THE NORTHMAN de Robert Eggers

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Titre: The Northman
Réalisation: Robert Eggers
Distribution: Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Björk, ...
Genre: Fantastique/Historique
Origine: USA

Sortie: 2021 ?

Synopsis: Au Xe siècle, Amleth, un prince nordique, se lance dans une quête afin de venger la mort de son père.

La production avait été stoppée à cause de la pandémie mais désormais le tournage est terminé. A voir si ça sort dans l'année, vu les deux précédents films du réal y'a vraiment de quoi être curieux sur celui-là, d'autant que Eggers a l'air de dire que c'est son plus ambitieux jusqu'ici.

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Sortie aux States le 8 avril 2022.

Co-star Ralph Ineson, who also starred in “The Witch,” also teased the movie earlier this year. “It’s an enormous movie,” Ineson told NME. “I saw a four-minute montage of some of the stuff they’d already shot and I was really blown away. The marriage of Rob Eggers’ imagination and Viking folklore…Jesus, man.”

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Très très grosse attente pour celui-là.

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[Mark Chopper]

On n'est pas à l'abri d'un Valhalla Rising 2.

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Un article intéressant sur Eggers alors que le film était en plein montage pour satisfaire le studio.

“Some audience member wrote, ‘You need to have a master’s degree in Viking history to understand, like, anything in this movie,’ ” Eggers said. “Like, ahhh, fuck.”

“We had kind of an expensive, arty—but commercial—but arty, but commercial, like, Viking movie. . . . Now everyone is kind of, like, ‘If this isn’t “Gladiator” or “Braveheart,” we’re fucked.’ And the thing is: it isn’t,” Eggers said. “It has aspects of that, for sure. But my best intention of doing ‘Gladiator’ or ‘Braveheart’ is still . . .” He let the sentence hang. “Weirder.”

Eggers understood that the studio wanted the film to be unusual. It also wanted a return. “Now everyone’s scared,” he said. We crossed a street near the BBC, on the way to the edit suite, in Soho. The long scenes and the formal composition of Eggers’s films are sometimes more redolent of theatre than of cinema. “The impression is almost of intoxication,” Cuarón said. “You are there, and you’re breathing with those actors.” But Eggers and Blaschke are left with very little spare footage or flexibility that might get them out of a jam—or a tough set of studio notes—later on. “Like, there’s not a lot of alternatives,” Eggers said. “The stakes are really high, and without, you know, coverage.” He said the word with big air quotes.

Eggers and Ford finished the new cut of “The Northman.” On November 3rd, Eggers woke up to another message from the studio: they liked it. There was no need for more test screenings. “Isn’t that great?” Eggers said, on the phone that afternoon. We met the following week in Soho. Eggers ate a lamb thali and asked if he seemed like a different person. A weight was gone. “I think I’ve delivered the most entertaining version,” he said. “The most entertaining version is not necessarily something I’m usually striving for. But it was here, you know, and it happened.”

Cuarón saw the cut and gave his approval. “Every single frame is charged with all the thematic elements of the whole film,” he said. “I have to say, it is very complex, it is very complicated what he does.” After lunch, Eggers and I went for a walk and ended up sitting on a bench in Soho Square. Eggers praised New Regency but described the editing process as the most painful experience of his life. “Frankly, I don’t think I will do it again,” he said. “Even if it means, like, not making a film this big ever again. And, by the way, I’d like to make a film this big. I’d like to make one even bigger. But, without control, I don’t know. It’s too hard on my person.”

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[Mark Chopper]

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Eggers s'exprime sur la réception de Northman, et sur d'autres aspects du film.

Now that The Northman has more or less concluded its theatrical run, are you disappointed in its box-office performance?

I think it met the expectations of a bad marketplace [laughs]. Am I disappointed that, three to four weeks in, we’re on VOD because that’s the way things are done in the post-COVID world? Yeah. But it’s doing great on VOD, so there you go. When I see, on social media, people taking a photo of themselves watching The Northman on their laptop and being excited about it, it draws a tear to my eye. But it is what it is.

Relative to your first two films, The Northman is big-budget epic. Was there a concern about maintaining your personality while working on a more expansive canvas, and with more archetypal characters and dramatic dynamics?

Mainly, the answer is no. [laughs] Part of doing a saga is that it’s a more normal story than, say, The Lighthouse, which arguably doesn’t even have a story. Sagas are entertaining, and in making an entertaining story that everyone can understand, I am therefore making something for a broader audience than I have ever done before. But because that’s the fabric of the source material that I’m using, I’m still being authentic to my method, which is to try to dig into the past and articulate it in this way. So, in that sense, no. And Regency was really great about allowing me to use all my heads of department again, and to shoot single camera, and to make a film on a larger scale in the way that I ‘ve done it in the past.

This has been covered to a degree to which I’m frustrated about, but in post-production, that was different, because the film was at this scale and I didn’t have final cut. That said, me and my collaborators stuck together, and we just said we were simply not going to leave with something we weren’t proud of. So, we did. But certainly, there were times when that was difficult in post-production.

Is your Nosferatu remake with Anya Taylor-Joy (and, at one point, Harry Styles) still in the works? And if so, what is it that appeals to you about re-envisioning that particular classic?

Well, it’s an IP, isn’t it? [laughs]

Good point! Does that make it more or less of a challenge?

I don’t know if it’s going to happen; it seems as if [F.W.] Murnau doesn’t want me to do it, because it always seems to go awry. But Dracula, it’s been said, is the only new modern fairy tale that’s actually something different, and Murnau’s telling of it is its essential simple form by being a silent film. Basically, it’s been an important film to me since I was a kid. That doesn’t necessarily mean I should remake it, but it’s certainly something I’ve been obsessed with and spent a lot of time thinking about. So, let’s see.