How The Northman Crafted An Astonishing, Visceral Continuous Raid Sequence

By Brandon Davis

The Northman will be raiding movie theaters this weekend, delivering the latest epic from Robert Eggers and seeing Alexander Skarsgård portray a the visceral leading role. Eggers dives into this centuries-old world with pride in the accuracy of its representation but also delivers an extra effort in many sequences to immerse the audience. One scene in particular sees Skarsgård and his viking clan raiding a village. They starts in the tall grass, emerge, catch and return a spear, climb the walls, jump down, slaughter enemy fighters, round up women and children, and take the place over all without the camera showing a cut or change in perspective. The minutes-long sequence was one of the most intense parts of the shoot, given all of its moving pieces.

"It took a tremendous amount of planning, you know? I mean, we built that village from scratch not just, you know, to build a village, but to build a village where we could shoot that exact sequence that exact way, you know?" Eggers told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. "I think it took four days to shoot it... Every single beat was so planned that it wasn't the hardest thing we did in the film even though it was the most complex and the most demanding. You know, I think it was physically one of the hardest things that Alex had to do 'cause it was so demanding on him."

The start of this sequence has been released online, revealing a fraction of the scene overall. You can see it in the tweet below from the official Focus Features account.

"We started working on that months before shooting the sequence," Skarsgård said. "It is almost a dance between the camera and the actors and we're both moving at quite a high pace. We're running, at least at the beginning of the sequence where I'm running and the camera's running and then climbing and jumping. So it's technically quite challenging to get that in one shot. And again, there are no cutaways. There are no second cameras."

Adding to the difficulty level is the amount of cast members, props, and animals used in the sequence. "Tons of actors, we had 30, 40 stuntmen. We had 300 extras. We had horses. Rob wanted chickens to fly through screen. Of course you need some chickens if it's an action scene," Skarsgård explained. "There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong and did, so months before, we started working on the choreography of it. And then, with the stunt team work on all the different fights, sequence by sequence, and then try to piece them together so we would have some fluidity to it. Our characters are in a berserker rage state of mind during that sequence. So there's no real opportunity to figure things out on the date, you just kind of have to be incredibly well prepared when you get there so that when we shoot, it flows."

Are you excited to see Eggers' next film, The Northman? See ComicBook.com's full interview with Skarsgård in the video at the top of this page. Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Twitter! The Northman opens in theaters on April 22.

Trending Now: