The Craft Of ‘Nosferatu’: How The Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, Costume Design And Score Brought “Originality And Darkness”
If there is one guarantee of seeing a Robert Eggers film, it’s that the artistic vision will stick with you long after you leave the theater. Nosferatu is no different, from the haunting soundtrack to the visually stunning yet chilling production design. It’s no surprise that Eggers continues to work with the same craft department heads for each of his films, as every collaboration seems to bring a better understanding of each other’s craft to enhance the workflow between departments.
Deadline spoke with five key craftspeople – cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, production designer Craig Lathrop, editor Louise Ford, costume designer Linda Muir and composer Robin Carolan – to discuss how they brought his dream project to life.
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To say Nosferatu is Eggers’ dream project is not an overstatement, according to editor Louise Ford who has worked with Eggers on every one of his feature films. “I’m sure everyone knows the story by now that the idea of making Nosferatu was the thing that actually made Rob into a film director,” she says.
“This one goes further back than all the rest,” says production designer Craig Lathrop. Like Ford, Lathrop has worked with Eggers on all of his films, which means he’s been hearing about Nosferatu for quite a while. “He started telling me about this one after The Witch… so I’ve been researching it for quite some time.”
“Honestly, I think it would not be as good of a film as it is if he’d done it any earlier,” says Ford. “[Nosferatu] has all the originality and darkness of a Robert Eggers movie, but also the awareness of the mainstream audience that enables you, especially in the edit, to know when something might be too obscure. We’d gotten over that hurdle on The Northman quite a bit.”
One person who learned a lot working on The Northman was composer Robin Carolan, not only because it was his first collaboration with Eggers but also because it was his first time scoring a film. Just like on that film, Carolan began his work composing for Nosferatu early on in the process before filming began. “I know a lot of composers and directors don’t work like that, but this is just the way Rob likes to work,” he says. “He wanted some original material to play on set… to create a certain atmosphere. Rob’s always trying to create as accurate and real an atmosphere as possible on film sets… so that everyone can absorb themselves into the way you would think if you lived at that time.”
Working on The Northman taught everyone a lot of lessons for Nosferatu, including the best way to replicate moonlight on modern film stock for cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. “Moonlight will never truly be believable unless you’re outside and front-lit by the moon, but then you won’t be able to see anything,” he says. To help the effect, he focused on creating a stylized filter to replicate the wavelengths of light that the human eye is capable of seeing in the darkness, like how the eye can’t see red light under a certain brightness level. “[In darkness, we can] only see up until cyan or so… there’s just something about cutting out the red and the yellow wavelengths that I just bought it more. Moonlight will always be too bright in movies, but that just gets me a little bit closer to the real thing.”
In addition to moonlight being a main source of light for the darker scenes of Nosferatu, candlelight and firelight was also used to create unique lighting that couldn’t be replicated with modern lighting techniques. Of course, this also presented some challenges for costume designer Linda Muir, who needed to outfit characters to be visible in low light environments. “For the women, it is a little bit easier because they are required at the time in society to be pretty things and dainty in paler colors,” she says. “For the two women, Anna (Emma Corrin) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), I gravitated toward paler colors and fabrics that reflected light… And all of their jewelry, whether it’s silver, cheaper versions for Ellen or gold and thick, hefty, expensive looking accessories [for Anna], all of that twinkled and caught the light.”
As the person who works closest with Blaschke on set, Lathrop was already on top of the production design when it came to working with the lighting. “One of the great advantages of having this family that has worked together on so many films is that I knew what moonlight was going to do to things,” he says. Lathrop stuck to brighter colors in the houses that would stand out in the lighting. “It killed some colors for sure. If you think of firelight, there’s a lot of reds and you think about moonlight and those reds are completely suppressed, so we tried to avoid bright red. The one place we had them was in the castle. I used some burgundies in the bed Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) sleeps in, and I think that’s the only real red that we used in the film to be associated with Orlok (Bill Skarsg?rd).”
One of the best examples of the moonlit exterior shots is when Hutter finds himself approaching a crossroads in the dark, surrounded by trees, as a carriage approaches him. With the backdrop of Carolan’s haunting melody, titled “A Carriage Awaits”, the moment was backlit in both directions to create a sense of anticipation and dread for Hutter. Carolan says this part of the score was a challenge to create as it needed to denote where Hutter leaves his normal, everyday life and accept the carriage ride into the supernatural world of Count Orlok.
For Blaschke, this scene couldn’t be anything less than perfect. After scouting at least six locations over a three-month period to find the perfect crossroads, he finally found one with straight paths, access for crane lighting and just enough of a gap in the trees to allow for light while still being closed off enough for an ominous atmosphere. “I decided to do the movie trick where they’re both backlit and both directions are backlit,” he says. “And then there’s a balloon right overhead to be the sky, and it’s a sausage shape that fits in the gap of the trees, and that’s also what lit the tree trunks. It’s a lot of work. Tedious, annoying, cold… but I think that’s my best night exterior so far.”
The supernatural feeling of the scene is furthered when Hutter approaches Count Orlok’s castle, which was able to use Corvin Castle in Romania as an exterior though the interior needed to be designed and built by Lathrop. “I looked at a lot of castles in the Czech Republic, probably all of them,” he says. “They’re all beautifully refurbished and ready for tourists to come through, but that’s not who Orlok is, right? Orlok has been in his sarcophagus for at least a hundred years, probably closer to two. He is in disrepair and decay and almost diseased, and you want to feel that.”
The disrepair and decay of the castle was also shown in Muir’s design for Orlok’s costume, which needed to have the countenance of a rich count from long ago. “If you looked at paintings of Counts of the period, you would see beautiful, lux, heavy, expensive fabrics with fur and gold accessories,” says Muir. “The challenge becomes, how do you start with a Count who would’ve been dressed like that 300 years ago, and still have that be recognizable when he’s decomposed for 300 years?”
When Count Orlok is first introduced, he is backlit by a fireplace which renders his features and clothing barely visible. Muir started with a silk tunic, with a jagged gold pattern and a stone colored distressed velvet with a very fine gold lace overlay. “Then all of that was distressed,” she says. After experimenting film tests and seeing how the material looked in the lighting, Muir adjusted the look of the clothing and continued to “decay” material to fit the character. “If he were a young man, he would be boasting his body. His chest would be puffed, he would be out there. He’s not, he’s 300 years old. He’s completely inside that massive cloak, his head is obscured with the kalpak, and he’s using it to hide himself.”
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