Focus Features revealed Robert Eggers‘ much-anticipated gothic vampire horror Nosferatu on Thursday night in a special screening for select guild members and press.
During a post-screening Q&A with Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro at the Directors’ Guild of America Theater in Los Angeles, Nosferatu writer-director Robert Eggers revealed key factors that went into making the film, including trained rats, six hours of monster makeup and lead actress Lily-Rose Depp‘s dedication to learning the physical moves required of her character.
Depp, who plays Ellen Hutter, wife of Nicholas Hoult‘s character Thomas, has scenes that involve contorting her body in ways that appear almost inhuman. During the Q&A, Del Toro said he had used a Butoh dance teacher on the set of his upcoming film Frankenstein, and asked if Eggers had done the same for Depp’s choreography. “Yeah [we had] Marie Gabriel Rotie, a Butoh choreographer who I worked with also with on The Northman,” Eggers said. “Lily did tons and tons and tons of body work with her.” The results were so impressive Eggers said, “A lot of people have wondered if some of that stuff is CGI enhanced, but she did all of that stuff physically.”
The exact details of the plot are still under wraps, but Depp and Hoult are joined in the cast by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin as couple Friedrich and Bill Harding, Willem Dafoe as the occult-obsessed Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz and Bill Skarsgård as the undead Transylvanian Count Orlok. “I did it Hammer Horror style where they’re British, even though they’re in Germany,” Eggers said.
Eggers—who also wrote and directed The Witch and The Lighthouse—said of Nosferatu, “Even though it’s a remake, it’s probably my most personal project.” He detailed his early obsession with the original F. W. Murnau-directed 1922 silent Nosferatu, including actually directing it as a school play, in which Eggers starred as Count Orlok. “I’m obsessed with the past,” he told Del Toro. “I don’t exactly know why, but it seems to be the way I like to explore where we are and where we’re going is by going backwards. And I think if I weren’t making films, I probably would be like an archeologist.”
When it came to creating the look for Count Orlok in this film, Eggers said he began by thinking, “‘OK, so what would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like? What would his hairstyle be?’ Apparently he has to have a mustache.”
Some aspects of Skarsgård’s performance as Orlok required six hours of makeup, said Eggers. “When Bill first saw the bust [of his character], he was like, ‘This guy didn’t look like me when he was alive.’ And he was pretty intimidated. But as soon as he put it on, I saw the moment when he was inspired by the makeup and knew that he could do something with it.”
Then there were the rodents. “There’s 5,000 real rats,” Eggers said. “So basically if there’s rats in the foreground, they’re real, and then they thin out and become CG rats in the background. And they were well-trained.” However, there was an unfortunate side effect of working with the little furry creatures: “I didn’t know that rats are incontinent, so the smell is insane.”
Eggers crafted over 60 sets for the film and “almost every interior is built,” he said. He credited his producer Chris Columbus for encouraging him on that front. “Chris is a creative producer… He went through the storyboards and would say, ‘Where’s this beat? Where’s this story beat? It’s in your script. I don’t see it in the story boards. It’s not enough for them to say the line, we have to see it visually.’”
Del Toro congratulated Eggers on Nosferatu, telling him, “Every time you come out with a new movie, I’m extremely eager to watch it, because I know I’m going to see something, a confection, with great passion, great care, and more than anything else, a unique and incredibly vibrant voice in film, and I thank you for that.”
Nosferatu will be released December 25th.
