In Eggers reimagining of F.W.
She was, as she is in the film, incredibly brave, and raw, and powerful.
Her ability to tune into this dark and haunted place so quickly is pretty phenomenal.
Lenne Chai
Eggers has loved the story ofNosferatualmost all his life.
It doesnt look like that in the restored version.
And ever since, he has dreamed of bringingNosferatuto the screen.
The project almost came together a few times, only to have it fall apart for various reasons.
I probably wouldve had a nervous breakdown had it all gone [at that time], he says.
Its never going to happen, its done.
Murnaus ghost is telling me to f*ck off, leave it alone.
And I had a script that I was really passionate about, but no one wanted to make it.
But then I went to Kujo [Peter Kujawski] at Focus [Features] and said, Nosferatu?
and he was like, Yeah, sounds great.
And then, all of a sudden, everything snowballed.
Nicholas is one of the nicest guys Ive ever met, Eggers says.
He was just so gentle.
Eggers thought of Hoult for this, particularly in view of his work in Yorgos Lanthimos 2018 filmThe Favourite.
And he has a great look for it and a great feel for it.
Like Hoult,Willem Dafoehad also met Eggers right afterThe Witch.
And that was fun.
Im a huge fan.
That strange magnetism between Ellen and Count Orlok is at the heart of the film.
Its this misogynist thing.
Depp sees Ellen as a woman experiencing a real loneliness as well as a nascent sexuality.
Butohwas something that I was familiar with, Eggers says.
So, some things became more demonic possession, but the starting place was with Marie-Gabrielle Rotie.
Eggers also explored the work of 19thcentury French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his findings on so-called hysteria.
He went back to the tropes of other representations and peeled them back to build his own monster.
And so, youre infusing things youre reading with cinematic tropes that arent there.
In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew.
And that was really interesting.
That was basically where I started from, and I wanted to still acknowledge Max Schrecks makeup design.
For part of his prep work, he spent countless hours consuming Romanian folklore podcasts and YouTube videos.
And of course, Roberts intention with this one was to bring it back to this Transylvanian folklore version.
Eggers says, First was finding the voice.
And also, I didnt want this spider-hand thing [resting] on the chest.
We were trying to flush that stuff away, but we found that in the audition process.
Then Eggers presented Skarsgard with the look of the monster, but Skarsgard was taken aback.
What the f*ck?
He wasnt mean, but he was alarmed.
And I was like, Well, thats the point, that youre totally transforming into somebody else.
And then, hes putting the makeup on and hes like, Ugh, I look like a goblin.
This is a person.
I started to see him in the mirror, playing around, trying to do something.
That was the next step of enjoying who the character was and could be, he continues.
The voice of the vampire was Hoult and Depps first impression of Skarsgard in character.
It was otherworldly, but rounded in history, and truth, and so that was exciting.
But that voice and Orloks appearance were not easy to achieve.
Sometimes the full make-up would take six hours.
Skarsgard says: To create that voice it was just a heavy labor of a performance.
The prosthetics took forever.
Everything was very uncomfortable.
You were very hot and you were very itchy and sticky.
Not only every morning, but between every take.
Between every scene, there was a whole routine that I built up so that pull up the voice.
It sounds silly, but it was real.
He told me the kind of things he was thinking about, and it was frightening.
And Im glad he was able to go there.
It wouldnt have worked otherwise.
I became very obsessed…
I was so in that mind state that I felt this is pure evil.
I felt that the movie was evil.
I think that felt like we were doing some sort of evil, dark, magic sorcery at times.
I certainly dont feel that way about the movie now that its complete.
I think its actually beautiful.
Its scary and its horrific, but theres also a lot of beauty in it.
And its sensual and sexual and it hits on so many different layers.
At a camera test Depp met Skarsgard in costume for the first time.
Before they were set to shoot, Eggers and his longtime DP Jarin Blashke moved to Prague.
When I say early films, Im also including some shorts.
But really, in a very lovely fashion.
As always, their attention to detail and exacting planning came into play.
Its tons of planning and working with a storyboard artist.
Do we move walls?
Do we need to move windows and walls in the middle of the shot?
Dafoe finds this detailed and tightly planned way of working results in a kind of acting athleticism.
Because theyre complicated and theres nothing to cut to, because they really shy away from conventional coverage.
For Taylor-Johnson, the experience of working within that exacting framework also served his performance.
Rob and Jarin, the cinematographer, have this special language, he says.
And the way they shot this, it was so unique to any other film Ive ever been on.
Theres a lot of blocking.
And theres one setup, one take for each scene.
And that would take the majority of the day.
And it put tremendous pressure on the actors in the scene.
The performances are so stripped down.
If your eyebrows were dancing up and down on your forehead, you were not allowed any of that.
Hed strip you of all your little safety nets and your little tics.
That was amazing, because it just pushed you.
It pushed you as an actor and it pushed you to just constantly sit within the period.
Youre in the costume, youre in the environment.
Everything around you is real.
The furniture is 17th-century antique furniture.
We built everything, basically, Eggers says.
All the interiors and the Wisborg back lot set.
We built all that stuff.
But for the vast majority of things, we built them.
Onscreen, Hoults Thomas is the first to meet Orlok.
He has been sent to get some papers signed by the mysterious Orlok.
As he approaches the Transylvanian castle, he stays at an inn, where the locals warn him off.
We built a Transylvanian village in the Czech Republic, Eggers says.
The scene is so arrestingly beautiful it feels like the manifestation of a Grimms fairytale.
First of all, theres the snow, Hoult says.
Thats the level that Robs working at with everything.
As the empty carriage draws up, Thomas seems to magically find himself seated.
Hes pulled, into the propulsion of his story, Hoult says.
Hes not the person thats going to be like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up.
This is what I need to do.
Then there are the rats.
5,000 of them, to be exact.
They seem to both follow and represent the vampire, signifying his presence.
A great deal of the rats were trained to enter on cue, Eggers says, straight-faced.
I think in the scenes where we had thousands of rats, that is not that challenging.
And then, rats in the background become CG.
Rats are incontinent, says Eggers, so they were defecating and urinating on her, take after take.
In that scene, Corrin had to lie, half-naked, covered in rats.
Thirty of them were on my bare chest, Corrin says.
Honestly, I was being very brave about it.
I was very much stoic, being very British about it, really.
The smell is something that you cant imagine.
And the incontinence was a thing that I really didnt expect, but was terrible… Do you watchIm a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!?
You know when they had to put their hand in the box with the tarantulas?
It was a bit like that, I wont lie.
Hoult laughs as he recalls his own interaction with the rodents.
Thats what Ill be selling on my Etsy store.
Mainly due to the rodent quotient, Taylor-Johnson advised his wife Sam Taylor-Johnson against watching.
I said to Sam, Im sorry, but you cant see this movie.
Shes like, Well, I really desperately want to see it, but is it really that terrifying?
I was like, Well, listen, youve got a phobia of rats.
And then secondly, its terrifying.
And I know its definitely going to cause some sleepless nights for most people.
But people like that.
And then there are also the maggots.
In a scene where she touches the vampires skin, Ellens finger seems to dig into something rotten.
Were they real maggots?
I think there was a question of real maggots, at some point.
Nosferatuis in theaters December 25th.
