Back in 2015, one of the breakout films at the Sundance Film Festival was The Witch, an unsettling and atmospheric film that proved to be a major success not only for director Robert Eggers but also for star Anya Taylor-Joy, with the actress recently noting that her upcoming reunion with Eggers for the horror film The Northman sure to be a shocking experience for audiences. Eggers’ last film, The Lighthouse, was another highly praised and ambitious affair, with Taylor-Joy’s comments about the upcoming project implying that audiences still won’t be prepared for the horrifying narrative that Eggers aims to deliver viewers.
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“[We] have now been friends longer than we have been co-workers,” Taylor-Joy shared with Collider. “Getting the opportunity to create art together again is amazing. We have both grown so much apart and now we get to grow back together. I am so proud to be a part of this project โฆ I think we will be presenting to the world something it genuinely hasn’t seen before. I just feel so humbled I get to be a part of it.”
Taylor-Joy is joined in the new film be Alexander Skarsgรฅrd (The Stand), Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse), Nicole Kidman (The Others), Ethan Hawke (The Purge), and Bjรถrk.
As if the cast alone isn’t indicative enough of the impressive scope of the new film, Eggers himself teased earlier this year just how much bigger this project is compared to his previous efforts.
“The scale is so huge and there are so many more locations and things that I couldn’t do everything or know every prop myself,” Eggers revealed to Collider back in April. “That’s been a challenge with the new movie … there’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films. There’s a lot more storyboarding.”
He added, “Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time.”
Stay tuned for details on The Northman.
Are you looking forward to the new film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!