Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
Nosferatu's Robert Eggers on Changes from Original Film, Reimagining a Horror Classic
Sometimes filmmaking can haunt a great director.
Spoilers for Nosferatu!
Across the board, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu adaptation (in theaters now) is getting universally praised — and in some case award-nominated — for its cinematography and production design. Haunting and darkly gorgeous, the film has sequences that cinephiles will be dissecting for years to come.
So when SYFY WIRE got the chance to chat with Eggers and his long-time production designer Craig Lathrop about the film, we of course asked him to unpack some of the sequences that were consequential in achieving his take on the classic vampire tale, which features an all-star cast including Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe.
Nosferatu scenes that made Robert Eggers most nervous
It's not easy to try and best a classic, but Eggers has been thinking about his own cinematic version of Nosferatu since his teens. After directing a few challenging period pieces like The Witch and The Northman, he said he finally felt prepared to take on F. W, Murnau's 1922 film, Nosferatu.
Because that film's imagery has become so iconic in the horror genre, Eggers told us that he was nervous approaching some of the story's set pieces because he wanted to do them justice. He was particularly concerned with two third act, climactic scenes. One takes place in a cemetery involving the main cast, and the other is an augmented scene that happens between the Hutters (Depp and Hoult), that was scripted by Eggers to show the emotional toll that Count Orlok (Skarsgård) is having on the couple.
"I really wanted to capture the Gothic atmosphere of the cemetery [scene]," Eggers told SYFY WIRE about the deeply sad and horrific moment. "I wanted to really hold up my expectations to everything that Roger Corman or a Hammer Horror movie would aspire to, and really nail that.
"But also a new scene, where Ellen and her husband have that long confrontation near the end of the film," he continued. "That was another scene that really kept me up at night, because Lily-Rose Depp's performance needed to go so far and be so crazy. And by the way, she nailed it."
Robert Eggers on the Nosferatu scene where Thomas Hutter gets picked up by Count Orlok's carriage
In a film full of beautifully framed and lit sequences, a standout is when Thomas Hutter (Hoult) walks on the road towards Orlok's castle at night. As the snow falls, his silhouette practically glows against the pristine snow. The inky black woods are solemn as the path to the devil beckons. For the sequence, Eggers explained that he felt a lot of personal pressure to reinvent it and make his own.
"It's a film with so much history," he said of Murnau's original. "When we go to the castle for the first time, that is a sequence that has been done really well, many times. So how do I live up to that?"
With production designer Lathrop and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Eggers said they coalesced around shooting the scene on location and tweaking how Hutter would make the last leg of his journey.
"I took a long time to shoot that sequence," Eggers said. "We had to keep returning to the woods, because in order to get the movie lights that were on helium balloons high enough to have the moonlight look like moonlight, we had to have still nights. But the wind kept being so crazy that we kept having to shut down and come back and try it over again." However, the delays allowed them to polish their lighting design which is so hauntingly captured.
Eggers also confirmed, "The snowfall is practical. It's potato flakes."
Robert Eggers on Nosferatu's driverless carriage
An important change from the original film in this sequence is the driverless carriage that meets Hutter on the road and takes him to Orlok's castle in the distance. In Murnau's version, Orlok is barely disguised as the carriage driver, which plays almost as a comedic beat.
"I always thought that there was something goofy about Dracula dressing up in a disguise as the coachman and thought, 'Wouldn't it be more haunting if there was no coachman at all?'" Eggers said.
To help achieve such haunting, Lathrop said he and his team built the carriage from scratch. "I loved making the carriage," he told SYFY WIRE. "The carriage is one of those moments when you read it in the script and you're like, 'Oh my god, it's a vehicle. I have to make a vehicle!' But it turned out to be fantastic and really fun to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing."
During his research, Lathrop came upon accounts and images of a carriage that Queen Elizabeth gave to the the Czar of Russia around 1600. "I found this as my prototype, and then I started making it Orlok's."
In Egger's film, the camera is inside the carriage with Hutter for a bit during the journey, which gave Lathrop and his team the opportunity for some subtle storytelling he knows most audiences won't catch.
"You can't really see it in the film, but all along the sides are all these bas reliefs of just nasty things happening. It's the Vlad the Impaler story being told in bas relief on the side," he revealed. "And we had some metallic embroidery on the edges [of the fabric] to give me a little bit of pop. We actually had that done with somebody I've used before in India.
"Then Adam, my decorator, did a fantastic job with all the soft goods in the [fabric] materials," he continued. "We were trying to find that balance right between what you're going to be able to see at night, yet it still needed to be black. Originally, I wanted sort of a horse hair material, which is very shiny for the outside. But that proved to be a bit expensive. So we chose a different material that looked quite a bit like it."
Nosferatu is exclusively in theaters now. Get tickets at Fandango.
