. So be it, slave. And this mummified head of my dear friend Willem Dafoe is based on the head of Mimir that Odin kept preserved by herbs to tell him what he needed to know. And this drum is a recreation of a Sami drum, not a, quote, Viking drum, which there's no evidence of a Viking drum. But I think that, you know, there seems to be potentially some overlap in what we might believe some of the potential shamanistic practices of Nordic paganism might have been, like, seems to have some overlap with Sami shamanism. And we know that that is for sure a thing. So we decided that perhaps he... traded or purchased a Sami drum as a shaman. Hello, puppy. I seek the weapon the Norns of Fate chose for my revenge. Hear me. Forged. Defoe did this voiceover right after we wrapped all the scenes we shot him in, and we did it in the longhouse, and it's quite impressive. These hammers are based on amulets of Mjolnir, Thor's hammer. And Tommy Dunn, the armorer, did a fantastic job of... making these museum-worthy recreations. And of course, this sword is from before the Viking Age. I also love the little people who play our mythical dwarves. They are badass. And the oldest one is actually a blacksmith, which was pretty cool.

The way we have the lead white makeup on his face is a little Brahmin-like. But there was a sorceress who was buried with a compact of lead white makeup. How she might have worn it, we don't know. But this looks good, I think. And shall you also enjoy the moment when you must choose between kindness for your kin or hate for your enemies? I like that Alex is, like, almost emotional about this sword. It's a beautiful performance that Alex gives in this film. There are no... snakes indigenous to Iceland. That is a kind of snake that would be in Norway. So this sequence, something we messed up is Alex, when he gets to the bottom, he should react to the horrible smell because that is the trope of all the sagas when the saga hero breaks into the burial mound to get his weapon, like immediately they're affected by the smell. And it's in the script and I totally forgot to mention it. And it really bugs me that I omitted that moment. And it would have been very easy to play physically in that wide shot. This was the first action sequence that we shot in the movie and was good to start with just this duet. While this is way too large for a Viking burial or a pre-Viking Age burial, we needed the space to do this fight in because also Ian White, who plays our mound dweller, is 7'1", and Alex is 6'4", so these guys take up a whole lot of space.

There's dead horses and dead dogs and dead enslaved people all in this burial that I don't know how much they read. And yeah, so this, all of the mound dweller's armor and his sword and shield and all of it is from a couple hundred years before this movie. And I was glad to do that because actually that period is kind of more beautiful looking than the Viking Age.

My thinking, based on the research, I'm not alone in this, is that Vikings who had ships burnt, you know, were followers of Odin. You know, the smoke goes straight up to Valhalla, or Valhall in Old Norse, as we're calling it in this movie. But if you were a follower of Freyr, you would be buried. So he has a boar. on the crest of his helmet, which is a symbol of Freyr. And this putting the head of the undead up his butt. is something that happens in every saga. And it's interesting, there's burials in Eastern Europe, vampire burials that also have the head up their butt. Interesting.

Sam Conway was our special effects supervisor who designed this little gag for our corpse to fall apart. And a similar thing happens in Milius' Conan the Barbarian when Conan's in a burial chamber and gets his sword, the skeleton falls apart, and Sam Conway's dad was the special effects supervisor for Conan and did that gag. So that is pretty neat.

Alex is trying to hide the sword in a pile of manure here, which I don't think is particularly clear. My bad, but it doesn't really matter anyway. This scene's a little bit crunchy and underexposed, but I think it still holds up all right. The water will prove that Harkon iron bates men are born of mud and water. A lot of that sword, Drogir, is similar to what was found in the Sutton Hoo grave.

Yeah, so the men sleep with the oxen in the oxen shed and the The enslaved women are in the byre with the cows. This kind of, you know, binary way of thinking. The hair of a Valkyrie. What a savage this love, bitch. This was Anya's idea to slap Claes with her menstrual blood, which was pretty badass, I have to say.

You will correct her, or you'll both be dead in the ground. Thank the Norns that a woman's tide is still... Might have been nice to have a little sunset on the reverse here, but when we... make the movie again will think of that. It was foretold that I would slay my father's killer in a burning lake. Till that day comes, I will torment the man who made my life a hell. Now sleep well, Nightblaze. Alex really seems like a saga antihero here. I'm very pleased. But we cannot escape our fate.

So this is Iceland. This is at Stoink. So this is actually the longhouse that we did a sort of larger scale version of. Where are they taking us? Something about the chieftain. And this was something that we shot after principal photography to get a little more exposition, which, you know, I think we found that it needed to get a little bit more in Alex's head and build Alex and Anya's relationship a bit more. So this is a scene that does that. When will you do it? When I must. Again, like, you kind of see, we just have a little bit of soft, hazy highlights here and not total gloom, but it was the week we were in Iceland was the sunniest week in Icelandic history, you know, not really, but something like that, and all the Icelanders were very... apologetic that we came to Iceland and it was sunny all the time and we were looking for gloom. This was Nicole's first day and she had to be on horseback. It was our windiest day and one of our coldest, so it was quite the welcome. I'm not a child. And we only shot this scene, this shot. And this was... the second to last or last take that we ended up using, and it's kind of nice because it's at the end of the day, so you got a little color gradient in the sky there. But, you know, and it was just tremendously muddy, and the greens department had to keep putting new turf down, like, over the mud, but we made a mess of it over and over and over again.

Look me in the eyes, slave. I also do know how to fight. We end this shot a little shorter than we photographed it, but we had the entire train moving, and it was quite a feat to coordinate, only to not be in the film. These are, of course, Iceland And this is Ireland, but we comped a couple Icelandic mountains on screen right just to tie it all together. So this game, Knotlaker, is a Viking game. It was played on grass and on the ice and kind of resembles hockey or irish hurling or scottish shinty and it was super violent there are some scholars who believe that they didn't score points the way the way that we do and that it was just like you know you were playing with the ball but it was really about who's the last man standing and that's it

And I was very hesitant about having this in the film. I'm not particularly into sports, but Sean, who's also not particularly into sports, felt it was really essential. And I mean, I think it's okay in the end. And Hafthor, aka the Mountain, is our baddie. and he is, you know, the strongest man in the world. And, yeah, when I fist-bumped him at a dinner, my fist looked like the hand of an infant next to his. But he's a really gentle giant. You wouldn't know it from this. And this is in the Morne Mountains, which is a pretty good double for Iceland. And I really didn't want to have to shoot this on a green screen or something horrific like that. So Naomi Liston, the locations manager, had to create a road to get us here. The crew had to hike to set. The cast was helicoptered in. It was quite a feat to get out here for this Knut Laker sequence. Also, again, you can't tell, but it was cold as hell. I mean, these guys who were playing the... Fallen teammates said that the worst part of this was lying on the cold ground. That's Nila, who was our Viking clothing expert, who's playing the wife of the chieftain Hauken, played by Murray MacArthur. One of the benefits... of our COVID hiatus is that a lot of people were able to grow their beards and hair longer. Stupid, stupid boy, wake up.

I think we probably should have just... We should have woken up now. Instead of there. And then we could then start panning now. And it would have been a lot better. I think we hold on this sort of poorly composed academic painting far too long. But you win some, you lose some.

So this, that's Isadora, a.k.a. Doa Barney, who's Björk's daughter, and she's playing Melkorca. That's Jonas Lorentzen of Nibala, formerly of Heilung. And this was kind of the most fun scene to shoot, honestly. It was like one of the only nights that wasn't stressful. And it was just, you know, shooting this little musical number was very enjoyable. So this is based on Boza Saga and there's this little body. little bit about a farmer's daughter and a phallus. But our Old Norse translator, Hoiker Thorgerson, took those verses and then, because it was written in the later Middle Ages, and sort of rewound it into his best interpretation of Old Norse. And Hauker's Old Norse is the Old Norse that's all over the film. I wish the whole movie could have been in Old Norse, but not at this budgetary level. But it's nice to have some. When we return to the farm, certain privileges will be granted you. Your work will be less burdensome. You will command others' burden. And... Gustav Lind as Thor is pretty excellent in this scene, I gotta say. He was just the nicest guy and great to work with. Really threw himself into the research, and I also just love his face. He could play a great Sherlock Holmes one day with that nose and those cheekbones. The stench of a low-born slave cannot escape him. Yes. Thank you. And Jack Gassman on the left there is quite an expert on saga literature and medieval swordplay. He was a very fun, enthusiastic... guy to have around. I really hate this. By the end of this scene, Alex and Anya are really great. And also the music's really quite lovely too. So I think it does work, but you know. In the raid and the post-raid of the Slavic village, you see my influences in a lot of Soviet cinema, but I feel like it sort of becomes its own thing. Like, you know the influences, but I use it to create something else. But this first little shot of this scene feels like a bad ripoff of a moment in Andrei Rublev, and it's also just like... pales in comparison, so I'm kind of ashamed that it turned out that way, but with, yeah, my lack of imagination is pretty staggering there. Here's some more of Yuri's beautiful ancient Ukrainian. Also, freezing cold. They were freezing cold. You know, I was wearing a downed parka and rain gear and a balaclava and, you know, and they're just naked. I'm placed beneath the trees. Here I speak with the earth. more than ever jaron blaschke is an authorial voice in this film so many of the sequences he really spearheaded what the cinematic language was and i'm very grateful and inspired by our ongoing collaboration

Tomorrow night, you and I will begin this nightmare and bring Fjolnir's life to chaos. That says, Draugrstautr, which means, like, the tale of Draugr or Draugr's tale. And Shion feels that that... is appropriate for this moment. It is the only chapter heading that's not a location, which is a little weird, but you know, don't tell anyone. God, I love those pigs. Love those pigs. That scene was actually much longer with farm work and it had a song and featured a lot of women walking, spinning their distaffs, but it was just kind of, slowing down the action a bit, unfortunately, but it was quite fun to do. These heads on the posts in the temple are based on Osseberg carvings, and that's the idol of Freyr, who has this erect phallus. You notice that Freyr is in the temple in Hrapsi, and the idea is that, you know, Klaes Fjellner brought it to Iceland with him. But the phallus in Hrapsi is made of wood, and here it is meant to be a mummified horse penis or a volsi. There's a thauter, a story about a family that worships a volsi, and we've included that here. Wow! Fear not for the first of many. Oh, I will find who did this. I will find them. I don't know that we set up the Christian slaves super well, but hopefully there's enough people crossing themselves that you kind of... get it, but obviously these enslaved Celtic people would have been Christian for the most part. Look what has been done to my brave friends! Christian monsters! Monsters! Monsters! That first enslaved guy that gets thrown down with the bowl cut is Sam Hansen, who's the vice president of New Regency. He's a great ally and a great Christian slave.

They were good boys. By Freyr, we will avenge. I think we could have used a few more helmets like Finner's in the movie, but it's probably good that he's the only one just because it's pretty iconic. But I think that that's like a cool hypothesis for like a slightly lower class person's helmet. Nailed to a tree. For what? These boys never touched them. And how might they find weapons? And those large hayricks back there are kind of designed to block trucks and modern gack that's at the bottom of that hill. No. These ones. Olwen... has such an incredible face and command and intensity. At her audition, me and Carmel Cochran, the casting director, just started to, like, cry when she was saying this, which there's nothing to cry about, but she's just so intense. And I immediately got up and said, you have the role. She's something else.

Blood-drinking Christians! Do as you're told. Go. The mushrooms. I have them. Not tonight. The spirits will ride and spill more blood. And let him see, when he has found The way that Doe is tied up is slightly based on a pre-Viking Age body that was found in a bog that was likely a human sacrifice. Black, she-spirit, abate, bear. this offering to your mistress. And actually, probably her feet would have been washed before that sacrifice, but they looked too clean compared to the rest of the movie. That's one of our more successful night shots with a fake sky. Rakhi! Rakhi! What is it, Rakhi? Rakhi! Down, Rocky! Rocky! And this probably would have been better to just have in silhouette as like having a Alexander Skarsgård and a vixen howl together. It seems a little potentially like a Disney movie. It should be mentioned that vixens, foxes are not in Old Norse mythology very much at all and the only times that they are mentioned is when male sorcerers have turned themselves or turned their spirit into a female fox. So wrap your mind around that in relation to the he-witch played by Ingvar. Free her.

Claes nailed this scene every single take, I gotta say. He's also a very handsome man. He has that kind of Christopher Lee menacing stoicism. But I also think that Claes plays Fjellner with a little bit of insecurity. almost like a Viking Richard III, which I think works quite well. Your father does not want an uprising by emboldened slaves. Do not doubt his wisdom. If you see there's a pile of dogs there on the right being pecked at by ravens. This stew made with lamb's heads is called svíð, and you can still eat it in Iceland today. I have not tried it. One of my Icelandic friends says it tastes like death. On the right there is Fwellin Cunningham, who plays An enslaved woman named Kormleth who is sacrificed at Thor's funeral, but you may not necessarily clock her. Poor Eldar is a vegetarian, so that was not fun for him.

Our core enslaved people were all really great, great, great, great sports and good. I mean, you know, the extras in this film are good. I am quite lucky. So many things can be, you know, ruined by bad background performers, but we lucked out.

Finner's nose, or his lack of nose, probably looks the best in this scene. So I wanted to only hear the hallucinations and not see them. I don't know if that was the best choice, but the sound design by James Harrison and his team, and particularly Damien Volpe, who worked with me on The Lighthouse and my short films, is certainly, like, cool. And the score here is pretty interesting. That whirring sound is based on a bull roarer, which is a Viking Age instrument, but then Robin and Seb's who is the first violinist on the film, Racky, realized that they could make that sound on a stringed instrument, which is pretty weird and remarkable. The night spirits have entered their skins and are riding their minds. We will meet you before dawn.

There's a nice little omitted scene here of Gudrun tucking Gunnar into bed that should be on the Blu-ray, so check it out. Let me know what you think. But, you know, I had a contractual obligation to submit a film at a certain length, and it's finally, it's Amleth's story, so anything that's not him sort of falls away, even though it's nice to enrich the other characters and give them More context. Father. We didn't set up that ring very well in Act 1, because Ethan's wearing so many rings, but that's the ring that everyone touches when they greet him. And I think we needed to just get a little closer to him to make that all work. It's okay, but it's not the most successful. So this scene and the raid are the scenes that I'm the most proud of. It was really inspiring working with Nicole in this scene. And I think this is the scene that made Nicole accept the role. But it was also just in the context of doing all these battle scenes and all these scenes with all these people that was really out of my comfort zone to do an intimate, character-driven dialogue scene like this. It's a hard scene. It was stressful. It was not easy. But that's the kind of hard work and laborious work that is... because it's so rewarding. You live. Still. A life of death. Yet I swore to survive till this moment. Tomorrow I shall finish my deeds in honor. Only then will I discover whether living is to my liking. It's cool. Nicole, in the beginning of this scene, she's front-lit and looks very vulnerable as she's making this discovery about the fact that her son's alive, and we don't know what's going on with her, but we just have this kind of harsh, vulnerable light. And then as she steps forward towards him and crosses the fire, she becomes more and more underlit, like... you know, Boris Karloff in a universal horror movie and becomes like, you know, quite demonic looking. And it's cool that Nicole's like willing to, you know, look like a demon. And ratting his horse. I know not if he had heart enough to love you. Silence. He was a coward, feigning to be a king. He was nothing. He was just another proud, lust-stained slaver. Hold your tongue! You spit in the face of your dead husband. Yet his brother, his fine brother. The bastard has no shame of himself, nor his trade. Your uncle loved me, though he knew well my past. Hamlet, even now you believe the fairy tale I told you is true? A noble bride hailing from the land of Brittany. I never began as his bride. Of course, here is where the branding iron choice is needed to make that reveal work. Yes. So then as she steps more and more forward by the end of this scene, she's... backlit and becomes very, very beautiful lighting, which is, of course, on her, which is what we need for this part of the scene. I think, you know, we talked about this film as Viking Hamlet, but at one point it was said, you know, it's Viking Hamlet, but... Hamlet's mother is Lady Macbeth. I saw it. This is also a fun scene to write. Screaming. Screaming. I was laughing. Lies! Now that you are I should kill you. And all that is dear to you. But you love me. A son loves his mother. A mother loves her son. All these hand gestures were very carefully choreographed and found in rehearsal, like in the pulling of his tunic. And what I particularly liked was this finger across his neck and the choking him. None but me knows who you are. Because a lot of this kind of blocking, like her going on her knees, I think that's probably in the script. And if it wasn't in the script, it was something that I certainly had in my mind. But this stuff was all Nicole. And really, I mean, the strangling him while she's saying this stuff is really smart. She's incredibly smart, I gotta say. Someone tamed us to kill Molly Garner. You would be my new kingdom. And together, we will rule. He's so fucked up. And the fact that he is so missing his mother's love that for a moment he kisses her back because he's just so confused. It's quite sad. Your words are poisoned! I am your death! That line... I made up, like, right before we shot it, because Nicole felt like she needed one more thing to say. This going through the bed into the floor when you're killing people at night is from the sagas. I particularly remember it in Geasley's saga. Of course, all of this Killing people at night the way Amleth does is a taboo thing to do. Later in the Viking Age, you would have been an outlaw doing this stuff. This expositional scene, I'm not quite sure we really need it. You know, their performances... are great. I mean, Alex is, he's really on fire and it's so specific. And Anya imbues each of her small lines with a whole lot of weight. She's enabled to enrich this character with just a few words in this scene. Any time that we can build their relationship is helpful for the film. But I do feel like everything that they say can be sort of understood before and after this scene but perhaps that kiss is more important than the repetitive nature of the exposition I don't know

So they've actually cut a hole in the side of the house to pull his body out of, which you don't see. And that was not a curtain, but these guys' cloaks. And that door is called a corpse door. And when someone dies in an unsavory way, they need to be carried out of the house through the corpse door instead of through the actual door, because otherwise they might be able to come back in through the actual door as an undead. And that practice still is... Here's another of this, like, tying of the undead, the Draugr in Old Norse tradition, and Eastern European vampires. This corpse door practice was practiced perhaps in the 21st century, certainly in the 20th century in Romania, in dealing with people who died, who they didn't want to become, Strigoi, which is pretty close to a vampire in Romanian folklore.

There is no evil spirit here. I told you. I told you. It is my cursed son, Amleth. We rid ourselves of you. I do like the choice that he's searching around for his heart inside his son's chest cavity, but we should have turned the body a little bit more towards camera so we could have seen the chest cavity a little better. This was day two for Nicole. And I was rewriting this scene, particularly her lines, like every time we did another take of it. And this is very demanding, like, you know, long take and great on her for being able to remember all the rewrites as we were going. And Clace also... brings it here. And of course his, you know, his behavior, the way, like Thor's behavior when Thor sees his dead friends is not how a Viking man is supposed to react. And so Guthrun's chastising of him is, you know, makes a lot of sense. You should be stoic and not emotionally eruptive like this. I mean, that's part of the thing about the berserkers is that the berserkers, like, not wearing... clothing and this is taboo stuff this acting out of control is like taboo so these warriors while they were elite and like king's bodyguards and on the front lines were also in society you know no one wanted their daughter to marry a berserker you know what i'm saying i see you're no longer afraid of a woman's blood Of course it is you. You're not! Let her alone! I offer you your son's heart in exchange for her life. Yeah, here, this scene also, he just, Alex feels so saga-like. I mean, I'm just really proud of him and his commitment to this role. His total immersion. And I love that, kill him, kill him. She's like a Disney villain in the best way. He does kind of a Tarzan punch there, a kind of monkey punch.

When we were shooting this part in Iceland, just for just a brief part of this, the stunt coordinator was confused why we needed to punch Alex quite so many times. And Sean came up to him and told him that, oh, he's Grettir, who's a famous saga hero. And then the Icelandic stunt coordinator immediately knew what that meant and why he needed to be, like, punched and kicked quite so many times to be... In the end, you're just like your father. Another great moment of Clace's smoldering stoicism. How do you know it's your son's heart and not the heart of a rabid dog killed two nights ago?

Where is it? This is a kind of cliche scene, but perhaps needed. Alex has some odd dialogue anyway to sort of help take the edge off the cliche nature of the scene. And the performances are good. Where is my son's heart?

Holden, the Allfather, will vanquish your god of erections. Fear him. Silence! I will come back. Yeah, I like that Klaes is actually, like, a little frightened there. It's good.

There is all kinds of, like, precious stones on that sword hanger, so it makes sense that Finner would steal it. And, you know, I mean, so while that scene is cliche, you probably didn't expect that ravens would save the day. Hopefully not. Although if you read a lot of Icelandic folklore, you might have guessed it. This is meant to be a threshing barn. We needed to justify a barn with a high ceiling. So this is, Craig decided this would be a barn where you'd be threshing your barley. Sort of unremarkable, depiction of Oðinn, but that's how he generally appeared to people, if he did, is in a cloak. I see my father and mother. So, Fweylin, who plays Cormleth here, like, her audition for this character was so excellent that this scene became a lot larger. And originally, you didn't see this woman being sacrificed, but Fweylin, when she auditioned, she said, are they going to kill me? And I said, yeah, you're right. So we really kind of expanded this sequence because of her cool singing voice and her excellent audition. So this is really based quite closely on Ibn Fadlan's account of a Rus Viking funeral. The main difference being that this ship is being buried. You can see it's half buried in a mound. and that the ship in Ibn Fadlan at the end gets cremated. The other major differences are it took a week for that funeral to occur with ritualized drinking where the men were drinking so much that many of them died of alcohol poisoning. And also this poor enslaved woman who's sort of being the bride of Thor in death. She was ritually raped by all of her master's retainers, which we also definitely did not include here.

Elliot does a very nice job here. I don't particularly love this time cut right here. Boom, but it works. And yeah, so then in Ibn Fadlan, the next of kin to the dead person, entirely nude, lights the ship on fire. But it's cool, like when you see Clace's body and you see that he's quite shredded and he's totally that... you know, mild insecurity is nowhere to be seen here. And so I hope that you feel that Amleth has a formidable foe. The Valkyrie costume, that Linda Muir designed is one of my favorite costumes. Actually, it's funny, the Valkyrie and the Shieldmaiden are probably two of my favorites, but the visual depictions we have of Valkyries that we think are Valkyries from the Viking Age are pretty simple, but certainly in later sagas, they're described as wearing armor and and i think you know in order to really communicate that she's a warrior maiden we we needed that and we decided that it was just sort of like she has the best version of the available technology because you know her armor is made by mythical dwarves or whatever so her chain mail is so much finer than any chain mail from the viking period and her lamello armor is finer and whatever her teeth are also something that we see like in remains of skulls that have these grooves cut in their teeth We don't know what it's about, but we gave it to her. I think it's cool, but I've noticed some YouTube comments where people wonder why the Valkyrie has braces, so maybe it wasn't that successful.

And this is actually in Ireland, but I think a very successfully Icelandic looking location. I am no Valkyrie. The dreams of your afterlife must wait. We made our own Icelandic hot spring. This place is called Gleniff Horseshoe.

But now this is in Iceland. I think, you know, I mean, I know that Alex is unsure if we went too far with this scene, but I think that he and Anya do a good job of being, you know, they're fairly cold characters and having a hard time struggling with being emotionally open with each other, even though, you know, they love each other. But it's not a traditional love story. I mean, he's part of, to put it mildly, he's part of these Vikings that, you know, destroyed her village. But then she's on this slave ship and she sees this guy who's a Viking hiding. And she realizes, you know, he can be a key to my survival. And so it's about survival. And he finds that she can be a key to his survival and his getting what he wants. But then something more grows out of it, which is not a traditional movie love story, even though there are, you know, the Hidden Valley hot tub scene before then has kind of a little bit of like a 90s movie epic vibe in ways that are maybe a little silly. But we tried to be a bit more honest where we could be. We can find this way. We could find safe passage there, together. Yet I cannot truly believe that you have extinguished your fire for vengeance. Hate is all I have ever known. You know, he just took a bath and things are good, but I think maybe their cloaks are just a little too clean in this scene. But look at that beautiful hand-woven wool. Iceland for Iceland in these three shots. That last shot is a vest for Horn. And their reflections in that sort of large puddle is something that we were very committed to. The deck of this wooden saddle beast will be the only ground you tread for 21 days. Ralph here, Ralph Einsohn, my friend as Captain Volodymyr, a Rus Viking with a merchant ship with his scene-stealing pearl earring.

Anchor up! Sail down! And there's a tattoo on a Rus Viking that is seeable in the film. I also like the leather. It's kind of proto-oil skins on his sailors. I think there could have been a little bit more of that on the other merchant ship in the land of the Rus, maybe, even though Linda very carefully researched the color and design of those other guys' tunics. And to the... Discerning eye, she did some pretty fantastic, subtle work there, even though I kind of preferred the look of the oil skins. Yeah, and then, you know, this was meant to be shot on location in Vesterhorn in Iceland. But unfortunately, again, because of COVID, we couldn't do it. But we shot these background plates in Vesterhorn. Alex and Annie are great in the scene, but I'm disappointed that we didn't get to shoot it the way I would have wanted to. While Fjolnir lives, our children will never be safe. If you but knew of this, he would hunt you with all the fire of the gods. It cannot wait. Stop this. There is now a living thread that binds us. I was a fool. I wish to flee with you from my fate. My vision shows me you will have two. My sword will save them. And my sword will save them was added, which I like and it was helpful because before he says, my vision shows me you have two and she cries and Louise Ford, the editor, joked that she's crying because she found out she had twins.

I don't know if Vikings French kissed, but maybe Amleth did some raiding in Francia and learned about it. Take her to Orkney. To return for this ring, my kinsmen will give you ninefold its worth. No! No! Amleth! You will be mother to a king! We cannot escape our fate. No! No! Obviously, this is a cool moment for Anya, and she really nails this. Quite powerful. It was Alex's choice to do the breaststroke with his swimming, which I think was pretty cool.

So this is the Maiden King that Bjork mentions. Perhaps you catch it, perhaps you don't. Played by Lily Bird, who's Lars Knudsen, one of the producer's stepdaughter. The original young woman that we cast got sick from being on the wire rig, and really quickly we needed to replace her. And Lily, I think she looks like she could be Alex and Anya's daughter, and she has also just, like, a kind of... like beatific quality that is quite lovely. This was a tricky scene to coordinate.

The sound design is too loud of Alex's background action there, but it's good because you get to read it, so it makes sense. Tiny bit of comedy. The cub you once hunted ate of your nose. Now the wolf has grown. He hungers for the rest. My wife turned to me at an early screening of the movie and said, worst COVID test ever. Keep him safe. This is a nice moment, I think.

Although Claes almost cuts Nicole in half as he exits the room. That's maybe overly gory. Take your freedom. And do with it what you will.

This was actually part of a longer, complicated oner. I think we did right by cutting it up, but it was impressive, I gotta say. The fires are all way too tall. Like, you know, you'd burn the house down, but we needed it for exposure.

We had wrapped this scene, and we're moving on to the next setup, and then Nicole wanted to go again, smiling when she died, and she was quite right. And I thank her very much for insisting on another take. And Elliot just couldn't wait to shoot this scene. He just couldn't wait to stab Alex a million times and couldn't wait to be slain. So, I don't know, it might have been his last scene. I don't remember.

That loom gets a lot of play. There is actually a scene that was cut from the movie with a different weaving on there. And, yeah, it was written into the script that, you know, that Fjellner carries the bodies of Gudrun and Gunnar out. of the room, and it took a bit of hard work to figure out how to do that. And a lot of people think that that is a dummy of Nicole, but that is a human being. I will meet you at the gates of hell. At the gates of hell. You will find me. And there you will die. By the hand that kills your father. One nice thing, I suppose, about that scene that I mentioned that had too much exposition at night is that when he says, I would never kill a woman, which is a Viking honor thing that people might not know, and hopefully it makes that scene a little more effective.

This was fairly cathartic for us to burn this long house down after this incredibly long, difficult shoot. We were cheering as well. The gates of hell, that spells hell grind, which is the gates of hell.

Images like this, when I went to Iceland for the first time, what I saw, I would be looking at these vast landscapes and I would just picture some Viking on horseback riding through them. This and the next scene at the summit or near the summit of Häkla were shot in a quarry outside Belfast and Craig, imported all this black sand to make it look more like Hekla. I actually think, I mean, you know, we scouted Hekla and, you know, and shot the plates of the volcano for the erupting and smoldering stuff. And I think it is pretty successful, especially giving us just a quarry. You can see Fjellner's done his best little version of a Viking burial and has sacrificed the horse. You don't really clock this, but he's also given his armor and helmet to Gunnar. Slain by iron, we shall all meet again in the stronghold of the Allfather.

The Langspiel melody here is quite nice. Robin and Seb are using Viking Age instruments for the lead instruments over the support of orchestral strings.

Alex is badass here. And these last music cues I particularly enjoy. So this is all shot in this quarry with ash and smoke and all kinds of horrible It was pretty hard for the guys to fight with all this horrible black smoke. Clace's sword fighting right here is quite good, I gotta say. He was like off for a few weeks just like while we were shooting other scenes, just working on this sword fight. basically we had leds like jaron had it and seamus the gaffer embedded these leds into the quarry that then got replaced digitally by lava and this is cool with the shield work that cc worked on which is based on kind of best educated guess about some Viking fighting styles that would be kind of unique to the kinds of weapons and shields that they had. And there's not a lot of like, like this is the only time that there's kind of Viking fencing where you see like more than one really skilled Viking warrior. I mean, I guess you see with the mountain dweller too, but so this is really the only opportunity for it.

This, there are Viking instruments in the drone, but the main lead instrument that plays the Orvandil theme is a violin being played without vibrato in a very, like, Nordic fashion. But we tried playing this with some Viking stringed instruments, and it was just too out of tune and didn't quite have the emotional effect here. Ah! Ah! And Alex's screaming here is just so rageful, it's hard to imagine. But he said, if you're naked in the freezing cold, in the pissing rain, it's easy to get angry. Like the lighthouse and the witch, another sort of symbolist painting here at the end.

These twins are actually played by the same baby. For whatever reason, this one baby was the only, we had like 12 babies or something on set for this day. This is the only baby who never seemed to cry. So we ended up shooting two passes with the same baby.

Someone who read the script who wasn't like a Viking expert but had a lot of knowledge about Vikings stuff sort of said the runes on the last title card seem quite off, but that actually says Amlotha Saga, which is the saga of Amloth, which is really what this movie should be called, but it is not a very commercial title. So I thought the Northmen would be better, but we get it. I get it both ways this way.

So there you go. That was the Northman. And if you're still awake, you know, make sure to turn off your Blu-ray player so the menu isn't on loop when you wake up at 3 a.m. on your sofa. Thank you.