“Folk tales, fairy tales, mythology, the past… I’ve always been interested in that,” said writer/director Robert Eggers. “I don’t entirely know why. I’m more interested in that subject matter than I am in films, maybe, in the end.”
The same is perhaps true for Robert’s writing partner, Sjón, an internationally acclaimed Icelandic author who published his first book of poetry at the age of 16. Sjón said, “When I was growing up in Iceland in the 70s, there was no cinema. But if we had had filmmaking at the time, I think I would have seen that as an option.”
The two met thanks to a chance encounter at a party in 2016 at the singer Björk’s home. “She invited us to dinner and said she was going to invite her friend Sjón, who she thought I would get along with.” Over home cooked salmon at Björk’s home, the two connected immediately.
At the time, Robert had just premiered The Witch (also written as The VVitch), a New England folktale about the 17th Century. “Oh, I’ve just written a novel that takes place in the early 17th Century Iceland and features witchcraft and sorcery. So obviously, we realized we had something in common.”
Sjón
Beyond subject matter, the duo are masters at building tension. “With The Witch,” said Robert, “I thought every single scene needs to end with an ‘Oh shit moment that is worse than the ending of the previous scene. If it’s always just a little bit worse, we’re going to build tension.”
The Thing About Curses
Sjón added, “That’s the thing with curses. They just get worse and worse and worse — if it’s a proper curse,” he joked. “If it’s properly cast at the beginning. It’s a wonderful storytelling vehicle to take you to hell. That’s what the old stories give us—these wonderful tools of narration.”
“No matter how modern or civilized we think we are, there’s a strong belief in the mechanism of curse. We see it all around us in our contemporary lives,” said Sjón. “They just have different names now. Cursed families. Families with endless troubles. Three siblings died in the same year. What happened? Where does this come from? It’s like something was set in motion.”
The writers said all human beings are susceptible to stories, so whether or not we label a curse a curse, we still see them in our everyday lives. “We understand the world through stories and we still believe in them deeply.”
Belonging to Culture
If you’ve ever seen any of Robert’s films — The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman — it’s clear there’s been a great deal of research. The same is true for any of Sjón’s books, such as The Blue Fox, Moonstone, or From the Mouth of the Whale.
“Initially, Sjón felt less restricted than me because the material belongs to his culture,” said Robert of their collaboration on The Northman. “I imagine Sjón felt the freedom to be. I, myself, like to keep myself imprisoned in research. The research, for me, is that you can’t make as many choices because it can’t be anything, it has to be this. This is the fact and you have to stick to it.”
For Sjón, on the other hand, he sees these folktales as somewhat adaptable. They’ve already changed over the centuries so as long as they stay true to the original idea, some points are mendable. “We gave the script to the first three Viking experts and there were things that needed to change.”
The challenge in working with the experts is that while the first version metaphorically worked as a film, it wasn’t as true as it could have been based on the true tale. However, as author/screenwriter Dennis Lehane told me, “Emotional truth trumps over facts — Edward Longshanks and William Wallace did not die on the same day, but it makes a good movie.”
“The nice discovery for me was that Robert wanted to be much more authentic than I needed to be, as someone who comes from a tradition of telling these stories. The Icelanders have never stopped telling these stories. That takes place in the 9th Century and they’ve been told over and over again. That is a fact.”
Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) Photo by Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features
The sagas were written in the 13th century but they’ve continued to be retold and reshaped. “We naturally give ourselves quite a large poetic license. I think we were a perfect match [for this script]. I approached it with a certain type of freedom and Robert came in with accuracy and historical remarking of the world, which had to be right. So I think we matched very well. It was liberating for the material.”
The Viking’s Journey
“In the storytelling, we not only tried to stay true to the subject matter of the story or historical accuracy of the creation, we are also working with a narrative structure that belongs much more to the medieval way of telling a story than you usually have in Western cinema,” said Sjón.
The writers essentially took the Hero’s Journey and brought to it the “medieval sensibility.” Sjón added, “Something I’m really proud of, in the film, is that we use the beats of the hero’s journey and in every moment the hero takes the next step according to the formula, but then that step is undermined immediately afterwards.”
Early in The Northman, for example, when young Amleth (Oscar Novak) escapes the island after the massacre and killing of his father, the story was set up as a character you would follow through everything simply due to the sympathetic nature. “Then what happens? The next thing we see is that he’s a grown up (Alexander Skarsgård) and he goes through a massacre of innocence. It’s hard to regain sympathy after that.”
Robert Eggers
In the juxtaposition of the Hero’s Journey, we’re also reminded that all of Robert’s films have somewhat of a blurred line between real and unreal. “It should be blurry, certainly in The Lighthouse. In The Northman, basically, if you believe in this stuff, it’s true. I think Oliver Sacks wrote a good book on Hallucinations and he kind of says, ‘Through prayer alone, you can see visions.’ Science can explain it, but if you believe it, it is that vision.”
“In The Northman, these people believe in the Norns and Odeon and the living deal, so it’s real for them. In The Lighthouse, as Thomas Howard (Robert Pattinson) is getting more obsessed with what’s going on, the more real it becomes to him. Interestingly thought, what Rob told me is that he didn’t want to make a movie about a lighthouse, he wanted to make a movie about someone going fucking crazy.”
He continued, “But, in his absolute moment of insanity, he believes. So everything Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) believes in, is real. Maybe David Lynch and Luis Buñuel would criticize me for being so black and white about being gray, but what can I do? It’s too late,” he joked.
Writing Logistics
Aside from the larger scope of their work, the writers had to form a method to their madness. “With The Northman, Robert already had 3-4 pages of storyline, so we sat down to work on that and it grew to a 12-page storyline. We sent that back and forth and it became larger than that.”
At the time, Robert was preparing to work on the Nosferatu reimagining (currently listed as being in pre-production) so Sjón took the first pass on the script. “When the first draft was ready, that became our playground. It’s been very much back and forth, especially on the dialogue, as English is not my first language,” said Sjón.
“Generally, Sjón does the heavy lifting to get us through the first draft and break the first draft. Once I do my pass, it’s constant back and forth through the rest of the drafts. Then, there’s dialogue tweaking in post-production. It was quite a challenge because we don’t shoot traditional coverage.”
Essentially, this means they could easily change a line if the actor was facing away from the camera, but if the actor was facing the camera and they only had the one shot, the writers literally had to count syllables and speech patterns.
“If all we have is a close up and we have to tweak something, I’m saying, ‘Sjón, it’s twelve syllables. The fourth syllable is a ‘th’ and there’s another consonant here, so it becomes this challenging New York Times word puzzle to figure out,” he joked. Despite that, the writers believes it’s mainly an organic relationship. They also shared essays and film clips and playlists to “share a mind space.”
In a final bit of encouragement to novice writers, Robert said, “It’s fine to emulate people who you are inspired by. Then, the derivative stuff will naturally shed away as you find who you are. But there’s no magic bullet for that.” Sjón added, “Write something that excites you. Remember what excites you in cinema, in literature, and remember yourself [at a young age] and the moments that inspired you and excited you, because that’s where you want to go and how you want to affect other people.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio interview here.
