10 Recent Movies That Put INSANE Effort Into Scenes
7. A Quarry In Northern Ireland Was Painstakingly Transformed Into An Icelandic Volcano - The Northman
Robert Eggers' The Northman is full of eye-popping imagery, and perhaps never more than during its testosterone-fuelled final showdown between Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) and his father's murderer Fjölnir (Claes Bang), which sees the pair fighting naked in the crater of a damn volcano.
Rather than simply plonk Skarsgård and Bang in front of a warm green screen on a soundstage, the scene was filmed in a freezing cold quarry in Northern Ireland, with production designer Craig Lathrop going to painstaking lengths to morph the locale into a lava-soaked hellscape.
Lathrop transformed the quarry by dumping black earth intended to resemble the terrain of a volcano. As for the lava effects and lighting? Most of it was achieved in-camera using custom-designed LED lights, which by projecting realistic lighting onto the actors made the scene appear more realistic.
As it turned out, the biggest visual effect in the entire scene was painting out Skarsgård and Bang's thongs, and then deploying CGI smoke to conceal where their genitals would've been.
As for the fight itself? Eggers and the two actors spent months choreographing the fight with stunt coordinator Jón Viðar Arnþórsson and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke ahead of shooting.
The end result is a fittingly epic conclusion to a mesmerising movie, and clearly well worth the tireless effort involved.