How The Northman pulled off its amazing spear-catch stunt

Anyone who’s looked into the behind-the-scenes processes on Robert Eggers’ movies knows that authenticity and strict realism are paramount obsessions in his work. 2015’s The Witch Five years of period research was required to determine the right clothes and tools for each character. Eggers also had to build his primary set with hand tools and materials that he would use in 17th century England. For 2019’s The LighthouseHe used original camera lenses from the 1930s and 1912, and built an authentic lighthouse in the period to achieve the narrow, oppressive spaces that he desired.

Then there was his latest drama The Northman, billed as “the most accurate Viking movie ever made,” involved meticulous research into everything from helmet styles to what kind of animal leather actual Vikings would have used in clothing. This is one reason a shot from the trailers, in which warrior protagonist Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) catches a spear thrown by an enemy from atop a fort palisade and throws it back, is particularly startling to see. Although it may seem ridiculous to believe that any other director could pull of such an act in real life, Polygon asked Robert Eggers if he did.

That spear trick was executed with CG, the answer being no. “Somebody threw a spear from the palisade onto the ground,” Eggers tells Polygon. “And then Alex, in some takes, had a spear the whole time that he would hold up and then throw. Then, with CG you can take out one and then put in the other. This is how it works. So there was some physical reality to the shot.”

Digital effects are discussed in The Northman, Eggers sounds a bit frustrated and defensive, as if these kinds of questions could only be accusations that he’s somehow violated his ethic. “I do get on my case about it, for sure,” he says. “Like, if that’s what you’re trying to get at, I whip myself every night.”

The issue of CG in The Northman Because so much of the film was made practically, it is irrelevant. Eggers likes natural light and builds entire villages that his cameras and actors can explore. Because he prefers to use a single camera for the entire film rather than multi-camera shots that capture every angle of the scene, this style is more real and focused. This film’s four minute single shot Viking raid was carefully planned out and executed without any hidden edits. Skarsgård wore a single pair of boots throughout shooting, and the film’s designer hand-repaired them when they were damaged. In a village where lines of fish were hung up to dry, set decorator Niamh Coulter used real fish, rather than plastic mockups: “The stench was absolutely authentic,” Coulter said about the handmade sets.

Eggers began with a practical effect, before adding CG. For an opening shot that’s zoomed in close on a raven’s eye, Eggers started with a practical shot of a real animal, and only replaced the bird with CG once it takes off and gets far from the camera. “I wasn’t going to start the movie on a fake bird, you know?” he says.

Eggers however, says that using digital effects remains an unavoidable necessity. “If you’re making a movie today at a certain scale, there’s no way you can do it without CG, just because of modern health and safety stuff, and the cost of labor, and unions and whatever,” he says. “So you can’t have horse stunts like in old Westerns or Soviet movies. It’s not a good idea. But that means at the very least, you’re erasing safety cables. When horses do fall, they will find mats under the mud to rest on. We can’t actually get those that muddy, so they’re covered with mulch, and then we’re using CG to cover up the mulch with mud, so it looks consistent. That’s not sinful, it’s just practical.”

Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/Focus

It clearly frustrates him a bit to talk about the digital elements — no one but him is suggesting CG could be “sinful.” In the case of the spear trick, the shot was important enough to him that he was willing to use special effects, because he was putting something on the screen that was taken from an authentic Icelandic folk tale — in the 13th-century Njáls saga, also known as The Story of Burnt Njál, one of the story’s most powerful warriors pulls off the trick.

“I think for the most part, the CG in this film is pretty tasteful,” Eggers says. “There’s just no way someone could have done that spear trick. There is no other way. If we’d been doing this in, like, 1972, there probably would have been some 2D animation painted onto the celluloid to get that effect. I think that as long as you’re using as many practical elements as you can, CG is a good tool. It’s just when it’s overused that it becomes something you can’t believe in.”

The audience’s ability to believe what they’re seeing is Eggers’ main focus when he does use digital effects — he complains about poor effects in the past and how they took people out of the narrative. One scene is highlighted by Eggers. The Northman With a ship caught in a severe storm. The storm is completely digital.

“If we’d shot this in the past, it would have been a model,” he says. “In White Squall Master and CommanderWe have the most amazing models that have ever been made for storm sequences with ships. However, there are many films in which the models have also played a significant role. look like models, you know?”

The storm may be digitally created, but the ship is actually real. “That’s a digital 3D scan of a ship we actually built, an exact replica of the ottar knurr, like in the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark,” Eggers says. “We were thinking, Okay, it’s going to be backlit, it’s going to be at night, we’re going to have rain, there are a lot of things we can do to disguise the fact that this is a visual effects shot. But you can’t fucking shoot a Viking ship at night in a storm at sea and get exposure. Even if you could shoot it, you wouldn’t get the film exposure.”

Even the most CG-like sequence to movie audiences had many practical aspects. You can find these practical elements in The NorthmanAmleth (Ethan Hawke) and King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) engage in a manhood ceremony that includes blood and hallucinogens. The vision of a tree composed of veins and vines connected together by a heart beat represents their shared blood relationship. The tree pulses with a bright, necrotic glow and has rotten bodies hanging on it.

Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/Focus

“Even the Tree of Kings, as Ethan Hawke’s character describes it, the arboreal family lineage hallucination nonsense, was done with practical elements,” Eggers says. One of his crew members does chemical photography, so the light shining through the scene was “created with chemical reactions.” And “the mummies of the dead ancestors were physical builds, or were actors in makeup that we photographed. There’s some pure CG stuff in there too, but the vast majority of the elements in even those sequences were practical.”

Ultimately, while Eggers prefers physical and practical effects in his work, he’s willing to use whatever tools are at hand, as long as they don’t jar people out of the story.

“You’re trying, like with that storm-at-sea shot, to really plan ahead so it doesn’t look like a fucking cartoon,” he says. “It’s always about trying to have as many practical elements as possible. There are around 20 Viking ships in the movie, and we didn’t build that many. These were used as repurposed ships, adding new shields and masks to them. We also added head carvings. After that, you can plug them in by shooting several passes. That’s a way of using CG as a tool to tell the story, to stretch your budget, but also keeping it grounded.”

The NorthmanIt is now in theatres