this version is the director's cut you know there will not be some longer version on the blu-ray
he's here he's here
father is here the kingman lady the king
the macho stereotype which by the way is is part of it um
and then and then the right wing misappropriation of viking culture those two things
uh really repelled me uh but when i took a trip to iceland um the the power of these landscapes uh
led me to pick up um the icelandic sagas and uh and and then i became
very interested in in vikings and then a couple of years later alexander skarsgard um and i had lunch
and he said he's been trying to make a viking movie for 10 years and uh it became
really save your mother
it was a pleasure i mean he transformed his body into a machine a work of art
he became a beast he created this posture holding years of trauma on his shoulders
unlike me he's been obsessed with viking since he was a kid and so as much as he has talked
impress about how i drove him to the edge with my perfectionism i can think of many times when
alex was the one who asked for one more take to get it right your strength breaks man's bones
i have the cunning to break their minds because i grew up in the countryside
you know but i was in my imagination and not you know in nature and it was it was it's in studying
the past that i've learned more about like our agricultural traditions and you know living
in nature and knowing you know what the seasons are and the weather and and all
this is telling you you know and and if you're in viking culture like and you have
this pagan religion that's more tied up into nature and the significance of these things
like it's gonna make everything around you alive and you are going to be more in tuned with it
and therefore have more intuition about what's going on
a few days after meeting with alex i discovered that shakespeare's hamlet was based on a nordic
legend uh the story of amleth and it's i mean it's the same story basically uh and and that was
really exciting because um i you know if i could indulge in viking uh religious
culture mythology ritual culture much more if i have a simple narrative that everybody knows
you know this is a big expensive movie for like broad audiences so we need i you know people need
to be able to follow the plot and this was my key into making sure that was going to happen
me and my dp jeremy shoot single camera um the uh you know the typical you know typically you shoot
a movie like this with with multiple cameras um you know if if you're doing it with a high level
of craft it helps you make your day and gives you a few more options and a little bit of safety if
you have a low level of craft you're just shooting a bunch of stuff that you can put together later
um but here we've chosen for through the entire film exactly where we're placing our camera
and it's not going anywhere else but but that and and in in it and it with with that we're shooting
these incredibly long um broken takes um and and those are difficult if you're shooting
uh a a raid of a of a village that requires um hundreds of extras and uh many many stuntmen
and horses and uh farm animals and children uh and you're shooting that in two very long
choreographed shots uh everything has to go right every you know and if it doesn't go right
you have to go back to the beginning and start over again um it's uh it's it it requires a lot
of discipline but you know everyone it's it's um an exciting discipline and so people um you you
you do get you do get addicted to uh the feeling of of chasing the success of shots like that
my takeaway sadly is that like we haven't really changed because as sophisticated and interesting
and beautiful as viking culture you know was the violence and brutality
uh is horrifying and so here here we are yet again uh repeating ourselves
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