The Big Picture - ‘The Northman,’ and the Top 5 Revenge Movies With Robert Eggers!

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

The breathtaking new action-adventure epic from Robert Eggers, the director of ‘The Witch’ and ‘The Lighthouse,’ is here. Chris Ryan joins to dive into this Viking epic (1:00) before Eggers talks with Sean about the making of the film (56:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Robert Eggers Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joanna, do you ever wish you could definitively prove that you had the right opinions about movies? Uh, yeah, Neil, because I do have the right opinions about movies and television, right, Dave? No, because I'm more right about those things, and I demand trial by content. Oh, boy. What is trial by content? Each week, we'll take on a huge question. Each of us will bring a choice, and combined with listener submissions and your votes, we will come to a decision. It's trial by content every Tuesday on Spotify, TheRinger.com, or wherever you're listening right now.

Don't let Neil win. Don't let Dave win. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Vikings getting their revenge. That's right, The Northmen, a breathtaking new film from Robert Eggers,

the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, is here. I'll be talking with Robert later in this episode. I hope you will stick around for our conversation. But first, we must dig into the majesty, mythos, and mania of this Viking epic and talk about our favorite revenge movies. And here to do that, of course, is my very own Valkyrie. It's Chris Ryan. Hello, Chris. This bear cape is itchy.

Chris, are you excited to talk about The Northman today? Yeah, I really am. I think this is the most interesting movie I've seen in a really long time. I hope that enough people see it so that there can be some really thoughtful conversations about it. Because obviously, when you get a Robert Eggers movie, you're going to get the five elements of hip-hop are going to get pushed really, really hard. The five elements of filmmaking, like the sound, the camera movement, the cinematography, the performances, the writing, all that stuff is going to be in the max. But the ideas and the storytelling style of this movie are fascinating. And I'm really, really curious to see what a mass audience thinks of it. I am too. So let's just paint the picture for the audience of what this movie is.

It is a true Viking epic and a true revenge story. It's about a character named Amleth who is on the verge of becoming a man when his father is brutally murdered by his uncle. His father played by Ethan Hawke. His uncle played by Clay Spang,

the Swedish actor. And after that, the boy escapes from the kingdom and goes on a journey. And on his journey, he learns to become a warrior. And he raids Slavic villages. He travels across Northern Europe. Soon he meets a shamaness.

And she reminds him of a vow he made when he was just a young boy escaping the village, which is to save his mother, kill his uncle, and avenge his father. That's the whole movie. The whole movie is just this crazed man's quest to kill people and acquire vengeance for his father. It's a very simple story. It's the kind of movie we've seen actually very often in the past and has been done well before,

though I will say Viking movies have not really been done terribly well before. Do you have an interest in the world of Vikings or the history of Vikings? I think I had a phase in my childhood after dinosaurs where seeing those ships at the Natural History Museum held some interest to me. And there's also at the Philadelphia Art Museum, there's a really great armory section where you see all the knights and stuff like that. And I think they have some Viking garb. But it was a fleeting moment if it wasn't one at all.

I can't say that I'm fully immersed in the mythology and folklore of this time period, but luckily, Robert Eggers is. Yeah. So one of his hallmarks, of course, is a tremendous amount of research and historical accuracy relative to the stories that he told for the witch for example he dove deep into new england religiosity and found a way to tell an incredible story about witchcraft and for the lighthouse he went to extraordinary lengths to recreate another new england nightmare inside of a lighthouse they built up this incredible edifice. The language that he used in that film was amazing and historically accurate.

He likes to get into the gritty, nitty gritty details of these stories. This is a much bigger movie than anything that he has made before. This is reportedly somewhere between a $90 million and $100 million movie. A lot of the press about the movie already has been about some of the anxiety about whether a movie like this can be successful enough to justify its budget. I'm candidly a little less interested in that than I am the movie itself, which I would say blown away by. And whether I loved it is something I'm still trying to figure out. But the scale and the intensity of purpose with which this movie is made is really quite something. I think every performance in the movie is extraordinary. I think Eggers is developing a Fincher-esque reputation as a person who will not quit until he gets exactly what he wants and gets

exactly what's in his brain onto the screen. You can see that in the performances and in the staging of the movie. That being said, you can also feel the effort in this movie and you can feel the movie dragging through its ideas at times too. So it's an interesting combination of soaring, blood-curdling, violent, epic, and also this kind of slow-paced, methodical exploration of the history of Norse mythology. And so it's a very odd stew. What did you think about it? Yeah. So you mentioned Fincher. And there's a New Yorker profile of Eggers that I'm sure will reference multiple times written by Sam Knight that came out a couple of weeks ago in

advance of this movie. And in that piece, he has a conversation. There's a little bit of secondary quotes from Ethan Hawke. And Hawke mentions that one of the reasons why he wanted to do this movie was because he had kind of been thinking to himself, am I ever going to be able to be

on a set like Apocalypse Now? And I kept thinking of Coppola while I was watching this movie because of that. And so this idea that there's a director with a singular vision who will stop at nothing to get

what's in his head on the screen and also does things that maybe for the 99.9% of viewers just wouldn't matter. So Coppola, there's this famous scene in one of the cut scenes from apocalypse now and in hearts of darkness the documentary about the making of apocalypse now

where coppola is like very very like uh detailed in his design of a french dinner that's taking place at a old french like compound up the river in in vietnam and's the one who's, he's like, they have to have the red wine is on the left. And then they have to have the napkins on the right. And that made, I was thinking of Eggers because there's stuff in the Northman that you will see for a split second that I bet he spent like two months refining

and making sure like that was an accurate wood cutting. Now the total experience winds up i think that stuff matters but when you were watching it in the movie you may not notice the accuracy or the nods that he's making to certain like uh legends or myth mythology from that from ninth century northern europe but i think it winds up ultimately paying off. The thing is, is that like, yeah, you're right. It's two different, it's almost telling this incredibly primal vengeance story and then taking these detours into,

I don't even know if I would call it magical realism because one of the things that I think people are really smart about pointing out about Eggers is that magic and realism exist like on the same plane for this guy. That's right. I think the same way that he treated the witch as if it were a documentary in some respects, that there is a mythic quality to it, but he's trying to make it seem real. The same is true here. There are spirits and there is a sense of religiosity in this movie too,

but it's mostly about Alexander Skarsgård and we haven't said his name yet and we should because he is the star of this movie and one of the producers and one of the reasons why it exists. It's in large part about him annihilating people. I mean,

the majority of this movie is him either killing or plotting to kill people. Some of the kills are unbelievable. This is a movie that does tend to redefine that was sick, dude.

It has a lot of moments where he is slicing people down or battling demon knights or essentially like channeling his true inner beast because the Vikings themselves were kind of channeling a kind of beast-like quality.

You wear the bearskin rug, but Alexander Skarsgård becomes the bear. He becomes the wolf in this movie. And so it is also a really interesting combination of the true savagery that we understand about the Viking people, and also this sense of higher power that I think kind of fascinates all peoples. The idea of being guided by spirits spirits particularly the um the clace bang character and his family's rejection of christianity is a part of this movie and the idea of like an alternative religion and what we believe in and why we believe in and what it drives us to do that's a big theme in the

movie you know it's sort of like what is fate and how do the gods dispense it to us is clearly something that eggers is really interested in it's something that I find hard to click with in most movies because I have no faith. I'm not really a person who ponders higher powers. When you're watching a movie like this or a movie like Gladiator or any movie that is like this that seems to be consumed by some of these ideas, do you view it as just like a foreign object or do you find yourself getting invested in that part of the story? Well, I think if you have something as primal and universal, sadly, I guess, as vengeance, as your motivating plot engine, it becomes something that you can understand no

matter what the setting, no matter what the time period, and no matter what it's adorned with in terms of its iconography, whether it's some kind of like Norse worship or whether there's, and there's like, there's a couple of passing references to Christianity in this movie. Like you mentioned with the Clay Spang character, who's sort of resisting the incursion of Christianity. There's one moment where somebody mentions like, the Christians worship a corpse nailed to a cross and in that one line you kind of get the idea of how absurd christianity must have seemed to people on this island in the middle of the north atlantic but the thing that's cool about this film in general is that it does subtly

show how like for one man's vengeance story is another man's family story and for one story one one island's occult story is another island's religious story you know like there is like this really interesting ability even though it's told entirely almost through scars guards perspective and is single-mindedly following along with this single-minded mission. There is a lot of subtlety and there's a lot of just sharing of multiple points of view throughout the movie, which sort of turns the vengeance story on its head at a couple of points. Yeah, I wrote something down here in the outline, which is there's nuance in this movie, but no modesty. There are little,

small storytelling choices that you have to recognize in addition to those historical details that you're talking about. But everything is still big and grand in the story, even though it's basically about one guy. It's still a really massive thing. We've talked about Fincher. You mentioned Coppola. The person whose films this really reminded me of is Werner Herzog. I feel like the films that Herzog was making in the late 70s and early 80s as he started to have slightly bigger budgets than what he was working with when he first started out, particularly the Klaus Kinski movies, A Gear of the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, that really feels like what he's after. He's deeply spiritual, crazed reflections of men on these hopeless missions.

And they operate as these kind of like mirror images of their filmmakers, you know, that like they are relentless and unwilling to give up on what they want, even if it costs them their life. You can feel Eggers kind of pouring everything he has and everything that Yaron Blaschke, his DP and the Icelandic poet Són, who he wrote the movie with, and especially Alexander Skarsgård, who it seems like went through hell to make this movie. And they're doing this living duality of what their experience is making something and then what it looks like on screen. The movie was shot and made in the mud and in the fire.

It looks really painful and gross and dirty. And yet it is kind of beautiful at times too. There's something majestic about it being in the dirt so that when you actually rise up out of the dirt, you feel the massive payoff. Still, I did feel myself thinking about how hard it must be to make this movie as I was watching the movie.

And I wonder if that's maybe one of its flaws is that it is like slightly overdetermined at times and that people will feel the effort. Did that strike you at all? Yeah. I mean, I think that there are certain moments that felt like there are a couple of moments that feel stitched in from another movie. And there's a bunch of stuff about whether or not Eggers had final cut and what he had to do to sort of please all the different masters that he had on this movie. And there's one or two transition scenes where the music is kind of different and they're riding horses in a triumphant way.

And you're kind of like, what part of this movie is about these people having a wonderful journey like in Lord of the Rings. But in terms of its labored quality, I guess at the end of the day, I just say to myself, I'd rather watch something like that than something completely anonymous. So that even if this person maybe spends five extra minutes on a psychedelic mushroom ritual that ultimately just reinforces the fact that this little kid is going to become a man or that he is tied to his father through like an oath and this tree of Kings, which is kind of like an idea, but maybe also physically real. I just think that like, I would rather watch something like this, where it's completely and totally somebody's vision, although, although messed with a little bit, then just something kind of anonymous, like, oh, cool. You like did it's good for what it is and you you got some ideas in there i mean everything in this movie

is an idea do you feel as though you were uh born of a line of tree kings do you does that feel true to the ryan historical experience when you think back on your ancestors born of a line of like pasty bookish irish guys um what do you think of the performances in this movie? What do you think of Skarsgård? What do you think of Nicole Kidman? What do you think of Anya Teller-Joy? Yeah. So Skarsgård, I think,

needs to kind of go into a different category because while I'm not trying to take anything away from the emotions he communicates, it's something that you have to reckon with physically. Dude looks like he's juicing. He has a neckline in this movie that I don't know if it's makeup or enhanced, but there is one shot of him in a mineral bath where he looks like he's wearing a shock collar,

like a 1980s linebacker. He looks like Brian Bosworth. Yeah, and he's nude. It's funny you say that because when I spoke to Eggers, he literally made reference to Alex's lats and traps. And I was like, makes sense.

He really put in the time here. Yeah. So the physical exertion and transformation and because Eggers shoots a lot of his movies in these oners, in these sort of like

one shot tracking shots i don't think i ever noticed any stunt work it just it just looks like scars guard the entire time so his performance for me was largely physical but it existed in this place where he's almost pushing this character to this point of animalistic primal rage. And he gets there. It's not a relatable guy. It's not even like Daniel Plainview, where you're like,

it was so interesting to see him immerse himself in this character. I mean, Skarsgård makes himself into an animal almost literally. There's a scene early in the film, shortly after we cut from the young boy transitioning to the older Skarsgård, where there is some sort of Viking ritual in which across a bonfire, the transformation is literally happening.

There's some sort of shaman leading a drumbeat that signals Skarsgård and his cohort turning into animals. And you can see in his face in real time that he is becoming a bear. And then that is shortly followed by,

frankly, one of the more amazing scenes I've ever seen in a movie. This Slavic village raid that the Vikings sick upon them is crazy. I mean, there's a famous scene from the trailer of this movie in which Skarsgård's character catches a spear that has been hurled at him in

midair and turns around and throws it back at his enemy. And that was an incredibly exciting moment when the trailer for this movie first came out. But everything that happens after that is even crazier. No, I guess what you're saying, Skarsgård, they raid this fort and Skarsgård,

like repels himself up this fort wall with an axe and you're like how is it how are you doing this you should really happening this is crazy this guy is climbing up a flat wooden wall with just an axe um and then leaps and and all the stuff you see in the trailer and we don't want to give away too much stuff. But it's also one of the more brutal things that you will see on a screen. And because the music and the sound is dialed up all the way to 11 in this movie, you almost come out of it, even if you're not appalled by the violence, you come out of it almost physically disoriented and sick from it because it's so punishing to watch so let's

talk about the rest of the cast then yeah um ethan hawk is your guy um he's having a moment here with moon knight he doesn't last very long in this movie which i don't think is really a spoiler honestly but what did you think of his performance so i was curious whether you thought that ethan hawk's role in this movie is to be seen the way the child would have seen him or to be is if that's like realistically like not not in the sense that like if that really what he would be like there's a moment between ethan hawk and nicole kidman who plays his wife that is notable but like i kind of you know you kind of want to put that aside because there's stuff that happens later in the movie

that reflects that. But I thought it was interesting that a lot of what happens is this kid who has this vision of his father as this conquering hero, as this loving father, as this loving husband, and this benevolent king.

And he's come back from battle. And Hawk does a good job like reflecting that i think that ultimately i honestly like at some point during this movie and i i have this this argument with myself a lot but like i kind of wish this movie had been three hours and that they had spent a little bit more time in this kid's childhood and seeing a little bit more about like what life was like before it was irrevocably changed for him what did you what did you make of like the early scenes the hawk-led scenes in that and on that island well i've been trying to trying to dig through it and it's a little tricky to talk about because it does potentially lead to some spoiler conversation

that i don't want to ruin parts of the movie for the. But there is something about it that feels like it is meant to start as formality, as like traditional storytelling in this mode where you have the great king returning home. And then very quickly, maybe 20 minutes later, is ultimately about subversion and is ultimately about kind of undermining your expectations of what this great king represents, not just to his son, but to the audience.

And then as the movie goes on, you may or may not believe that to be the case. I think the fact that it's neither confirmed or denied, whether he's a great king or a weak king, is one of the more interesting aspects of the movie. You know, it's one of the more, it's one of the new elements, I think, that he's bringing to a story like this.

And I don't know, I mean, I like that. It reminded me a little bit of some of the storytelling in The Last Duel, where there is a sort of multiplicity of points of view, and it's questioning the kind of archetypal story that we tend to get set in these times. And it reminds us that men that seem great

aren't necessarily all that great. So I thought that was fascinating. And I think Ethan Hawke is kind of the perfect man to do that. You know, he is on the one hand, this avatar of like Gen X disinterest. And he has like kind of a beta vulnerability, I think to him at times as a performer.

And so even though he is wearing the chain mail and he's got all the garb and he's participating in the crazed rituals, he's still like the guy on the train from before sunset. You know what I mean? Like he's still got this kind of, this kind of daffy sweetness to him too so i thought he was really good i i do it would have been nice to have more of him you know clace bang uh is really one of my favorite actors honestly

since i started seeing him in um reuben oslin movies and he has a very very important role in this film and there is a version of this movie that is told from his perspective. Yes. And I think the point that you were making earlier about his character's point of view on Christianity is really interesting because this is also a movie that initially deems him pure evil. He is like the sort of the figure upon which vengeance is sought. But his character kind of has a point too. There's a little bit of Thanos going on here where it's like should we be taking Clay Spang's character's side

in the story? And that's another thing that I really like about the movie. It's much more nuanced than your typical vengeance tale even though it has all the shape of it. And I really liked him. And I thought without giving anything away I thought this was the best Nicole Kidman performance in like 10 or 15 years. She's amazing in this movie. Takes a while for her character to kind of make her presence felt but she i thought

she was brilliant um i'll let listeners decide for themselves on that and then and you tell her joy is an interesting one to discuss because in many ways robert eggers discovered her yeah she plays um a slave who is also a kind of aspiring witch as well in this movie who falls in love with uh scars guards character and who wouldn't you know what i mean you meet a guy uh he's he's got direction in life you know what i mean like so many so many young men are aimless you know yeah yeah like bobby you know but but not not amless this reminds me it reminds me a lot of when eileen and i met in high school you know and she hitched her wagon to me and she was like you're on a mission on a mission. You know, you've got some big ideas and you want to make something of yourself and I'm here for you. And what I will do is channel the gods to lean in your favor.

I thought she's pretty great in this. I think she and Eggers have a real interesting thing going where he keeps casting her in very similar kinds of roles where they start out seeming like pretty nice, but then ultimately they are like consumed by their vision. And she's like a movie star now. It's kind of crazy. Also that like, uh, you read these,

you, if you read articles about the Northman and Skarsgård and Hawk and everybody are just like, so like shattered by the experience that I just tell her joy is just like, that's my guy. Like I love showing up and having to wear 17th century clogs. And her whole thing is, if you know he has this very specific vision for the film, what you're there to do is to execute

it. And it's not like, oh, we show up and maybe we'll put the camera here and maybe we'll put the camera there. She's like, no, he has something and my job is to help him find it on screen, which is kind of an awesome old school. You don't see a lot of director-performer relationships like that anymore. Yeah, I hope they make a lot more movies together. And that is honestly how I think of you on this show.

You show up and you're ready to do the work. I'm just wearing my clogs and I'm like, you just point the camera at me um what else strikes you about uh uh eggers's directing style is there anything about it specifically that that because he he he makes a lot of choices you know he does do a lot of this sort of symmetrical head-on close-up stuff that you see in like wes anderson movies or barry jenkins movies they just happen to be in viking settings you know he does those long one-ers that you're talking about, which require this incredible amount of choreography because they're not just tracking shots through a target, you

know, they're action sequences. And so there's something amazing about that. Anything else about his style? Well, I don't mean to change the subject on you, but what do you think of his writing style? Because it's very, I mean, the visuals are just stunning. You could watch this film with no dialogue

if you wanted to. Probably understand what's happening and also be blown away. But the basically the language of this movie and the sort of written the written character of the film is a really interesting one

because it probably is the thing that made it hardest for me to, I guess, understand is there's like these scenes where you're just, you know, people are talking about fate, but, you know, like they're also talking about these ideas

in such a language that is like, it feels not quite poetic in the way shakespeare would would feel but is is obviously very i think historically rooted i'm not doing a good job describing it but i found it like so dense but yet not that beautiful if that makes sense maybe like the land you know what i mean maybe like mysterious but not exactly gorgeous or pretty you know and uh i found like you know like there's a um a moment where uh the the amleth meets a a basically a mystic a witch and it's a very very crucial scene in the film because it's like this like he's going to be set on his path back towards this uh to avenge his father and a lot of information and a lot of

very important dramatic motivation is in that scene and i have to admit i didn't quite understand what happened you know what i mean and i know i had a little bit of that issue with the northman too and with the lighthouse as well where like the language of it was so specific that it was kind of hard for me sometimes to to to feel like i understood what was going on yeah i think it's an it's an interesting question there's two different co-writers on those movies max eggers his brother was the co-writer on the lighthouse and and sion this this icelandic poet and author is the co-writer on this movie i think sion's probably responsible for quote unquote a lot of that language that you're describing you know bjork

the famed icelandic pop star plays this this cirrus who gives amleth this this mission kind of reinvigorates his purpose that scene is hard to understand and in part because of how bjork delivers it in part because of the volume with which it is shown on screen and the the kind of the contrast between this brutal thumping score of this movie and some of the more whispered dialogue I don't it doesn't really bother me in the Northman but the difference between the Northman and the lighthouse is the lighthouse to me is hilarious

that's like to me I think that's one of the funniest movies the last five years and if you say watch that movie with closed caption on at home you can see all the jokes you can see in Willem Dafoe's performance the comic pursuit in some of that. Now, this movie, like The Northman, does have a couple of fart jokes. There are a couple of funny moments in The Northman, but not very many. It's not really

a very funny movie, and it's not really very interested in amusing you. It's interested in thrilling you and captivating you. So there is something a little distancing. I agree with you about the language, but I think it is accurate to the period and to the history. And so if that's ultimately what is driving so many of the creative decisions, you kind of have to accept that. Whether audiences are going to care, I don't think they are really going to care. I think they're going to like half listen to that stuff and then just wait for Skarsgård to put a sword through a dude's chest. You know, like that's, That really is the value proposition. Maybe we should talk about that just

a little bit. I mean, what do you think? You mentioned the final cut thing. Eggers did not have final cut. This movie had to go through test screening, which is something he didn't seem very happy about when we spoke. But I understand why that was the case. This is a very expensive movie on a grand scale after he made two fairly modest-sized

movies. It's an original story, quote unquote, even though it's the oldest story in the history of time. And it's basically Hamlet. Yeah. Yeah. I would flatly, plainly recommend this to anybody that likes epic movies. I think it's like, at a minimum, there is extraordinary accomplishment in the movie and some awesome sequences. But it might be a tough sell. What do you think it's gonna do uh in terms of its commercial prospects yeah

i don't know man ambulance made eight million dollars what are we what are we doing here if people see like 500 ambulance commercials during nba regular season games as they wind down and during the masters and stuff and then they're like pass. I don't know if they're going to be like, oh, is this two and a half hour Viking movie with the guy from True Blood and Clay Spang who I've never heard of? That's what you're

going to go see? I'm really worried for its prospects. I'd love to be proven wrong and I hope that it's a kind of movie that has a second and third life as something that gets screenshotted a lot and something that gets talked about a lot and then like something gets watched over and over again once it inevitably hits a streaming service but as like a commercial blockbuster movie going up against Sonic the Hedgehog 2? I don't know. Oh my god.

Here's the thing that I do think it has going for it. And this is part of the larger conversation that we're having today on my favorite movie podcast. People fucking love vengeance. They do. And revenge is like one of the top two or three

motivating actions in storytelling. It's just like, I gotta get my revenge there's i gotta get the love of my life there's i gotta get my revenge and there's i gotta get out of this place and if you can include all three in one you got yourself a really hot property property but this movie digs down deep into the mud of what revenge is it's what's cathartic about it and what's ultimately empty about it and that's the thing i think i love the most about this movie aside from like obviously like once in a generation i that this guy has i think you nailed it that's that is really the theme that vengeance is fundamental to this character's survival and also pointless yeah and and and and a journey to oblivion really there's nothing else really to it it's a fascinating movie i hope people check it out i don't know what else to

say there's a fucking sword fight in a volcano you know like can you do better can you do better in a movie than a sword fight in a volcano i don't think so it feels almost fake it's so so grand it's very fun the vengeance aspect of it is fascinating for both of us a volcano? I don't think so. It feels almost fake. It's so grand. It's very fun. The vengeance aspect of it is fascinating for both of us. You're not, you don't strike me as a particularly vengeful guy.

You have a reputation as a good guy. People always turn to you and they say, hey, you're safe harbor. You're emotional comfort. But do you, is there something inside you

that burns? So I think that as an only child, I have a pretty, I had had and i suppose still do have like a pretty active like fantasy life you know what i mean like i think this was more the case before it's like a dana wheeler nicholson thing or what do you mean no but like i think this was more the case before you could distract yourself at any during every second of the day with like your phone or whatever but like you know you would just sort of be like oh i i don't know like they're like you see somebody driving by in a car and you're like

what if i was driving that car that kind of thing you know what i mean sure and i think that imagining slights and then like avenging those slights is a part of that like i definitely think like when and they're one of the movies i'm going to suggest when we do our top five vengeance movies is very much rooted in the fucked up experiences that everybody has in high school and like i think that that probably vengeance in in high school is like when it's most fertile because you are just feeling like completely destroyed on a daily basis but no not on a i don't walk around being like i will fucking sail across oceans of time to get my revenge against you sean because you cut me off on a podcast one um one of the tricky

parts about revenge movies is that they are often quite brutal and tend to age a little bit poorly because in an effort to portray brutality they maybe are not looking to the future of how they'll be understood. And some of these movies, I guess, are quote unquote problematic. I still think that there is something searing and exciting about someone just laying it all out in a movie

and just saying like, this is hard to watch, but you know what? It's necessary in a way to tell the story properly. So let's just, let's talk about it. Your number five is a CR classic. What is it? My number five is Man on Fire, which I chose. This is Tony Scott's

foray into Mexico City with Denzel Washington as a retired, somewhat disgraced ex-CIA agent who's acting as a personal bodyguard for a rich family living in Mexico City. He develops a relationship with the daughter of this family. We're a very protective paternal relationship. And then she gets kidnapped and he unleashes hell on the Mexico City criminal underworld and corruption, the corrupt police in the city. And it's essentially like there's obviously this famous scene in this movie where where christopher walken is talking about denzel washington and is just like his art is death and he is about to paint his masterpiece this is a movie where like you see a character who's actually

like in his in his natural state is to be in a state of revenge and to be inflicting pain on other people but can do it in a way that is actually to rescue this girl so it's got like his his debased kind of violent instincts are given almost a moral clarity because he is trying to like save someone and also like make people pay for what they did uh this movie is sick uh denzel puts a bomb up a guy's ass, as people may or may not know, but is kind of like peak Tony Scott, absolutely deranged, sweaty, smoking, violent, dark, fucked up,

and the end of the movie, it gives you no catharsis or happiness. I still never got into Man on Fire. I don't know what it is really yeah yeah yeah it's like one of the only tony scott movies that i can't click into i'm not sure what it is maybe it's just because i know how important it is to you and and i'm like you know what that's that's for that's that's for chris and bill yeah those guys they deserve it they can have it you know i'll i'll obsess over enemy of the state, you know, or, or, or domino Beverly Hills cop too.

Um, okay. My number five is miss 45. This is a able for our is second non-pornographic feature film. Um, it's from 1981. And when are you going to make your first non-pornographic feature film? I think that's what a lot of listeners could be a while,

you know, I'm still very vital. So I still, I've got my juices flowing um the things they're doing with cameras these days are amazing it's pretty remarkable yeah no cgi needed over here though cr uh so miss 45 this is a very depraved movie i i thought i needed at least one representative of the the rape revenge subgenre of films and miss 45 might be the best one it's um it's a movie about a young woman a mute woman who is working as a seamstress in new york city who is raped not

once but twice in one day in two very brutal sequences this is at times a very hard movie to watch so i'll just i'll foreground that for the listener but um she immediately seeks her revenge by dressing in a kind of a sexy nun's costume and then meting out revenge across the city and killing people. And it is a fascinating analysis of what satisfies that vengeful lust. And it features an extraordinary performance by Zoe Lund in kind of like the star making role. She appeared in other Ferrara films and is a unique actress who also really struggled with the heroin addiction over many years. And there's very few people that look like her. She's incredibly striking on screen.

And this is a movie that a lot of dirtbag cinephiles and aspiring auteurs saw and adopted style and depravity from over the years extremely influential movie and beautiful in its own very fucked up way so that's miss 45 there was a just a really long period of time uh where rape was just the motivating incident like the the triggering incident of like all revenge movies and i'm not laughing at that i'm like like kind of almost like in shock that that was just something that happened for 25 years and there's a bunch that we could mention here i spent your grave uh last house on the left where you're just like oh wow so straw dogs this is this is just like this is what this movie is about

yeah i mean in some ways it makes sense as a storytelling trope because it is the most awful thing short of murder that can be done to a person and to show it on screen really like it boils people you know i spit on your grave is a really interesting example of that and that's another movie that's incredibly hard to watch and yeah um would never be made today in the way that it was made back then in the 70s but um has a power to it you know it has an undeniable power to it. What's your number four? My number four is Gladiator. And I chose this because there is a world in which the Northman is Gladiator, right?

And it's another Sword and Shield epic. It's another movie where a guy gets everything taken away from him, is forced into slavery, and makes his way back to his home to take what was once his. It's really fascinating. I would almost want to watch these on a double bill to see how someone who maybe is the ultimate insider artist, Ridley Scott, has anyone ever been a more stable and sure-handed studio director who's also able to like put his his personal vision on those films like him i don't know i don't think so you know not not somebody who's ever been as prolific as him you know you'll get somebody who maybe is like a good

studio director but doesn't work as often but at least scott like can make two films a year as varied as last dueluel and House of Gucci. But with Gladiator, I think obviously this was a multi-Oscar winner and made Russell Crowe into a blockbuster superstar. This is basically the best version of this movie where it's relatable.

The characters' motivations are clear and uncomplicated. The villain is absolutely, unquestionably the villain, you know, and it winds up actually feeling both poignant but cathartic at the end. And

there's a lot of Roman politics stuff in here that I don't think anybody really cares about, but this is like an amazingly well-done revenge movie. Yeah, I thought of Commodus a little bit when we were talking about the Clay Spang character in The Northmen and the fact that it's sort of sort of the inversion you know comedus we have no empathy for him we don't really see i mean he's a fail son you know what i mean he's he's not an interesting character and so the there may be the movie has a little it is maybe less multi-dimensional

than the northman is in some ways but and even Eggers, when he and I spoke, said, I got to give it up to Gladiator. Gladiator is a good movie. And he's a tough critic. That's a good one. My number four is probably a good double feature with Miss 45. It's another B movie from the 1970s. It's called Walking Tall.

People may remember that title as a movie starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, which was remade in 2004. This is the original. I encourage people to check out the original. You can watch it on Pluto TV. It's a little bit slower than the remake. It's a little bit more of its time, but there is nothing has more satisfying than watching Joe Don Baker bash dudes heads in with a club. And that's what he does in this movie. He plays a retired professional wrestler who moves back to his hometown to spend time with his parents and his family, his wife and his children.

And when he returns home, he discovers that this town that he grew up in has become very corrupt and is full of thugs. And he's attacked in a bar one night and he gets arrested for it. He goes to trial and he makes his case and he shows the jury the scars that he has from the attack that has been wrought upon him. And he's let go. He's deemed not guilty. And after that, he runs for sheriff and he gets elected sheriff and then he just unveils a lot of fucking whoop ass on this town and all the bad guys in this town starting with the people who terrorized him and beat him up but then extending to every single corrupt person in this town yeah this movie is a lot of fun i don't think people

really understand we we used to make things in this country, like Joe Don Baker bashing guys' heads in. And if you haven't seen it, you should check it out. It's a good one. Joe, this is a really good recommendation and is sort of part and parcel with a sub-genre, like these 70s B-movie, like Rolling Thunder-type revenge movies where it seems like they made like two of these a week

and Quentin Tarantino watched all of them. Yeah, and he definitely told me about all of them, thunder type revenge movies were it seems like they made like two of these a week and uh quentin tarantino watched all of them yeah and he definitely told me about all of them which is why i'm recommending them these days but um walking tall is an interesting one because it it was a huge hit and it was a movie that started out very small and and played very well in the south obviously for obvious reasons and there was a lot discussion. It's interesting to read the kind of East Coast intellectual critics, sort of the Pauline Kales and the Andrew Saris's and the Vincent Canby's

trying to tangle with this grimy, pulpy, exploitation movie set in the South, a world they know nothing about. And all of the reviews are all sort of like, I don't know what it's doing, but it's doing something

to the people in this country. So I love relics of time like that too, where you don't have a lot of people living in the heart of Tennessee writing about this movie. That would be very different if it were today. Today, you'd have a New Yorker essay written by someone living in Knoxville saying like the true story of the Buford in my life.

Anyway, that's Walking Tall. What's your number three? Number three is Carrie, Brian De Palma's adaptation of the Stephen King novel starring Sissy Spacek. And this is a little bit of an inversion of the typical revenge story, because usually what happens in the revenge story is something bad happens in the first scene. And then for the rest of the movie, our hero is getting their revenge. And Carrie, you're basically forced to go through this young woman being tortured by her friends and her mother for 80% of the movie.

And then she becomes telekinetic and fucks everyone up and i think that the reason i wanted to throw this on here aside from it's just iconic status is this very very um potent setting of high school and the torment that people can experience when they're young and kind of first matriculating into like a larger social life and experiencing like their sexual development and everything and like just like carrie obviously has like this fucked up home life but and she doesn't have a lot of friends or any friends and she's basically got one person at this high school who's looking out for her and then the worst possible nightmare happens to her and it triggers this hyper violent supernatural response from her that i think is a really great story but is also a

great metaphor for like the untamed rage that can exist inside of kids when they're when they're taunted like that um so carrie yeah i mean fucking dropping blood on carrie and then carrie just shuts the doors you've got tony scott you've got ridley scott and you've got brian de palma so far. You're doing pretty well. When you were in high school, were you more of a sissy space sack or more of an Amy Irving or more of a Nancy Allen? What was your archetype? I was pretty Ferris Bueller-y in high school. What? What does that mean? You were the coolest guy ever? No, I worked really hard at not working, if you know what I'm saying. And I just, I like to hang out.

You know what I mean? A little bit of basketball, a little bit of school paper. It's been said before, both by us and by others in the world, that you do have a Ferris energy and I have a Cameron energy. That's why it works so well.

You know, that's why I love hanging with you. Yeah. Okay, my number three. The Outlaw Josie Wills. You had to pick one clint had to be a clint eastwood movie revenge is the operating premise of probably 50 of clint's movies especially his action movies in the 70s and 80s i didn't really want to do a dirty harry movie because i don't really feel like revenge is something that police officers are motivated by at the start

maybe as the dirty harry movies go on that's a part of the telling this of this story but the allah josie wales is a movie about a guy whose family is killed and then who loses his mind and needs to seek vengeance he starts out by teaming up with a band of confederate soldiers and you know raises the land and then after that finds betrayal in the union army and then this basically strikes out on his own killing people left and right um you know this movie was a huge hit this is the movie i think more than any klinis would directed film that paved the road for where he was going to go as a director incredible action sequences and shootout sequences it's beautifully photographed

um and it is similarly primal i think to the northman it has a lot in common with that movie about a guy who is kind of monomaniacally focused on this mission of destruction yeah i'd say this and pale rider both yeah yeah and they're kind of in conversation with each other you know pale rider is almost like a spiritual sequel about a spirit of a kind and um it's just a really really great movie for its time features a great a great performance by Chief Dan George. I love him in this movie. He and Clint have amazing chemistry together.

Really unusual movie. I think if you read the description like I did and you were just like, a Confederate soldier goes off killing Union Army members, you'd be like,

whoa, that seems like really problematic. It's not really like that. It's not a movie about politics necessarily. It's much more an emotional journey and a really cool movie.

So, L.O Ella Josie Wales. Okay. Number two for you. So I cheated and picked two, but they are very much cousin films. I picked 1967's Point Blank directed by John Borman and starring Lee Marvin. And then I picked 1999's The Limey directed by Steven Soderbergh starring Terrence Stamp. And both of these films are incredibly stylish. They're both set in Los Angeles. They're both about

older gentlemen kicking ass across LA. But I thought they both did a really good job of cinematically representing what happens to a mind that's consumed with vengeance. They are both highly,

highly stylish, doing a lot of things with time and chronology and linear storytelling in terms of jumping ahead of where the story is while the story is still being told or doing a montage of things that haven't happened yet and then all of a sudden we're ahead of them or we go into the past. The Limey is about a man avenging the death of his daughter point blank is about a man uh who is avenging himself who's been betrayed by his partner and his wife uh they are both in their own ways um kind of sick you know what i mean like it's kind of they're very good at depicting like the sickness that revenge must visit on the brain

if you're consumed by something like this but are also just amazing la movies the brain if you're consumed by something like this, but are also just amazing LA movies. And just if you're interested in a creative way to tell a very minimal story, you should check out these two movies. Love that one. I thought seriously about putting the Limey on the list. I think the Limey is being released

as part of a Criterion collection later this year, or so I've heard. Is that the Soderbergh bought all his masters back thing? I think so. I think it's, I think it's a part of that. The limey also features maybe my favorite line from a revenge movie where it's just Terrence stamp after killing a bunch of guys comes out into the harsh LA

sunlight with blood on his face and just screams, tell them I'm fucking coming really good stuff uh okay let's begin the Quentin Tarantino portion of our conversation here uh he's already come up once he's obviously the um the master of the revenge movie somebody who's watched all of these movies that we've been discussing and iterated on them and reimagined them and rebuilt them there are a lot of good movies of his to choose from that could fit this category. You chose one different for me. I chose Inglourious Bastards. I think I ultimately went with this one because I think Shoshana is probably his most underrated character and probably the

most fascinating representation of the pursuit of vengeance, not because it's just the power of seeking revenge on all of Nazi Germany by annihilating its leadership, but by doing so as a projectionist in a movie theater, which feels like the ultimate meta commentary for Quentin to make on his series of revenge stories. I just, I love Inglourious Bastards in addition to it just being like a really fun military romp, like Dirty Dozen style, Brad Pitt-led movie. It just features this incredible duel

between Melanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz at the center of it. And it's one of my favorite movies of all time. Me, you, and Mallory Rubin talked about it on the Rewatchables, one of the most fun episodes we've ever done. I think it's a movie that over time increasingly becomes the one that I think is like him

at his apex, his highest powers as a filmmaker. And so I had to give it a shout in Glorious Bastards. Which QT did you choose? I did Kill Bill 2. So you just talked about Kill Bill 1 for action movies a couple weeks ago.

I've rewatched this film a bunch recently. It's been on cable a lot. And I think the reason why I'm so into this and why I wanted to put it at number one is the amount of time he spends giving voice to the people who are being hunted. The reason why the bride is looking for her vengeance is Bud and Elle and Bill.

And they all get to talk about what they're expecting, whether they deserve it, why they did what they did. And I think that's fascinating. If I had said to you, maybe I guess after Jackie Brown, Qu Quentin Tarantino's basically gonna get make revenge movies for the rest of his career in one way or another like in some place

whether it's almost like acts of historical vengeance which is something we talked about a lot on the Inglourious Bastards rewatchables but I think

you could say Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a act of revenge for you know for Sharon Tate you know like all these things

that he seems to be consumed by as a filmmaker. Would you be surprised that that was like his central idea and central motivating storytelling device? No. And I, you know, not to psychologize him, but I think that you can almost feel him like seeking revenge on everyone who didn't believe in him in a way you know like the audacity of his filmmaking and his fearlessness i think is in part inspired by the fact that he's like no one let me do what i want to do and i have a big bold vision and so like you can feel him channeling that in his characters i do think it is it's the driving motivation for almost all of his best characters right but surprised i'm'm surprised by it because you get to Jackie Brown.

And I guess he makes Reservoir Dogs. That's very much of its time. It's like a crew movie. It's very cool. It's a heist movie. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, I think in some ways, are an explicit Elmore Leonard adaptation,

but also Elmore Leonard-esque crime stories happening in and around Los Angeles, although very much Quentin's experience and Quentin's language. And then after that, from Death Proof, Django, and Glorious Bastards to Kill Bill films,

and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I think that the idea of vengeance or the idea of correcting history is pretty much what he's consumed by, with the exception, I guess, of Hateful Eight. I would argue that even in the characters of Butch from Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown herself, those are revenge stories. Those are stories about taking your power back, about a black woman flight attendant who's been underestimated and undermined her entire life and her trying to get something for herself and same thing with butch you know it's like dumb boxer you wouldn't have the the wherewithal to you know undermine this crime lord and get what's yours and he does it and i i think it's just such as the reason that i think he has

proclaimed the greatness of movies like Rolling Thunder and Miss 45 over the years is because they influenced him a lot. You know, he puts it into all of his movies. Kill Bill 2 is a great movie.

It's probably the like, Kill Bill 1 is so explosive and entertaining that I think Kill Bill 2 gets a little bit pushed aside at times

because it's a little bit slower. A lot of it is much more focused on the kind of Carradine Thurman showdown at the lot of it is much more focused on the the kind of caridin thurman showdown at the end of it that kind of a long conversation that they have together but the different kind of daryl hannah michael madsen scene where he's just like that woman deserves her revenge and we we deserve to die like that's amazing so amazing in the trailer yeah

my number one is once upon a time in the West. My favorite Sergio Leone movie. Speaking of revenge, somebody who knows a thing or two about it. Probably the best old movie in theater experience I had as a kid. My mom took me to see this movie. I've talked about it a few times on the pod. I think when Ennio Morricone died, I talked about it a little bit. The character of Harmonica, played by Charles Bronson, is the one seeking revenge. It's a revenge that we don't necessarily fully understand until we get to the end of the movie. But again, extremely influential on a lot of the movies that we're talking about here.

Also a movie that goes to great pains to undermine traditional heroism figures. Henry Fonda, beloved man of integrity, Harry Fonda, plays one of the worst bastards in the history of movies in in this flick and um it's a leonie movie so it's grand it's beautiful the music is extraordinary uh it features great gunfights the bad guys are real bad and the and the heroes are real ambivalent about being heroes and there's a there's a damsel in distress and she's played by claudia cardinale and she's beautiful. Just one of the greatest movies I ever made. I love this movie. So Once Upon a Time in the West. I, you know, when I was watching,

when I saw you put this on your list, I watched a bit of this last night just to kind of be like, I want us to rewatch the opening scene. And maybe we underestimate what like audiences are capable of. I mean, people watch these Sergio Leone movies and they were these incredibly operatic,

demanding, punishing, in some ways, films. And it's like, maybe audiences are more open to something like The Northmen than we're giving them credit for. From your lips to the Norse gods' ears, Chris. Odin, please get these folks to the theater. CR, where can we hear you, man? Where are you making your wares these days? I'm on The Watch podcast twice a week. Greenwald should be back by now. By the time people hear this, Andy will be back on the feed. He was on vacation.

And then I'm on The Answer on Fridays on the Ringer NBA show feed talking about NBA playoffs. Okay, Chris. Thanks so much. Now let's go to my conversation with Robert Eggers. Say hello to Tim Selects, Tim's everyday value menu. Enjoy the new spinach and feta savory egg pastry

or our roasted red pepper and Swiss pinwheel starting at only $2.99 plus tax. Try one or try our full Tim Selleck's lineup. Terms apply. Prices may vary at participating restaurants in Canada. It's time for Tim's. So happy to have Robert Eggers back on the show, one of my favorite filmmakers with an incredible new movie, The Northman. How are you, Robert? I'm great. I'm pretty great. So let's start with The Lighthouse, which is really one of my favorite things in the last 10 years. And we talked a little bit after you made that film, and I think you had basically

already started on this or had an idea that you were going to this. Was this purposefully an elevation or an expansion out from a two-hander, or was there not as much forethought going into the idea of making this big epic story? The thing is, I'm always working on multiple things and you never know what is the thing that's going to happen. I mean, the lighthouse was kind of a... It was like an escape car that I had ready because I thought some bigger things were going to kind of fall apart.

And it just so happened that shown and I had a script that of, of the Northman that we were happy with enough, you know, not a shooting script, but like, but a script that's definitely said like, this could be a good movie. That it was ready right before I went to can with uh with the lighthouse so um so you know i took my cue from you know one of my idols uh bergman who when smiles of a summer night was doing really well at can he said this is time for me to pull out the seventh seal and get it financed and that's sort of you know what what we did with

with with the northman and thankfully thanks to the vikings tv show on the history channel which then spawned like a lot of other tv shows and video games uh you know and the marvel stuff there was like a hunger for viking. So golly gee, what a surprise. Like I'm making little tiny art house movies and now I'm making a big Viking epic. Wow. That was unexpected.

Love the idea of you leveraging Marvel IP to make the Northman. There's something very special about that. So, you know, you've written your last two films with, with writing partners and that's different from what you'd been doing previous to that. What, how is it different? And what do you like about it? to like break the script or i'm never gonna like have enough stuff on the stove ready to go for you know what for whoever orders what off my menu but you know i mean look shown is an incredible writer um he's a literary giant like in my mind, it's like collaborating

with Bulgakov. And I'm honored that Sian would want to work with me. And look, we're working on something else that has nothing to do with Iceland or Vikings, but in making a Viking movie, I needed to have, in my opinion,

an Icelandic co-writer because even the most Viking-hating Icelander knows exactly what Viking saga characters they're literally directly related to. And, you know, many Icelanders today still believe in land spirits and fairies. And so I needed someone who grew up with that on a cultural understanding and shown even as an Icelander is particularly interested in folklore. So he's a very special and specific partner for this. One thing that you are often asked about and well known for now is accuracy, attention to detail, having a sense of historical context for a lot of the stories that you tell. But you don't often, I feel like, get asked about invention and creation and coming up with new

ideas. So the Northman does have some kind of conventional structures to it when you think of a Viking story, but were you trying to subvert or redefine how we think of some of that stuff yeah but not by inventing anything like every all all of the subversions come through research so i mean the beginning of the movie in in many ways like is deliberately a version of the beginning of uh you know um the vikings uh fleischer 1958 kirk douglas like coming home from a raid yay the king's back time for a big feast but it is not the like sloppy raucous um feast of of the vikings like the you know i mean by the way if if you know if we stayed in that great hall like over a few hours it would have turned into that you know and people would have been puking all over the place and everything else but it but we wanted to show how like ritualized and sophisticated

uh viking culture was in a way that we haven't seen before and you know and it's and even as like you know king ethan hawke is writing through the streets people aren't like throwing flowers like everyone's like nodding like in respect and maybe a little fear, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a much,

and it's a much more restrained like Nordic attitude. And that indicates part of what is to come in the storytelling too, which is kind of what's smart about that. You know, you're, it's a little bit of an Easter egg, I guess, for where your story's going.

I'm interested though, like the physical and structural challenge of the movie seemed really big i know it's it's a it is truly an epic but it seems like all of your movies there is like a physical challenge aspect to it like do you pursue projects that you think are going to be hard to choreograph and unlock is that part of the appeal of some of these stories? I mean, I get,

I don't do it like that, but clearly I'm drawn to things like that, you know, and in, and you know, in, you know, in something that I wrote that was maybe less demanding compared to say the Northman,

I decided it's like the first two acts are raining in every single scene and the last act is snowing in every single scene so and i but that was just like i wasn't i just was like oh that that would be that would be nice uh seems to suit the mood um but yeah i mean obviously that's gonna make my life hard if that movie gets made do people try to talk you out of this stuff do they say like why are you doing this to yourself you couldn't you could have you could just make a make a movie with two people in a room talking you're so you're a great writer you have a great visual i mean uh jaron my dp and i like have a long-standing joke about our edwardian picnic movie uh so when we're when we're out like getting you know uh mutilated by

nature uh and the icicles are hanging off our beards, you know, we'll say, yep, one day we'll make that beautiful Edwardian picnic movie. We'll all be, it'll be springtime with flowers and everyone's playing croquet and bad mitten with phonographs and boater hats. Won't it be lovely?

But I, you know, I have a feeling like if that ever happened, that would be act one and it would end up like with a lot of edwardian death and gloom you know with with with any hope yeah sounds more like picnic at hanging rock if you're if you're doing it for sure um so you know language and cadence and the curiosities of how people speak i feel like has been a big part of the first two films. This one's a little different.

There's not as much dialogue in this movie. This is such a visual feast. And, you know, working with a co-writer as a poet. How did you think about what was there a particular like a purposeful reduction in words in this movie? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's an action movie. I mean, like it's like, yeah, man. And also, um, but, but, you know, if I had been able to do whatever I wanted, I would have had the whole movie in old Norse, uh, aside. Well, I mean, old Norse and, and, and old Slavic. Um, but, uh, because I'm not Mel Gibson and I can't self finance my own historical

epics like that was not to be. So we do use old Norse in kind of ritual contexts. And then we do, you know, I mean, old Slavic is used where old Slavic is used. I don't know how any Taylor Joyce character Olga learns how to speak like her captors tongue so so well so quickly.

But hey, yeah, I think so. We were trying to have something that felt like a good translation of an Icelandic saga. And so I asked Sjón when he would do his first passes of dialogue to like bluntly translate them from Icelandic. So it would have kind of an interesting feel that I would work on, uh, finessing. And sometimes Shion had to tell me to like, calm down and stop being so, uh, Shakespearean, uh, because I would want to add too many, too many words. Um, and because viking poetry is beautiful but it is also like you know nordic uh i really love revenge movies do you do you like revenge movies was this a an attempt to explore that world yeah it's really weird because i don't i don't like vengeance isn't a feeling that

i have a lot you know i'm not saying i'm a, like a saint or anything like I'm not, but that for, but that is not something that I feel a lot in life, but yeah, like revenge movies work. Um, revenge movies do work. I remember watching like a year after I went to Iceland and got the first inklings of maybe that there could be a Viking movie. I saw, you know, blue ruin and thought,

yeah, yeah. Revenge movies work. So I guess when you're thinking about, uh, the history of Viking storytelling, like on screen, it's actually not that deep and or good.

You know, you did mention the Fleischer movie, which is probably the best known. There've been a handful over the years, but there's not a lot to even compare yourself to. Did you find yourself thinking about what had been on screen before in addition to that Fleischer movie?

I did, but I didn't like do a deep dive into Viking movies because they just like seem to not be very good. Why do you think that is? You know, I really, really, really don't know. into Viking movies because they just like seem to not be very good. Why do you think that is? You know, I really, really, really don't know. I mean, like I wonder if like, I mean, one of the reasons that I was never interested in Vikings is because of the like, you know, Nazi right wing misappropriation of Viking culture.

Maybe that has something to do with the sparsity of Vikings. I don't, I don't think so, but maybe. Did that give you any pause even doing this story being like, I don't want this to be misappropriated in some way. Sure. You know,

but I think we were just, we just were really careful, you know? But, but, but then again, like, like I can't entirely help how the film is viewed

because if you're someone who's searching with a hammer then everything's a nail so i and i you know but uh but we were definitely really carefully considering all of our choices and and we also like continue to have our our v Viking experts who consulted on the film, like consulting on, on the marketing and, you know, what was the single hardest thing to do in the production? Um,

for, for, I mean, for me, it was really post post-production was the hardest bit. How so? Uh, but well,

it just, it was the first film that I didn't have final cut. So, so I, so there was, so it was a lot more strenuous and, and I had to do test screenings, which I had never had to do before.

I, you know, my, the witch and the lighthouse were tested after they were made just to were made just to understand how to market it. And I knew that they both tested poorly, but I didn't have to do anything about that. And so that was where it was the most difficult for me. But look, the whole thing was hard. I had to do something with Vanity Fair fair what's the hardest day on set it's like well like if i'm not doing

a raid of a village with like like hundreds of extras and stuntmen and horses and cows pigs chickens kids and mud axes spears uh you know i'm there's it's a it's a storm it's a storm at sea at night on a merchant ship or it's a naked sword fight on a volcano or an incredibly tense, Oedipal dramatic scene with limited coverage. Everything was hard the the there's like a song that has been enslaved people sing in the forest that was kind of a pleasant evening

so one one night one night one night was nice and easy yeah um yeah we talked about this a couple of times already but it's even more at the forefront of this conversation because there's all this anxiety about the budget of the movie. Will can a movie like this succeed? All that stuff. But my point of view on this is kind of the inverse, which is despite some of the testing you had in your first two movies, those movies were both successes, maybe not at the massive scale of something like the Northman. But is there any part of you that is confused or surprised by how successful your feature film career has been going,

given your fascinations and the way that you want to tell stories? Of course, it doesn't make any sense to me, but like, I'm not, uh, I'm, I'm glad.

Why is it? Do you think, have you considered like what it is that is connecting? Uh, I mean, I've said all kinds of crap about like, you know, archetypes, Why is it happening, do you think? Have you considered what it is that is connecting? I mean, I've said all kinds of crap about archetypes reconstellating themselves and all this stuff. But I don't... The Norns of Fate weave a mysterious thread.

I don't know what to tell you. But yeah, I mean, why in the hell was a boring like pilgrim horror movie successful i have no clue but i'm i'm very grateful that it was what was your uh what was your takeaway from the testing experience this time don't want to do it ever again just no no i'd do it again here's i'll tell you what like it's annoying to hear people say like who are like dumb shits but but also like there you do you do there are things that i absolutely learned and took away from the feedback so like i i i that's fine what i do not

like about testing and i'm sure like virtually, I don't, you know, virtually every filmmaker would back me up here here is that like, it's not scientific. There are no statistician on the planet would tell you that there is enough data that these numbers are actually that these numbers actually can mean anything so like as a tool to just kind of like wrap your head around some ideas and like think about some stuff and think about like what's working what's not working like absolutely sure but those the weight that like these the numbers like have to to the studios that's just absurd. Really, it's absurd because it's absolutely not scientific. And they treat it like it is. So that's what I don't like about test screenings. But you can

absolutely learn things about how to improve your film. Right. Yeah, there is something inherently commercial about an action epic, right? And it's a popular genre and a story that people do like to see. Do you feel like you have popular taste? Probably not. I mean, absolutely not. 100% not. I don't even mean do you watch MCU movies. I mean, like, the comps, like the Braveheart comp or the Gladiator comp, like those kinds of movies. Did you find yourself a fan of those movies growing up?

Growing up, but I'm not a child anymore. You know, I mean, look, Gladiator is a good movie. It's a good movie. I didn't like the score when it came out, and it's even more dated now. But it's a good movie. You know, but that's, you know, I'd much

rather, you know, watch some weird Soviet art film, right? I wanted to ask you about the score, actually. So Mark Corvin did the score for the last two films and Robin Carlin and Sebastian Gainsborough did this one. What were you looking to do?

What were you looking to accomplish that they're so distinct in the first two films that you want to do something different here? Yeah. But, uh, I mean, this, this,

this has a ton of score. Um, this has, I think like the movie is like two hours and 15 minutes. And I think Robin and Seb composed two hours of music or something like that. Uh, I mean, it's the music is really propelling the story the entire time and,

and a very like insanely aggressive way. And it's, it's a, it's a cool score. It's a unique score. I mean, it has this bed of symphonic strings and, and,

and, and, and choir, but then, you know, all of the lead instruments are viking age instruments and the like the sort of lead vocals are using hypothetical uh viking uh singing styles um it's um it's cool you know um but it was it was and it was something that we really labored over and and robin

has told me he never wants to hear another drum again for the rest of his life i just watched the latest trailer and i couldn't help hear that it's almost all drum you know that there is that that propulsiveness feels like the heart of the movie i really like the new trailer i will i must admit it's very good uh here's an easy one how'd you get bjork to come back to movies um it was it was i think she felt that it would was a familial environment because robin who we were just talking about has collaborated with bjork and friends with her and he in like introduced me and my wife to Bjork and Bjork introduced me to shown and she's known shown since they were teenagers. So it was all that kind of stuff.

So there you go. What was it like working with her? Great, you know, and easy. I think, uh, you know, she is the pop shamaness of planet earth. And so she just simply needs to put on the costume and she can become a Cirrus. It's very simple if you're Bjork. Speaking of pop shamanesses, Anya has become a huge movie star since you first worked with her. It's cool to see you guys reuniting. How is she different as a performer working on this since you, I mean, I don't know if you discovered her, but it worked with her very early in her career. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean,

we've both gotten better since the witch and so that was fun, but I think, you know you know, for, for one thing, Andy and I are friends. So I've been talking to her and hanging out with her here and there, like over the past seven years that we hadn't collaborated. So it wasn't like this movie star transformed has come on to set for like, who is this? You know, and also, by the way, like Queen's Gambit was exploding while we were shooting the movie. That was crazy for her because she was like, you know, going from like the muddy mountainside to then like zoom press in her, in her, in her, you know, hotel. It was, it was kind of crazy for her.

But, you know, look, she's such an accomplished actress. She gets such a facility for language, whether it's early modern English in The Witch or ancient Ukrainian in The Northmen. And her ability to be ethereal and grounded is why I like to cast her in these witchy roles. And she's got an incredible work ethic, which is boring, but true. And, you know, and she just kind of explodes off the screen. How about Alexander? Obviously, it's pretty clear why he wanted to do this and have been wanting to tell a story like this. But it's been interesting reading him talk about the kind of like the effort and the power of working on a movie like this, that something this intense, what was your experience with him? Like, well, I mean, Alex, unlike me was, has been into Vikings like since forever for him.

And, and so this is something that he, like he wasn't going to accept anything else, but like utter perfection in his performance. And he really delivers. And as much as he talks about me driving him to the edge or kind of stuff, which may or may not be true, I can think of more than one time when he asked for another take himself. But I'm really proud of his performance. I mean, the last act particularly,

he just feels like a saga anti-hero. I mean, he's completely transformed. And, you know, I mean, obviously the bodily transformation, the fact that he's this beast and he's so huge

and his traps and his lats are just mind-blowing uh but but but but also think about the vulnerability that it takes to channel that kind of rage on on on screen it's pretty damn impressive i wanted to ask you is there one image that you've been able to put on screens thus far that you're most proud of? Because you have a powerful sense of lasting imagery. Is there something that you really dig that you weren't sure you were going to be able to pull off or that you think really worked incredibly well? Well, it's probably for someone else to say. Really?

But I want to know what you like and what you like about what you're doing uh you know i mean like i don't know dude like the the sasha schneider hypnosis ripoff shot from the lighthouse is pretty cool but i just ripped off some simplest painter um you mentioned that uh you're writing something else now what are you what are you what are you writing well i can't say because i'm a horrible person and and a rude guest i'm sorry so annoying are you are you do you do you still enjoy writing love writing it's it's so great because like you haven't made the movie yet so it's like a masterpiece it's great how much did you have to change much in this one that was not achievable like at what point do you realize like actually we can't pull this off Does that come up with a movie this big?

You know, I don't know if we really did like have to do that on this. In fact, like sometimes we, like we, uh, there, we,

we never finished the visual effects, but like we, um, like at one point there was like, uh, a lot of Valkyries like we shot like tons and tons and tons of valkyries uh but it's sort of in the context that everything kind of became perhaps too confusing uh but no i think i think you know with the witch there was some stuff that we

i mean i don't know if i've ever talked about this publicly or not, uh, because it's as if on horseback on a goat back and then, and then ride him up into the sky, you know, but we could, but we, but the goat was not big enough. We have, we had,

there, there are videos somewhere of Anya, like, like trying to ride the goat. And it's like hilarious. Um, I think I might've asked you this a couple of years ago but uh what are your thoughts on making a movie set in modern times uh no thank you just absolutely never

no why is that i don't know i mean it like, I think let's just put aside the, why I'm not interested in making that, why I'm not interested in a modern story. Let's just put that aside. Cause I don't even know if I can answer that question, but like, I truly love researching. I hope that like, you know, I think, I think, I, I think my research, it like is purposeful. You know, it's not just for me, like it, it, it accomplishes something and helps me create like an atmosphere with this accumulation of details that I've researched, but I also love doing it and it takes a lot of time and it occupies a lot of time. So what the hell would I,

I don't know, what would I be doing? Like I went with my time. I don't know. I don't know. I did want to ask you how it feels to be psychologized so deeply with a project this big. Is it driving you crazy? Well, it's weird because the, the conversations that are sort of more enjoyable, like our conversations that I wish I was like, I did Mark Marin, which was nice, but I sort of like,

kind of like would rather have that just been like a conversation I had with Mark Marin and not a conversation that I had in public. It's the same thing with some aspects of the New Yorker piece, which I really like, but it's, some of it is like more pride. And I knew this is how it's going to be. Yeah. It's like, I, it's not like it's par for the course. I could totally get it, but it is like more personal than i i would yeah it's all it gets more personal than i would like but it's okay you know you know it's been fascinating to watch it just being very interested in your work from

the first feature and then seeing you go through the stations of the cross here you know the new yorker profile the bigger budget like you're you're you do you feel like you are checking boxes in a certain way or is it is it not as conceived as that uh i i don't feel like i'm checking no i don't feel like i'm checking boxes should i be checking boxes should i feel like boxes i don't know no no but it's funny because everybody if you have success you are asked. No, no, but it's funny because everybody, if you have success, you are asked to participate in these things.

So it's always interesting. You mentioned Soviet art films. I end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? Seen anything cool lately? Yeah. What have I seen that's cool lately? this is like this is funny one but like i watched the road to wellville again the other night and like not a soviet art film i thought

it was pretty darn good you know it used to be like like it got totally panned i remember and uh and it played on comedy central all the time when i was a kid and it's good like you know i mean bridget fonda is not like a hundred percent believable as like an edwardian person but like it's she's still pretty good and like and everything else i mean it's like it's uh you know it's kind of like coen brothers meets felini in this like turn of the century american environment like people were criticizing anthony hopkins performance for being like over the top well like yeah it was fucking over the top on purpose guys like clearly i i it's a good but but it's yeah i thought it was i thought it was pretty good i probably haven't seen it in 25 years that's a great recommendation though robert thanks for doing this congrats on the movie i

thought it was genuinely awesome so thank you so much for doing the show and this was fun well you didn't you i had a great time no you didn't you don't know i did i had a good time i had a good time i had a good time okay well i appreciate it and uh talk soon okay thanks Talk soon. Okay. Thanks. Thank you to Robert Eggers. Thank you to Chris Ryan. And thank you to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on this episode. Stay tuned to The Big Picture.

Next week, we are building the Nicolas Cage Hall of Fame and talking about the unbearable weight of massive talent. We'll see you then.