Remakes, reboots, and sequels are all the rage in Hollywood these days. Studios hand them out like candy to proven and unproven talent alike, but very few directors not named Villeneuve or Spielberg get to actually direct them. The studios think that’s their job. Thus the films are usually derivative––canned blockbusters that only bust the blocks of IP stans’ driveways. But period-piece horror savant Robert Eggers is an exception.
The writer-director––known for his imbued, academic-grade historical research, technical craftsmanship, original screenwriting, granular attention to detail, entrancing sound design, masterfully-measured pacing, and enveloping moods––made a name for himself in the indie scene with his debut The Witch and took it even further with his shantied black-and-white follow-up The Lighthouse. In 2022, he expanded his scope with the release of his third, biggest-budget film, The Northman, which wore faint traces of studio interference (that he seems to have shrugged off) and garnered less fanfare despite its box-office numbers.
Now, Eggers has decided to step into the remake arena. And with good reason. Having all but cemented his directorial autonomy in three films, he had the freedom to tell any story he wanted. Instead of a new tale, he chose one close to his heart, a story with a rich tapestry of cinematic horror history that drew in and siphoned great films from Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, and F.W. Murnau––the one that started it all: Nosferatu.
The first, Dracula-derivative story follows a Transylvanian real-estate agent and his wife as they’re preyed upon by the titular plague-bringing vampire. As expected, Eggers’ remake is as terrifying as it is creatively astounding. The singular filmmaker plays the remake game with a level of cinephilic tact and storytelling nuance studio-directed remakes could only dream of. With a major Christmas release on the horizon, we sat down with Eggers to talk about the film, his influences, his processes, and the new territory it marks for him.
The Film Stage: To what extent did you want to tonally and stylistically make your own Nosferatu, and to what extent did you want to call back to Murnau’s version and the German Expressionism that has been so influential in film history?
Robert Eggers: The film is trying to acknowledge and respect the original film while doing its own thing. One of the first things that my cinematographer and I said to each other was that we did not want to replicate any of Murnau’s shots. Obviously there are many visual motifs and things like iron crosses and traveling hats that look similar to the things in the Murnau film. But we don’t replicate any of the shots. The Murnau film and the [Henrik] Galeen screenplay and the dialogue and the acting style are expressionist. And it was part of the expressionist movement. But the film itself is more neo-romantic.
They were exploring German Romanticism from the earlier part of the 19th century, and I think part of that was an interest of Murnau’s and his collaborators. I also wonder if they knew that because of their meager budget they were not going to be able to build any exterior sets, so it was going to have a different kind of realism to the locations: it couldn’t look like Caligari because they couldn’t afford to build Wisborg in an expressionist way; it was just gonna look like Lübeck and Wismar. So that concept was something that I sort of ran with and elaborated on. I think generally that was my approach. You know, “What were they thinking? Now double-down on it.”
For example, the film––unlike any other version of Dracula––ends with the Ellen character, the female protagonist, being the heroine and savior. And then that inspired me to tell the whole story through Ellen’s––Lily Rose-Depp’s character’s––eyes.
There are so many different versions of Dracula––were you going for a more Slavic rendering with the mustache, or did he just look better with a mustache? How much did you base your Nosferatu on Stoker’s Dracula and Murnau’s Nosferatu? What other iterations of Dracula did you pay close attention to? What other monsters?
Basically, in an evolution of the cinematic vampire from Max Schreck’s iconic creature to Edward Cullen’s sparkling vampire, vampires are no longer scary. And so I felt that if I went back to the folklore that was written about and by people who actually believed that vampires were real and were terrified of them that there must be something palpable there. And these early-folk vampires from Baltic and Slavic regions were rotten, putrid walking corpses. So that question is: What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? And you do a lot of research and you discover “that’s what he would wear,” or “there’s no way in hell he’s not gonna have a mustache” and commit to it.
But I think, again––like, Schreck is not really human. Schreck is kind of a creature. While my vampire is very much a dead human. Because of his deadness, it makes him a bit of a creature, which, again, is sort of like a throughline between the two. We also, you know, gave him the Max Schreck fingernails and hunch and shape of the skull and stuff.
This is your darkest film so far in terms of actual lighting, and the color is often such a muted twilight blue-gray that it looks like black-and-white. Did you consider making the film in black-and-white? And, regardless, are those midnight palettes meant to evoke a black-and-white aesthetic reminiscent of the original?
Yeah, you know, clearly our intentions didn’t work out ’cause no one seems to get that it’s simply just meant to be moonlight. But, no, I wouldn’t have done it in black-and-white because there’s a good black-and-white version. [Laughs]
The immersive sound design is some of your and the year’s best. One of your main sound designers, Michael Fentum, worked on the design for the last three Harry Potter movies, 1917, No Time to Die, a lot of Ridley Scott epics, action films, he just worked on Gladiator II. But there’s not much horror on his roster. And you hadn’t worked together before. How did that collaboration come about?
Well, Damian Volpe was the supervising sound designer, who I’d worked with on The Lighthouse and other things. He brought Fentum on, and Fentum was awesome. Fentum was excited to do something different. For as much as, like, I generally talk about Damian, Fentum absolutely is responsible for some of the signature sounds. I mean, the sound of the vampire drinking blood in such an extreme and visceral way––that was Fentum. I remember, so much of this movie was pre-calculated by me. And that was definitely something that I was not expecting. The first version was even more insane than that, but I was like, “There is something to this.” Like, this is fucking cool. [Laughs]
What does your sound design process look like? Are you super involved in that on, say, a minute-to-minute basis? Or are they sending you big sections back and you are talking through them from a bigger-picture perspective?
I mean, there’s a lot of description of the sound in the script. But then the typical methodology is doing spotting sessions with the sound designer, press pause, and then talk about stuff, and press pause and talk about stuff. So yeah: you go through the whole film. But then it continues to evolve. I’ll do sessions with Damian in his studio and go over things and push it in a certain direction. But it continues to go all the way until the final mix.
You’ve expressed some reservations over how The Northman turned out. Do you feel like Nosferatu turned out more true to your vision of it? What’s changed in your processes since?
Every film, you get a little better at being able to articulate what’s in your brain and put it onscreen. And, you know, I think The Northman was just a big step forward, just such a huge jump in budget from The Lighthouse. But you always need to try to bite off more than you can chew in really challenging yourself. I think somehow with Nosferatu––because I had such a supportive line producer and such a supportive studio and executives––they gave me the support to wrestle everything into control if it seemed like it wasn’t going to work out right.
Where The Witch and The Lighthouse face us with more cerebral, abstract horrors that occasionally make themselves known, Nosferatu is full of pure, brash, in-your-face jump-scare horror from start to finish. Did you set out to make your next film more overtly horrifying? Or is that just what felt right for Nosferatu? Or maybe you don’t agree with that description.
Yeah, no, it’s meant to be my most approachable film. And the other thing is: because Nosferatu sort of invented horror movies, I felt I had a responsibility for this to be a horror movie and even have jump-scares. As long as they moved the plot forward and aren’t just there for no reason, I felt that they were an important part of telling this story.
Was it harder to tell a story that was adapted versus a story from your own brain that doesn’t carry any traditional expectations?
It’s harder because of audience expectations. It’s harder because Jonathan Harker meeting Dracula in his castle––that scene’s been done great, like, at least five times, you know? And I knew I would have to do that scene. But then there are also advantages to doing something that’s been done so many times, because you see what has worked, what usually doesn’t work, what never works, what’s always missing, and you can apply that knowledge as well. Like, Dracula: Dead and Loving It was really helpful in kind of shining a bright light on all the dumb things about Dracula, you know? And you’re like, “Okay… don’t do that!” Or, like, “That scene has to be done––there’s no way around it––but look at how it can go so wrong.”
Nosferatu opens in theaters on Christmas Day.
The post Robert Eggers on Nosferatu, Jump Scares, and Making Vampires Terrifying Again first appeared on The Film Stage.
from The Film Stage https://ift.tt/0sVNC6p
0 Comments