Making 'Nosferatu': Corralling Live Rats, Overpowering Flames, and ...

Near the end of Nosferatu (now in theaters), director Robert Eggers places a small, sentimental easter egg that calls back to his earliest experience with this iconic vampire tale—as a teenager directing a school play. As he explains its meaning, his voice goes a bit soft. Eggers seems to be moved by the fact that he got to make this movie at all—and that he pulled it off as only he could.

His interpretation of Nosferatu is in meticulous conversation with the story’s various, previous iterations: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1922 F.W. Murnau film (an unauthorized Dracula adaptation) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu remake, and yes, that school play. In striking gothic-horror cinematography captured by Oscar nominee Jarin Blaschke (who previously worked on Eggers’s The Lighthouse), this take reframes the story of Ellen, a young woman (Lily-Rose Depp) possessed by a demon (Bill Skarsgärd), and tells it largely from her point of view—while also examining this tortured anti-romance’s impact on her marriage to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a simple real estate agent.

Shot in the Czech Republic with mostly practical effects and largely on soundstages, these images reveal that the new Nosferatu is an Eggers-Blaschke movie through and through—if also one with deep, fascinating roots in film history.

Director Robert Eggers, actor Emma Corrin, director of photography Jarin Blaschke and actors Lily-Rose Depp and Aaron Taylor-Johnson on the set of their film Nosferatu, a Focus Features release.By Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features.

Robert Eggers: This location was very difficult to find, in the Murnau film and also the Herzog version. The scene takes place on a beach—Murnau and [Henrik] Galeen, the screenwriter, must have read Bram Stoker’s novel and saw the description of Whitby, where you have a cemetery that overlooks the ocean, and wanted to somehow do that. It created this more humble version of sailors’ graves and sand dunes. But we shot it in the Czech Republic, which is landlocked. I thought with the Northern German setting, it would potentially make more sense for there to be an estuary near town because otherwise they would have to travel quite a long way from Wisborg to get to the seaside.

We thought all our problems would be solved, and we could have a lake that we could turn into an estuary with some CG. But finding a lake in the Czech Republic that would work for us was very difficult. The one that we settled on, nobody really liked; the day we showed up, it was flooded and there was barely any shoreline to work with. Most of the crew is standing in the water shooting for actors who are about to sink into the sand.

Jarin Blaschke: Which is also part of why you see a crane there. We’re right up against the water.

Robert Eggers: I’m in the water. I’m wearing waders or tall boots or something.

Jarin Blaschke: You always have the best and most gear, so yes.

Robert Eggers: Well, I love costumes…. Murnau’s approach in this film was to articulate some sense of historical accuracy as well. So these iron gravestones that we associate with the Murnau film actually were the thing that would be in this setting in this period. It’s not just like, “Okay, he did that. Let’s do that.” If you look at paintings from the period, you’ll see these existing in this kind of a setting.

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter in director Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU.Courtesy of Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features.

Robert Eggers: She’s calling out to Orlock, telepathically, that she’s ready to receive him.

Jarin Blaschke: It’s part of a montage where you have this very swooping, operatic shot. This is a typical moonlight situation for us, at the window. This is on stage—what percent was on stage, Rob?

Robert Eggers: 90%, something like that.

Jarin Blaschke: That works for placing your moon inside. I shot the light into a convex mirror to make it as hard as possible. I set it as high as I could while still having it reach her in the window, because if you set it too high, then she’s in the shadow of the windowsill. You have to contain it, so it only goes to the mirror and doesn’t bounce around all over the place.

Robert Eggers: Jarin and I talk all the time about how we pre-plan and then execute the plan, which is the case most of the time. Even that scene on the beach that was flooded and there was no room for the actors to move, we still basically shot what we planned. We had to modify a tiny bit, but barely. But seeing what Lily was capable of physically did inform things, because she was learning how to do all this stuff while we were still mapping the film out.

Jarin Blaschke: This is probably as monochromatic as our moonlight gets. I’m maybe speaking too soon. [Laughs] People are sometimes confused—they say, “It’s as if it’s black and white,” and that’s fair. It’s a continuation of an idea that began in The Northman that was a little bit more scientific, and maybe a little too literal, which is, we don’t see color at night as mammals. It’s technically a similar approach for this movie, only that I allowed it to go a little bit bluer and a little more stylized than The Northman, which is almost, literally, monochrome.

Either through filtering or gels, depending on what the camera has to do and the lights and where they are, no red light is reaching the film. It’s what you call a shortpass filter. That was borne out of me doing tests on The Northman and not really getting the look that I saw in my head. Out of curiosity, I had the lighthouse filter—our orthochromatic filter for black and white—and I just put it on the camera. I put it on here on for The Northman, on the test, and suddenly it looked right, and I didn’t really know why.

I did some research: The human eye, not only does it not see color at night but it only sees this part of the spectrum. So it started in this really kind of nerdy place, and hopefully it works out.

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter in director Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU.Courtesy of Focus Features.

Robert Eggers: The big confrontation scene towards the end of the film is, to me, the possession that I’m the most proud of. We rehearsed that and blocked her movements very differently. When we finally were shooting it, Lily was overwhelmed by the dress, and it did not read on camera what she was doing. Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, the choreographer who worked with Lily, and I went home that night and both of us were trying to think of something different to do. We came in onstage the next day and rehearsed with Lily. And we did have to change the camera movement to accommodate this. It became more about the face, because the movement was lost in the dress.

I was losing sleep over this confrontation scene because a little after halfway through the film, we have a competent version of the kind of possession scene we see in a lot of other movies. But then we need to top that somehow, visually and/or emotionally. According to my taste, we did. I can’t speak for audience members.

Here, the lamp on the floor, it’s underlighting her, which creates a nice horror movie, Boris Karloff vibe. But more than that, as she comes around the room in this sweeping motion before she starts tearing her at her bodice—Jarin was like, “Oh, it’s going to look like theater footlights, and here she is taking the stage.” That was helpful in designing the shot. I’ll tell you what, though: I really do feel like we should have shot a reverse on Lily in the beginning. I know it’s from Thomas’s perspective and that’s why we did it that way, but I think it would’ve been helpful to be able to have that.

Jarin Blaschke: Before he wakes up, you mean?

Robert Eggers: Yeah, before he wakes up.

Jarin Blaschke: When I watch it tonight at the premiere, I’ll pay attention to that and say, “Yeah, is that missing?” This is a case where you really needed the actors to block this scene. We did a similar thing in The Witch, and at that point in our journey, we were a little overwhelmed by that. It just had a lot of beats. How do you indicate a beat change, and how do the cameras say different things with each chapter of this scene?

When you go from a two-shot section to a shot-for-shot section, I have a feeling—and I think that Rob probably does too—that when the structure changes, it should indicate a beat change in a scene. There’s a part where she’s facing the wall and he’s in the background. And when she turns around and you finally cut, that cut means something. Now she’s front-lit and underlit, and it’s a totally different feel. Rather than just getting your wide, getting your overs, and then an arbitrary college shot—hopefully they’re aligned with different chapters of the scene.

Robert Eggers: The main thing that I am looking for in possession scenes is to keep it within reality. One of the marvelous things about Lily-Rose Depp’s performance is her wild physicality—people think it’s CG-manipulated or sped-up wire work, but it’s all her. When I go and see a possession horror movie, I just know that there’s all kinds of VFX involved. There’s no way you could ever, ever, ever actually do that. It’s not as scary as something where you could think like, “Oh, could this happen to me or my wife, or my sister, or my son?” This scene, we knew we could only do about three or four takes because it was so physically exhausting for her. Also with the screaming and everything, she was going to destroy her voice.

Jarin Blaschke: And the camera’s very active here too, or relatively active. It’s just to get the muscle memory of landing the marks, and even more so for the camera and the dolly grip on the dance floor to land the mark when she’s there, and synchronize those in front and behind the camera.

Courtesy of Focus Features

Jarin Blaschke: We waited around a while to make sure it’s dark enough that the flames actually read. It had to be real dusk, because your exposure is nailed to how bright the torches are, so you can’t really just shoot it earlier and print down. I had some nets behind the camera as we’d dolly left, and then we pushed into the mausoleum. There’s a flame bar hidden inside that adds to Willem Dafoe’s torch, when he breaks in to reveal some dead people.

Sometimes I find it’s nice to do a simple camera move, and then make it look more complex than it actually is through the blocking. You want a wide shot? Move the actors further away. There’s your wide shot. They run into a medium, and then they go over, and then it’s a close. And then, you want it wide again? All right. Have them enter the room, and we stay back. And Rob loves his smoke.

Robert Eggers: I really like the way the cemetery looks. I don’t like to toot my horn so specifically, but the cemetery stuff is like what Gothic cemeteries in Gothic horror movies should look like.

Jarin Blaschke: But it was spring.

Robert Eggers: Actually, it was really alarming. I went to this cemetery. It was walking distance from my house where I was living in Prague, and spring had sprung that weekend before we shot it. These green apartments are picking leaves off the trees and coming in with the fake snow and everything. We shot in a real cemetery, but because we needed to build that mausoleum. The part of the cemetery that we were shooting in wasn’t super populated with graves, markers. This little alleyway, all the grave markers, they are real—aside from the two in the foreground that we brought in to get this specific shot that we storyboarded. But as the dolly tracks camera left, there are a whole bunch of grave markers that we brought in to populate this place.

The buildings were all obscured by fog. But in the deeper background, we had to get rid of the leaves that were on some of the trees.

Jarin Blaschke: There were a lot.

Nicholas Hoult stars as Thomas Hutter in director Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU.Courtesy of Focus Features.

Jarin Blaschke: This is actually a green-screen shot, which seems silly—but it’s nighttime when we’re shooting. We had to be there. The schedule dictated we only had one day. So then when you shoot the reverse, we tinted it and did it during the day. Ridiculously, this background had to be fake so we could shoot it at a non-dusk time.

Robert Eggers: It was very finicky to grade because the green screen spill was all over the door and those coffins.

Jarin Blaschke: And it was on location, not on a stage. So it couldn’t really get any further away. There’s a limit to how far you could tint this damn thing.

Robert Eggers: But fun, wasn’t it?

Jarin Blaschke: A terrible amount of fun. Then he walks in the foreground. And then the torch in the foreground transitions to the torches on the boat in the next scene.

Robert Eggers: We do so much practical stuff, and we built that massive backlot, and we were using thousands of real rats and real wolves and all this stuff. So a shot like this, a blue screen or a green-screen shot—you’d never even think about it. You’d never even consider that this would be a visual effect shot. That’s something that we do a lot—the stuff you’d expect to be visual effects, we try really hard not to do them. So then when simple things end up having to be visual effects shots because of budget and schedule and health and safety and random shenanigans, they become invisible.

One fun fact is that the coffins were not made of balsa wood. They were made of oak or something. They were the heaviest coffins that you’ve ever seen in your life. The undertakers or the pallbearers could pick up the coffins of the children. But Anna’s coffin was so heavy they couldn’t lift it. A week prior, I happened to have come across this Victorian newspaper article about pallbearers being crushed to death by a coffin that fell on them, that they were carrying into a grave. I was texting this to everybody, but it was also a little scary. We were worried that that was actually going to happen.

Jarin Blaschke: As we’re going to work that morning to lift these same things. [Laughs] There didn’t seem to be any lightweight wood available in Czech Republic, is that fair to say?

Robert Eggers: Yeah, it’s true. Everything was very sturdily built. But anyway, I remember when Louise Ford, the editor, got the rushes, she was like, “Wow, those guys are doing such a good job pretending that those coffins are heavy.”

Jarin Blaschke: They’re fighting for their lives.

Courtesy of Focus Features

Jarin Blaschke: That’s real torchlight. We had lenses that were fast enough to deal with candle light, so a torch is nothing.