“I don’t know how you’re supposed to behave if you’re being chased by a vampire, or experiencing demonic possession,” said Robert Eggers, smiling a little but deadly serious.
Not that he hasn’t thought about it for a very long time. The writer and director’s first brush with “Nosferatu,” F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film with a story ripped straight from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” was in a book. As a child in New Hampshire, he saw an image of Max Schreck as the vampire and it obsessed him; as a teenager, he directed a stage version in, improbably, black and white. (The actors were painted in monochrome.)
This anecdote is not very surprising if you know Eggers’s work. At 41, he’s made three acclaimed feature films — “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman” — that are united in sensibility: They’re historical, deeply researched and, let’s be honest, pretty strange. Obsessed with detail, Eggers excels at not just evoking some setting from the past but drawing the audience, with a kind of uncanniness, into the head space of his characters. The lazy tendency of many historical films is to put people with modern frameworks and preoccupations into period garb, telling stories that make sense to contemporary audiences. But Eggers refuses to pander.
Davis was part of a stellar American athletic contingent in Rome that included the boxer Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, the decathlete Rafer Johnson and the basketball player Oscar Robertson.
Produced by Robert Jimison and Michael Simon Johnson
Videotranscript
vegasslots‘Nosferatu’ | Anatomy of a SceneRobert Eggers narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicholas Hoult.“Hi, I’m Robert Eggers, the writer and director of “Nosferatu.” Nicholas Hoult is on a journey to Castle Orlok, and he is stopping in a Transylvanian village that we built in the Czech Republic outside of Prague. We went to a lot of vernacular architecture museums in Romania, in Transylvania, to study what we would be building, and this is based on all that. It was a very difficult sequence to cast. We have Roma non-actors and Roma musicians and dancers from Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania. It was challenging to work with everyone speaking a different language, but also very enjoyable. These musicians are from Romania, so it was the woman who was just clapping with the red kerchief on. You may have noticed, or maybe not, that this is all one shot. This sequence was very carefully choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time in a warehouse in Prague. And then we had to bring everyone here and get it right. And I think we did about 30 takes of all of this. This guy Radu, is a dancer who does kind of traditional Roman dance combined with hip hop. But here he’s just doing the traditional thing. And this gentleman with the Golden tooth is Jordan Haj, a Czech pop star. Why are they laughing at him. Is it the hat or is it something else. But it certainly is meant to make you feel uneasy as an audience member, because he doesn’t know why they’re laughing at him.
Robert Eggers narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicholas Hoult.CreditCredit...Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features“Nosferatu” continued to preoccupy him, even as he directed other films. Now, he’s finally pulled it off, and the result, which opened on Christmas Day, is peak Eggers. His vampire, Count Orlok, is not the sleek and seductive type; he’s a folk vampire, the animated but rotting corpse of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman, played in a counterintuitive twist by 34-year-old Bill Skarsgard. Across many miles, Orlok has forged a psychic and blatantly erotic connection with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Luckily for him, her solicitor husband (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to Orlok’s castle to deliver papers that will make him the owner and inhabitant of a home near Ellen.
In town from London, where he lives, Eggers met with me over lunch at the coincidentally named Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. (The English town of Whitby is where Stoker was inspired to write “Dracula.”) He was thoughtful, a little reluctant to funnel his creative intuitions into words. This movie obviously took root deep inside his subconscious.
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