Interview: Director Robert Eggers (‘Nosferatu’) on the Consequences of Temptation, Training Hundreds of Rats, and Playing with Vampire Lore
It took some time for Robert Eggers to bring his version of Nosferatu to the big screen, a project he has been wanting to work on for the better part of the last decade. After the acclaimed director’s debut film, The Witch, was garnered critical and commercial success, the instinct would’ve been to use the cache and good will he built from that film to go ahead and tackle this legendary story. But as the director said in an interview back in 2016, he stated that “It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do Nosferatu next. I was really planning on waiting a while.” And a while he did wait, as the project went through up and downs, close to being made several times over the last couple of years, with all of the parts not coming together until now., This stretch of time allowed Eggers to create two other films, The Lighthouse and The Northman, and firmly establishing his voice as a modern cinematic visionary and one of the most detailed filmmakers we have working today. With Nosfertu, we find the director at the height of his powers, bringing together all of his usual precise, elegant technical work mixed with a dark, haunting, relevant telling of this iconic gothic story that adds layers emotionally relevant, personal elements that only someone like Eggers could bring to the table.
Born in New York City, raised in Lee, New Hampshire, Eggers knew at an early age he wanted to be in the arts, attending the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, where he studied theater, directing, and design on the stage, as well as directing and designing short films. He was born to be an artist, and Nosferatu was one of the guiding lights of inspiration for him from an early age in seeing a film version of the story, to creating a stage version of the story in high school, fully shaping his imagination and purling him forward to college and beyond to become a storyteller. Over the course of the last decade, Eggers ranks as one of the most original, meticulous, immersive directors we have working today, and has continued with Nosferua to showcase just how special, rare his film’s feel right now in the modern landscape of cinema. In her review, our own Sophia Ciminello called Egger’s latest film a “masterful reimagining of the classic gothic tale” and hailed it as “a timeless and timely cinematic achievement.” And she’s not wrong in her praise as Nosfertua is one of the best films of 2024, and, for me, ranks as the best work of Eggers career so far.
In a recent conversation, Eggers and I sat down and talked about crafting this new version of the classic story, his research process into making the film, and how the original source material has changed for him over time. We also discussed the perfect use of shadow throughout Nosferatu, capturing the stellar performance from Lily-Rose Depp, the symbolic nature of animals found in his films, and how he feels about the state of independent, auteur driven cinema.
Ryan McQuade: I know that you’ve wanted to tell this story for more than a decade now. When you decided you wanted to make this your next feature, where did you start in your research process and what was the primary focus? The original texts, the other films, the time period in history, general knowledge of vampires?
Robert Eggers: I mean, I did everything that you just asked about and more. The first thing was re-watching the Murnau film and then in Lotte Eisner’s biography of Murnau, she has the screenplay by Galeen with Murnau’s notes and that becomes sort of the primary source.
And so I was trying to think about the filmmaker’s original intentions and kind of explore those further. But then, yeah, I mean obviously I have to learn about the culture and the material world of Northern Port City and Germany and the 1830s and I have to learn about vampire folklore and the occultism of Albin Grau, the producer and production designer, even though his occult views were different than ones in 1838, but to further understand maybe what they were after, I felt it was important to know about that stuff. So it’s a whole lot of things, but I think that you’re sort of, it’s interesting with Nosferatu slash Dracula because there are so many versions and in order to read the Stoker novel or to explore the folklore, you have to erase everything you’ve ever learned, which is a lot, especially as someone who’s really obsessed with Dracula and vampire movies.
There’s all these cinema tropes and scenes from various Dracula movies that you feel like are in the novel but are not actually in the novel. And then the Vampire folklore is even more astonishing because I mean, even Montague Summers, who wrote a couple of famous books about vampire folklore, he didn’t live through the hundred plus years of vampire cinema and he was still too influenced by vampires of 19th century novels to read the folklore without being twisted by the Byronic, pale, sexy, aristocratic, neck blood-sucking vampire, you know?
RM: Yeah, no, for sure. I know that for you, even before a film adaptation, that you created a stage adaptation of this story. You’ve had an attachment to the material for a long time, and so I’m interested in how time has factored into your perspective on the material. Did you see different things in the story that spoke out to you more when adapting it into this film than when you first made it into a stage production?
RG: Yeah, no, of course it all changes, but I think the biggest step was finding a way to, as deplorable as it sounds, of finding ownership, the story and the world. In writing the screenplay of Nosferatu, I wrote a novella, which is something I’ve not done before and not done since. But it was a tool for me to really immerse myself in the world and the characters and their backstories and their relationships and writing a lot of scenes that I knew would never be in the film but would expand my knowledge and my understanding. And it was also a way to experiment with going too far with things in order to rein it back in.
RM: Temptation is at the heart of the original story, but in your film, the stakes feel far more sinister and dire than in past iterations of the story. Usually desire and lust is the focus of this idea but it feels like your film is focused on the consequences of these characters’ decisions, and how they can affect others they love. So could you talk about diving into the consequences via temptation for your characters?
RE: In some ways, the stakes are lower than Stokers, because Stoker’s Dracula is moving to England to kind of take over the world. Here, Orlok is entirely just focused on Lily-Rose Depp’s character, but he leaves a whole lot of destruction in his path in order to get what he wants.
And I think it’s really about just having the opportunity and the time to… My mom sends me every article and I usually just read the headline, but there’s this weird, all this stuff being like, this is the longest version of Nosferatu of all three. I’m like, “Who cares? What is that? How’s that a story?” I mean, okay. Anyway, it is the longest because I’m trying to explore the psychology and emotions of the characters more. And obviously the love triangle between Ellen, Thomas and Orlok is at the forefront of any discussion about what this film is. But also the Harding family played by Aaron Taylor Johnson and Emma Corrin that Friedrich in the Murnau film has a little bit to do. But here you see the downfall of a family, which was something that is not in many versions but I thought would be potentially satisfying and also satisfying to explore.
RM: It makes those decisions in your film, I think, a lot more personal, especially for Lily’s
character, and it being people that she knows and not just herself going through this experience alone. The other character’s decisions to not believe her cost something, right? The Count’s wrath is not just on her shoulders, right?
RE: Yeah. I mean in Stoker, like Lucy and Mina just happened to be convenient necks that are in Whitby, and Lucy, like Ellen is a somnambulist. And in the 19th century it was believed that sleepwalkers had either an innate or easier susceptibility to things in another realm. So she becomes first on the hit list and then he just moves on to Mina. But when you do a version like the Jack Palance version or the Coppola version where Mina is this figure of love and desire that’s beyond anything, you kind of wonder why the hell does he go after Lucy first then? And here it’s all about Ellen and destroying the things, the people that she loves is a way for him to exert more control and terror over her.
RM: The use of shadow and darkness throughout the film is vital to making the horror and scares work effectively. Can you talk about working with Jarin [Blaschke] working to not only create a true sense of terror in the darkness of what you were shooting, but also when it was right to use light to build anticipation when we meet the count and see his violent actions throughout the film? And at the same time, could you speak to you both capturing and collaborating with Lily and Bill on the creation of their detailed characters?
RE: Yeah, I mean, it is all kind of on the page and I don’t like to improv. Jared and I worked very carefully to pre-plan all the shots in the film. We worked with Adam Pescott, a storyboard artist, in making very, very detailed storyboards that unless there’s a serious problem or miscalibration, we just kind of carry it out. So it’s a long rehearsal process with the actors learning the staging that we have thought about beforehand and rehearsing the blocking enough that it hopefully doesn’t feel dead and canned and like actors hitting marks. Hopefully it feels somewhat alive.
And Lily worked for months with Marie Gabrielle Rotie, a choreographer, to learn all of the extreme body movement stuff that she does in her hysterical fits and seizures and possessions. And again, it is all carefully choreographed and Bill does his amazing transformation, but it was a voice that I had in my imagination and he was working on the voice and sending me recordings and I would suggest a little more of this and a little less of that. Eventually he worked with an opera singer to help him lower his voice an octave and to get that power that he has.
RM: I am fascinated with a through line I’ve noticed in your films, and it’s the involvement of various animals. You have the goat in The Witch, the seagull in The Lighthouse, wolves are represented in The Northman, and now obviously rats in Nosferatu. Could you talk about how you use animals as a vessel to convey and amplify your themes in your films and the characters that inhabit them?
RE: Obviously, as someone who’s interested in folklore and myth, animals are going to play a big part of it whether you want them to or not. So you just have to follow it. And rats became a big part of Nosferatu, so they’re a big part of this movie, but it’s always enriching to work with animals because I’m always amazed by how intelligent and usually very trainable if you have a good animal trainer, I mean the rats, a couple hundred of the rats were actually trained to enter on cue, but also they also don’t give a shit, which is also refreshing.
RM: Lastly, I spoke with Jeff Nichols earlier in the year, and he was talking a lot about, we were talking about his film The Bikeriders, and he had optimistic about the future for independent cinema and creating films that are within your own voice, and he brought you up as someone who is an example of how to stay authentically yourself when crafting a film that is a bigger scope or budget than the films that have come before. For yourself, do you share in his feelings that independent cinema, mid budget movies will continue to be made with the vision of the creator intact? If not, that’s okay too.
RG: I feel like the situation’s a little dire (laughs), but we’ll all try our best. I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve been able to carve out a niche at the moment, and by the way, it’s wonderful to know this project is being well received, but we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with it, what its actual fate will be. But part of the reason why I’m able to get these things greenlit is because they are also in a genre. I think it’s harder to make personal cinema in the commercial cinema landscape right now if it can’t be marketed as an easily digestible, big idea, whether that’s Nosferatu or Barbie.
RM: I totally agree. So thank you so much for your time.
RG: Thank you. Pleasure.
Focus Features will release Nosferatu only in theaters on Christmas Day.
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