Robert Eggers On ‘Nosferatu’ Falling Apart Twice, Why He Can’t Stand ‘The Witch,’ Praises ‘The Batman’ & Marvel Isn’t In His Future

Having just released his Viking epic “The Northman,” this past weekend (read our review) director Robert Eggers is now giving some brief insight into where his future projects could be going while reiterating his desire to avoid another big studio project as his next movie. During a new interview with GQ Magazine, Eggers confirmed that he’s indeed working on a project in the Elizabethan era but was scarce on details and whether there will be an added genre element going on.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“The Northman,” a violent epic of Viking revenge, is not a good movie. It’s like “Gladiator” without the Colosseum and with a stubbornly uninteresting hulk avenger hero. (It also drags on 45 minutes longer than it should have.) A lot of critics have overpraised the movie because they feel invested in the career of Robert Eggers, the maverick indie director who made the spectral Puritan horror film “The Witch” (2015) and the even more impressive two-men-in-a-lighthouse gaga period fever dream “The Lighthouse” (2019).

The Northman (★★★☆☆) unfolds like the sort of epic that Viking warriors might have passed down for generations, sharing over horns of ale around a roaring fire: the haunting Legend of Prince Amleth.The exiled prince’s trials and adventures appear to have been shot by firelight, too. Writer-director Robert Eggers and his Oscar-nominated Lighthouse cinematographer Jarin Blaschke opt for enveloping the action in shadows and mist, the natural darkness of a northern land where winter nights are long, and the days short.Even the film’s climactic showdown, a naked sword fight by a lake of lava and fire, is depicted as a brutal clash between silhouettes backlit by flames.Rivals dueling on an erupting volcano forms a gorgeous tableau, but audiences might, for various reasons, wish they could actually see more of the combatants swinging their swords — especially the ferocious Amleth, embodied heartily by Alexander Skarsgård.The erstwhile Tarzan delivers a gruelingly physical performance, fighting, running, lifting, swimming, hauling, speaking primarily and most clearly through Amleth’s vivid body language.

A.D. Amorosi Without a doubt, Robert Eggers’ “The Northman” traffics in his now-usual brand of haunted atmospherics and wonky mysticism, a signature whose intensity is upped by the savage bloodlust of its characters and the vastitudes of his first big-budget epic with a price tag reportedly hovering between $70 million and $90 million.The only thing more intensely stressed than the dilemma of a Viking prince in the year 895 (avenging the death of his father, the king, at the hands of his jealous uncle who stole the prince’s mother as the spoils of war — or did she go willingly?) played to brutal, muscular perfection by Alexander Skarsgård, is the all-consuming dedication of its tactile production design, its brooding, cinematographic ambiance and the craftsmanship of its furry, hierarchical costuming.

After “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” director Robert Eggers brings his passion for meticulous historical recreation and his interest in the (often tortured) psyches of past generations to the violent and epic world of Vikings in “The Northman” (read our review). Unlike actor Alexander Skarsgård, who plays the film’s eponymous hero (read our interview with the actor here), Eggers was never particularly inspired by these ruthless people before the idea for the movie was suggested to him — which only makes his achievement on “The Northman” more impressive.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterNicolas Cage is back… not that he went anywhere.The actor’s latest movie “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” a meta comedy in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself, is one of several films opening nationwide over the weekend. It’ll compete against director Robert Eggers’ Viking epic “The Northman” and Universal and DreamWorks’ animated family film “The Bad Guys,” as well as last weekend’s champion “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.”Unless ticket sales crash in week two, “The Secrets of Dumbledore,” the third chapter in the “Harry Potter” spinoff series, should retain the domestic box office crown.

Is it truly a marketplace for branded tentpoles and uber low budget fare at the box office as the pandemic eases?

Alexander Skarsgård does not simply play the eponymous man of the North in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic “The Northman” — the Swedish actor essentially knocked the first domino down in the process of turning the project into a reality, convincing Eggers to delve into a history the director previously had no interest in. The result, in ways not completely dissimilar to Eggers’ 2019, somehow pre-lockdown cabin fever freakout “The Lighthouse” is a rousing and maniacal portrait of raging masculinity and hot-blooded violence: in his most physically demanding and biggest film role since 2016’s “The Legend of Tarzan,” Skarsgård tears through villages as a berserker and pursues vengeful retribution on the uncle who tore his family apart.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman are each other’s biggest fans. The stars praised each during the Los Angeles premiere of their film The Northman.

The domestic release of Robert Eggers‘ big studio revenge flick “The Northman” is days away (April 22) and most critics are deeply impressed by how well the filmmaker has done in the realm of action (read our review here). The plot —a relatively simple story of a son avenging his father—takes direct cues from the original Scandinavian tale that inspired “Hamlet,” and attempts to be historically accurate compared to other Viking projects.

The Lighthouse.The actor has worked with director Robert Eggers on two feature films, his directorial debut The Witch and The Northman opposite Alexander Skarsgård. While she didn’t make an appearance in his second film The Lighthouse, it wasn’t through a lack of trying.Speaking to NME, she revealed how she asked Eggers for a role in the film starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.“I felt very lucky that Rob [Eggers] and I love each other so much and he wanted me to come along on this journey,” Taylor-Joy said about joining The Northman.“I was jumping at it because when he first called me and was like, ‘Hey I’m making The Lighthouse and there’s no role for you.

“The Northman” has revenge on his mind in the new trailer from renowned filmmaker Robert Eggers.

Björk in The Northman has just been shared exclusively with NME – take a look above to watch it.The musician and actor stars in Robert Eggers’ viking epic as a whispering Seeress predicting the future of Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth.The film follows Amleth as he seeks revenge for the murder of his father, played by Ethan Hawke, and aims to save his mother Queen Gudrún, played by Nicole Kidman.Anya Taylor-Joy also stars in the film as Olga, alongside Claes Bang as Fjölnir, Amleth’s uncle, and Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool.Eggers co-wrote the screenplay for The Northman with the Icelandic poet Sjón, who has previously collaborated with Björk on the songs ‘Jóga’, ‘Cosmogony’, ‘Oceania’, and others.The filmmaker had previously directed The Lighthouse, starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, and folk horror film The Witch which starred Anya Taylor-Joy.Last year, British actor Ralph Ineson, who also stars in The Northman, shared further details from the movie.“It’s an enormous movie,” he told NME. “I saw a four-minute montage of some of the stuff they’d already shot and I was really blown away.

Do you know what people seem to already adore? Robert Eggers’ epic, bloody, wild-sounding action film, “The Northman,” a revenge movie set in the Nordic Viking era. With an all-star cast that includes Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, and Willem Dafoe, the review embargo for “The Northman” lifted this week and critics were absolutely ecstatic about the movie.

Harry Styles will no longer be a part of the “Nosferatu” remake.

Director Robert Eggers‘ third feature film “The Northman” releases on April 22 and we’re all dying to see his remake of the classic 1922 silent vampire film “Nosferatu” finally come together after multiple production hiccups. His recent comments to The Guardian suggest that the horror project stumbled after Harry Styles had to back out of the Thomas Hutter role opposite Eggers’ longtime muse Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Witch“).

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and it doesn’t get any colder, literally or figuratively, than the bitter portion ladled up in Robert Eggers’ merciless yarn of medieval vengeance, The Northman. This seriously nasty and violent tale comes across as an intense labor of love on the part of the American director and his Icelandic co-writer, the poet Sjón; there’s scarcely a moment of softness, sentiment or relaxation here, just fierce and ferocious determination to fight and prevail in an unstintingly harsh environment. For the most part it’s an enthralling immersion in a forbidding time and place, enhanced by an immoderately attractive cast and saddled only by a dramatic sameness that settles in after a while and gradually diminishes the film’s impact.

Director Robert Eggers returns with his third feature film, “The Northman,” a Viking epic that places the filmmaker in a more accessible genre. The visually striking revenge flick allows for more action sequences and a larger scale/budget than he’s used to.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticFields glow kryptonite-green against volcanic black soil, while not-so-distant mountains smoke and spew hot red lava above the heads of hardy sheep. Nowhere else on earth looks like Iceland, which is why so many productions over the past decade — from “Interstellar” and “Oblivion” to “Game of Thrones” and “Thor” — have used its peerless primordial terrain to represent alternate dimensions and far-off planets.Iceland plays itself in Robert Eggers’ “The Northman,” a brutal tale of 10th-century Viking revenge that makes evocative use of far more than just the scenery to be found in this stunning Nordic outpost.

As floridly written and meticulously etched as they are, at their core the ornate period works of director Robert Eggers summon an elemental human conundrum: the constant clash between free will and the unexplainable in the construction of one’s fate. If there are forces beyond our control meddling in our mortal existences, must we surrender or can we fight back? In 2015’s “The Witch,” a young woman gives in to the preternatural entities that haunt her in part to go against a religious microcosm that demands her submissiveness.