‘Nosferatu’: How to Make a Robert Eggers Movie, with Help from Mel Brooks and Chris Columbus
No filmmaker wants to be told what to do. Figuring out how to nab a decent budget while not selling your soul is always the challenge.
Robert Eggers has managed this feat, partly by forging relationships with distributors A24 (“The Witch” and “The Lighthouse”) and Universal subsidiary Focus Features, first with his gorgeous and violent Viking epic “The Northman” (2022), starring Alexander Skarsg?rd, and “The Witch,” star Anya Taylor-Joy, which cost $70-90 million, and now less costly Gothic vampire remake “Nosferatu” (December 25), starring Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Nicholas Hoult as her feckless husband, Willem Dafoe as an expert in the occult, and Alexander’s brother, Bill Skarsg?rd, as the decrepit and passionately obsessed Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck in the F.W. Murnau original.
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While the scary genre thriller may not look like an Oscar contender on its face, the well-reviewed “Nosferatu” is such an impeccably wrought 1830s period drama that it has a shot at several craft awards: Last week, the movie was Oscar-shortlisted for Score and Makeup and Hairstyling, and Cinematography and Costume and Production Design could also be in the offing.
When I sat down with Eggers on the patio of the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny Drive, he tried to explain how he goes about crafting these detailed masterworks. Some things have changed over time, like his willingness to talk about “Nosferatu” not only with Guillermo del Toro at the DGA but with me and other journalists.
“I’ve just given up,” he said. “When you’re younger, you want to be like David Lynch and not say anything, but then you find it’s hard to do that. You’re forced to go through the process. Even though I don’t smile on the red carpet, I’m a fairly affable person (laughs).”
Follow your bliss. Eggers has been obsessed with Murnau’s 1922 silent “Nosferatu” since he was nine years old and first watched a lumpy VHS black-and-white transfer from the Cinémathèque Fran?aise with English subtitles. “It was the original one that sunk its teeth into me,” he said, smiling. “Something about Max Schreck’s performance and the uncanny atmosphere…[It was] an enigmatic fairy tale. And in some ways, it is the most haunting one, the version that I saw as a kid, even though without the color-tinting, the night scenes don’t make any sense, because they’re shot in the day. There is something about those degraded versions that are more transportive even than seeing the restored Murnau versions. It’s interesting to see the scope and the specificity of his storytelling, but maybe less spooky.”
The “Nosferatu” adaptation Eggers wrote in high school with Ashley Kelly Tata launched his career. “This guy, Edward Langlois, who had the interesting theater in southern New Hampshire, invited us to do a more professional version of our play there. And it changed my life and cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director.”
After attending the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) as a way to get to New York, Eggers worked as an actor Off-Broadway, started his own theater with friends, designing their plays but also doing production design for others’ dance pieces, theater, shorts, and features. He started making his own shorts, which he also designed. Eventually, a gig assisting a high-end set designer paid well enough to give Eggers time to write his 2015 Sundance breakout, “The Witch.”
Stay curious. Eggers never stops reading and researching, ever since his grandfather started collecting Native American artifacts and African masks. “Those cultures were compelling,” he said. “But my dad was a Shakespeare professor. I’m exploring things in a safe place with making films. I’m interested in the occult, but I don’t want to be a practicing occultist and go insane, because when you believe in it, then it’s real. So it’s safer to make movies about it. But, as much as I wouldn’t want to live in the past, the period of time and culture where there’s a lot more sacred and a lot less profane is appealing to me. As precious as it sounds, there is something appealing about being a medieval artist who’s making their stuff for God, because then it’s not about the career move. It’s just about accessing the beyond through your work. It’s more pure.”
Play with language: Eggers sets “Nosferatu” in London and Transylvania in the 1830s, and deploys the language of the period — think Jane Austen-lite. This director is not trying to reach young audiences with anachronistic references. “It’s like Merchant/Ivory, mega-Hammer,” said Eggers, referring to the British Hammer Film Productions that churned out the beloved ’60s Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula series.
Never give up. Eggers wrote the first draft around nine or 10 years ago, along with a “not well-written” novella that he never intended to publish that helped him to delineate the characters and their backstories. “[The script] hasn’t deviated a tremendous amount since then,” he said. “It’s gotten leaner and better. I wrote a novella in the process of figuring out what the script [would] be, but also scenes that I knew would never be in the film, but would make it so that I could understand what was new that I was bringing to this and why it needed to be made.”
Along the way, various iterations of the movie came and went, including one with Harry Styles playing Hoult’s husband role.
Make it yours. The challenge with “Nosferatu” is that the Dracula story is so familiar. It’s been told countless times, and we all know the rules. Eggers sets out to break them. “Vampire cinema is so prolific that we have all these tropes and rules that we think we know that have been established, and Anne Rice refined them further. [While] trying to understand the origins of the vampire myth and understanding folk vampires, I had to forget everything that I had learned. I read [Bram Stoker’s] ‘Dracula’ at least five times as a young person, and then realized that I had infused it with things from vampire movies that aren’t in the book, [that] I thought were there.”
Eggers went back to the source of the vampire legends for inspiration. “Vampires of folklore didn’t always even drink blood,” he said. “Sometimes, they would strangle their victims. Sometimes, they would fornicate with their victims night after night until they died. And while it makes perfect anatomical sense, Anglo literary vampires would drink from the throat. But because of waking nightmares and old hag syndrome and the pressure of that feeling on your chest, many types of folk vampires would drink from the chest, which is what I do in the movie. So it was fun to find the things that were more primitive. As you watch the movie, I hope you’re [saying]. ‘Oh, that makes sense!'”
While Murnau’s film is credited as the first time sunlight kills vampires, Eggers doesn’t buy it. “It’s not sunlight; it’s just the fact that it is dawn that kills him. In the folklore — which we say in my film, which is pre-Murnau — the vampire must go back to its grave before the first crow of cock. So it’s not that vampires are allergic to sunlight in the folklore, and that the sun burns and kills them. It’s that the purity and the redemption of dawn doesn’t work for a demonic being.”
Over all these years, Eggers kept refining ways to avoid vampire clichés. He thanks Mel Brooks’ vampire satire “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” for pointing out everything that doesn’t work about Dracula, and he rewrote “Nosferatu” as a result, he said. “There are a lot of scenes that were deliberately rewritten after watching the Mel Brooks movie, and considering, ‘Wow, that totally doesn’t make sense.'”
In Eggers’ movie, the stake doesn’t go into the heart but through the navel, “because you’re just trying to stake them into the ground so they don’t move,” he said. “That’s not too much about killing them.” This film’s supporting characters are mostly named after the ones in “Nosferatu” as opposed to “Renfield” or “Van Helsing.”
Casting Skarsg?rd as the hideously ancient, mustached, layered-with-prosthetics Count Orlok was about keeping the demon sexy. “It was important to have a young, beautiful person underneath that,” said Eggers, “maybe that’s a good thing for Lily-Rose, but there is something seductive in this powerful figure. Bill’s a good actor. But Orlok, before he was dead, was probably a handsome guy, a harsh face, but a beautiful face, too.”
Elevate women. One of the changes from the Stoker canon is that Dracula isn’t heading to London to seek world domination. In Eggers’ version, Count Orlok is chasing Depp’s Ellen Hutter, who from the start, drives the action as the men around her try to be heroes in this drama but are actually powerless to help. Only Hutter has the answer to this vampire’s problem. In “Nosferatu,” Hoult’s Hutter is scared to death as he enters the fortress/castle of Count Orlok. Here, Hoult plays the damsel in distress.
“It’s true,” said Eggers. “It took a repressed Victorian hack, sorry,” he said of Stoker, “to accidentally create this incredible fucking story of Dracula. But he knew that the female protagonist needed to be expanded. She comes to the forefront as the film develops, but how much more interesting would it be if it is with her from the beginning? That’s what I was drawn to: This woman, who is an outsider stuck in this period, is a victim of 19th-century society as much as she’s a victim of the vampire. She’s alone, she doesn’t have anyone who she can connect with, she loves her husband, but he doesn’t fully see her. The tragedy of this story is that the person who does see her is a fucking demon, so then they have this sick, tormented relationship that’s beyond love in this film about obsession.”
Have a strong mentor. Producer Chris Columbus and his daughter Eleanor’s company, Maiden Voyage, support first and second-time filmmakers and helped out Eggers when “The Witch” ran out of money in post-production. Since then, producer and director Columbus (“Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Home Alone,” two “Harry Potter” installments) has been a mentor to Eggers. “This is the first time that we’ve worked incredibly closely,” he said. “He was there for every single day of prep. And there on set every single day, next to the monitor. I always learn a lot from Chris, [who] was there to help me, like all my other collaborators, achieve what we wanted, what we were after. It’s not a Chris Columbus movie. And he knows that, and he likes that. But he also is one of the great Hollywood storytellers. And so to have him double checking my darker inclinations, and me and my DP’s arty-fartier inclinations, was great. He would go through the storyboards and say, ‘Where’s this beat? Where’s that beat?’ Many people have said this is my most accessible film. Some of that comes from Chris’ eye.”
Stay calm. For all its logistical and creative challenges — Depp did her own body-twisting stunts worthy of “The Exorcist” — “Nosferatu” was a calmer, less intense production than “The Northman.” Eggers and his frequent collaborators pushed themselves “beyond what we’re capable of, to try to get better,” he said. “The emotional intensity of the scenes and the complexity of the camerawork was difficult, but there was more inner joy (laughs) for me. It was the first time in post-production that I didn’t hate what I was looking at every day. Usually, I’m so excited to be writing the next film in post. I’m in the edit room a ton. I’m not the kind of director who leaves for two weeks and checks in. I’m there every day, no matter what. But this was the first time that I didn’t want to escape into something else. I’d go home after working 10 hours in the edit room, and then I was watching horror movies all night long: ‘Maybe that could make this better.’ It felt like a first feature again, which was cool.”
Stay in touch with the real world. Eggers insists on period authenticity, even in a horror fantasy. He had 65 days to shoot this period nightmare. Of course, he deployed movie lights, and one can’t shoot in the moonlight, but he tries to get as close to natural lighting as possible.
“It’s always my interpretation,” he said. “The physical world, the things you can touch, is all supposed to be historically accurate. And the lighting is also, while polished and beautiful, it’s what’s coming through the window and nothing else. When there [was] a candlelit scene, we were only using flame, and we’re using mirrors to reflect the flame. If it’s gaslit, we were using electric lights to replicate the gaslight because it’s too expensive. We want that Gothic atmosphere. The fog machines were always going, and we were religiously only shooting on gloomy days, except for Hutter leaving the city in one shot. And then, of course, the sunrise. That was the only thing that the studio executives were on their knees crying [about] … waiting for the sun to go away all the time.”
The most complex maneuvers were the film’s long choreographed shots (with depth of field made possible by faster 35mm cameras), “which are pretty much always driving on the Z axis to create something hopefully hypnotic that draws you further into the film,” Eggers said, “further into the period world. And the only thing that’s deliberately stylized is the fairy-tale compositions. So you have a realistic castle and a realistic carriage and real wolves and real horses, but the composition of it is an Arthur Rackham or a Harry Clarke illustration.”
Juggle multiple projects. Eggers has a bunch of movies on the burners, some in back, some in front. They move around as greenlights become possible. A miniseries about Rasputin came and went. “What’s not to love about Rasputin?” said Eggers. Medieval film “The Knight” is “on a shelf with a lot of screenplays. I have five things going on, because you never know what’s going to work, what’s going to appeal to people, what’s going to be greenlit. This movie was not greenlit three times. I absolutely thought I was making a movie that has not gotten greenlit twice instead of this, so you never know. You’ve got to have a lot of stuff going on.”
One possibility from a man who spent his summers with his grandfather in Wyoming: “I would like to do a Western at some point.”
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