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The cinematic worlds that the filmmaker constructs are the stuff of dreams – or, perhaps more precisely, nightmares. As he gears up for the release of his arguably most significant title to date – an adaptation of vampire paradigmatic Nosferatu – the 41-year-old chronicles the chapters that have led him to this exigent career milestone.
© 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Words BEN TIBBITS
As Robert Eggers enters the cafe of the British Film Institute in Central London’s Stephen Street, he’s huddled over, hooded and draped in all black, as if to remain inconspicuous among the Metropolitan bustle. He orders a double espresso, efficiently shakes my hand and perches directly opposite me in a circular booth. Based in the English capital, the New England-born screenwriter and director’s restraint in overtness feels an apropos character trait; a small-town oddball who grew up “in a clapboard house surrounded by giant white pines,” and who has “always been interested in the darker side of things.” Raised by a Shakespeare professor and a kids' theatre company worker, Eggers' interest in the macabre and the mythological were planted, explored and chiselled as a child and have proven central characteristics in all four of his feature films to date: 2015’s folklore horror The Witch, 2019’s pitch-black cautionary comedy The Lighthouse, 2022’s historical epic The Northman and his soon-to-be-released interpretation of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 classic, Nosferatu.
We convene at a landmark in Eggers’ career – as he prepares to share his vision of one of cinema’s most iconic horrors, a gothic tale that has beguiled him since childhood. But the 41-year-old’s pathway here has been far from linear. Ambitions to direct developed in his school years, before he moved to New York to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy – somewhat surprisingly given his reserved disposition. “The only thing I actually have training in is acting,” he quips. “I was a little bit ambivalent but it took me to New York and that was exciting, and I actually really enjoyed the experience and got a lot out of it. Then I was a working actor in off-off-off-off-Broadway productions and felt like I couldn’t be a worse director than the people who were directing me. So my friends and I started our own theatre company and started doing stuff.” Eggers would work on the sets and costumes for the productions that he’d direct – facets of story-telling that had fascinated him in his youth, always “trying to replicate makeup from movies in the mirror.” From there he found an industry entry point as a production designer, and subsequently “more experienced directors saw my work and asked me to design for them.” But, for Eggers, such pursuits were stepping stones to creating his own films rather than tied-up goals, “a means to an end.”
There were times when his faith in his objective waned. At age 28 or so, he found himself at a crossroads. “I wasn’t even getting decent design gigs,” he remembers. “At one point I was painting drywall in some office and was like, ‘I’m fucked.’ I just felt like it’s never gonna happen. You just have to keep believing through that. But there is belief and resilience and luck and then there’s, you know, hard work.” And so he persevered with attempts to direct, and after “finally making a short film that was not bad, I tried to write some feature scripts but no one wanted to make them. They were just too weird and genre-less. So I felt like if I made a movie in the horror genre, I could probably get it financed. I thought that it was going to be a small endeavour and would probably have to be shot in the proverbial of, you know, my parents' backyard. So I thought about what would make sense for New England, and The Witch is the archetypal, New England spook. When we went to Salem as kids on field trips, I was always super interested in it, and part of me always thought, ‘What if the witches had been real? What would that have been like?’”
© 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Written in early modern English and boasting a towering breakthrough performance by Anya Taylor-Joy, the deeply unsettling, eruditely constructed folk horror of The Witch followed a banished Puritan family whose remote farm existence falls victim to ominous otherworldly occurrences. While much contemporary horror has fallen short of converging captivating drama and blood-curdling fear, Eggers’ embryonic effort exceeded expectation. It was genuinely, unequivocally terrifying, and earned Eggers a bouquet of awards including the US Dramatic Directing nod at Sundance. It’s only grown in popularity in the years since its 2015 release.
“You obviously hope that what you’re making connects with audiences and so it was really satisfying and a big relief [that it did well],” he says. “The success of The Witch changed my life completely. [Proportionate] to the budget, it’s my most successful movie at the box office. And it’s cool to see how it has settled itself over the years. It was a weirder movie when it came out than it is now, because of the landscape of horror and the folk-horror revival that was going on before. It’s not such a weird, alienating film anymore.”
Following the critical adoration of his debut, Eggers was suddenly one of left-field cinema’s hottest directors. Rumours of his attachment to a Nosferatu remake scattered around Reddit forums, but it’d be a near decade of development, of peaks and troughs before such became a reality. Instead, for his sophomore feature, Eggers made The Lighthouse, a film about two lighthouse keepers on a remote island who attempt to cling to their sanity amidst isolation and cataclysms. “If I had to watch one of my movies, which I would prefer not to do, I would probably watch The Lighthouse,” he admits, an opinion shared by many when measuring his filmography. The two leading A-list prongs of the film, heartthrob character actor Robert Pattinson and savant of the peculiar Willem Dafoe bring substantial appeal. Their characters’ love-hate bond and deteriorating rationality prove to be horribly thrilling cinema. Elsewhere, Eggers’ laconic, potent script brings splashes of colour to his long-term collaborator Jarin Blaschke’s breathtaking black-and-white cinematography. It’s a giddily gothic, deathly, funny oeuvre that’s equal parts majestic and morose, psychological and supernatural.
From the scant and taciturn to the elaborate and maximalist, Eggers labels his third film, The Northman, as “the movie that made me feel like I know how to direct a movie, that I’m not pretending and trying to convince people,” he says, before adding, “I’m not saying that it was such a great achievement in articulating my vision; the scale of the movie made me have to learn so many aspects of filmmaking. It had a major impact on me.” Co-written by Icelandic poet, novelist and screenwriter Sjón, and with a cast as eclectic as Nicole Kidman, Björk and Alexander Skarsgård, the 2022 epic is the grandest production of Eggers’ to date, a big-budget all-action extravaganza that, despite the odd misstep, shows the director’s ability to tame the beast of mainstream cinema. But having gone from a small-time A24-distributed noir like The Witch to a grandiose Universal-backed blockbuster with only one Pattinson-cloaked stepping stone, I tease: is Robert Eggers Hollywood? He pauses, a smirk appearing in the corner of his mouth. “I think in some ways I’ve spent more time entangled with Hollywood dynamics in some movies that didn’t get made, which I learned a lot from,” he says carefully. “But, yeah, certainly The Northman was a big movie with a big budget and Nosferatu is not an intermediate-sized film either. But, you know, I’m not making Marvel movies.”
And so with three very different films under his belt, all spectacular in their own manner, the mist finally cleared over Nosferatu. Set to descend into UK cinemas on 1st January 2025, it’s a project that, by this point, Eggers has tried to kickstart on multiple occasions. It’s his magnum opus, his most personal and gratifying picture. In many ways, everything in his life has been building up to this moment. I’ve been into Nosferatu since I was a little kid,” he says. “I wore my VHS out and then in high school as a senior I directed a play with my friend Ashley Kelly Tata – she’s now an experimental opera director in New York – of Nosferatu on stage, with black-and-white makeup and costumes and sets. A local theatre impresario, Edward Langlois, saw it and invited us to do it in his theatre in a more professional setting. And that was what cemented the fact that I wanted to do this work. The idea of doing Nosferatuas a film was exciting. It’s been about ten years since I started working on it, and weirdly, because I’ve been thinking about it for so long, it’s just as personal of a film to me as The Witch. It had a long gestation period and all the characters and locations feel very close to me.”
As established by the mouth-watering casting across his previous repertoire, Eggers tends to have the pick of the bunch when it comes to actors. For Nosferatu he curated the ensemble more closely than ever, going to inscrutable depth with each potential face of his vision. “It’s an incredible cast,” he says of an entourage that boasts Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård and the “very talented and versatile” Nicolas Hoult as its leading triad. Elsewhere, new-wave heavyweights Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson fill supporting roles, and there’s a third collaboration for Eggers with his most trusted thespian, Willem Dafoe, as the wacky, eccentric Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz. “I’m so fortunate that one of the greatest actors ever likes to work with me,” Eggers says on Dafoe. “Who else is going to play the crazy vampire hunter? Willem says he took the role because he knew that it was who I would want to play if I was in the movie. Which is true.”
© 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For the eponymous villain, Eggers would require a vessel both sinister and artful, who can remove themselves from the moral and the real, and plunge headfirst into a dark, devilish existence. Skarsgård, best known for his terrifying interpretation of Stephen King’s Pennywise in It, has a knack for doing just that, and so Eggers enlisted the brother of his previous star Alexander as his nucleus for the picture. “[Skarsgård] really disappeared into the role,” Eggers emits. “I remember when we were doing the second or third makeup test with the full costume, something just clicked and it was clear that he had found it and it was exciting for everybody. But, you know, scary. He was a foreboding presence.” Opposite his imposing tyrant, Eggers set his sights on a leading lady who could shock and stun. He feels that Depp, recognised for her work in divisive HBO series The Idol, is set to surprise critics as the haunted Ellen Hutter. “She has this otherworldly look that seemed appropriate, but she also really understood the character. When we started talking, she was referencing a lot of the films that I would have sent her anyway. I kind of said, ‘Look you do have to audition for [the role], but let’s talk together and build this performance. And the audition was so insane, she was so brave and so intense. Myself, the casting director and the videographer were all in tears because the audition was so profound. The depth that she brings to the character, I think people are gonna really be blown away by what she’s capable of.”
All of Eggers’ films prior to Nosferatu were original plots that he’d envisioned himself, from concept to cutting room. But, in many ways, to remake such a classic that first hit screens a century ago is even more challenging, especially considering his deep contextual relationship with the source material. He admits it’s his most pressured directing venture to date, and for a self-professed perfectionist, settling for anything but his explicit vision proved onerous. Ultimately though, he’s happy with the finished product. “I spent so much time trying to make the right choices,” he says. “I remember we were shooting, pretty early on, this Transylvanian village scene. I was at take 29 or something like that and Chris Columbus, who is the main creative producer, was like, ‘Look, I would never tell you you have [the shot] if you don’t have it, but you have it. You need to move on.’ I had spent so long thinking about that scene and what it needed to be, and I feel very happy with it now. But, at that moment, I realised that I had to let this film be what it’s gonna be. Nothing always lives up to your expectations, but a lot of things really did, which was awesome.”
A reputation aggrandised at every checkpoint, Eggers is one of the most unique and fearless directors of his generation, whose work horrifies and terrifies, awes and excites. There’s little humanity, and what there is is veiled in transgression, but this is the bold, barnstorming filmmaking of the Lynchs, the Cronenbergs and the Kubricks. Robert Eggers is weird. And he knows it. In fact, he revels in it. “I’d rather be with Boris Karloff in a churchyard with a fog machine than anywhere else,” he shrugs, draining the final drops of his lukewarm espresso, before disappearing off into a drizzly afternoon: hidden, searching and timeless.
Nosferatu is in UK cinemas from 1 January 2025
