Nicholas Hoult & Director Robert Eggers Break Down a Scene From 'Nosferatu'

So this is Thomas thinking, This is fine.

[both laughing]

Magic.

Hey, Vanity Fair. I'm Robert Eggers.

I'm the writer and director of Nosferatu.

And I'm Nicholas Hoult and I play Thomas Hutter.

And this is Notes On A Scene.

[dramatic music]

The scene is Nicholas Hoult's character Thomas Hutter

arriving at Castle Orlok in Transylvania.

I'll do sound effects.

So you can't see much of it,

but this is Hunedoara Castle in Transylvania.

Amazing medieval castle

that looks just what you want a gothic castle to look like

and is my belief that it is Bram Stoker's inspiration

for Castle Dracula in the novel.

We put here Count Orlok's coat of arms,

which has these wolf dragons.

It's a wolf's head with a serpent's body.

The ancestors of the ethnic Romanians were called Dacians

and this was like one of their big symbols

and they had like war trumpets and flags

shaped like these guys.

So here on either side of the coat of arms

are these Dacian dracos.

I love hanging out with Rob

'cause you learn things like this.

And it's all the little details like this

that make this movie so special.

This is an interesting moment here because here are my legs,

but they're not actually my legs

because of cinema trickery. No. Cinema magic.

We're getting into dream logic

and the shots kind of flow into one another

and because Thomas Hutter's character

is in this kind of weird, like, dream state here

and he's getting kind of dizzy and he's inside this carriage

that is very, like, suffocating

with a coffin-like atmosphere.

And so here we think he's in the carriage, right?

We're seeing his lap, but let's see what happens now.

[tense music]

[Thomas] Oh, oh, I'm in a carriage.

Where am I?

Wait, no, I'm not, what's this over here? Oh.

We reveal that I'm actually

walking up to outside of Count Orlok's castle.

So that was actually a very complex,

I mean you can describe it.

So Nick is standing actually with.

Coat draped over them. And then like,

and then there's the carriage behind him.

And as the camera's right here-

I'm waking up. the carriage comes apart

and his legs are pulled out

so that then the castle doors are behind him.

Now we're in a castle in the Czech Republic

called Pernstejn Castle that's in Moravia.

And we built all the interiors of the castle,

but we need the gatehouse and the courtyard as locations.

And this castle, I went and it was really fantastic,

but I found out that Werner Herzog

shot his Nosferatu there

so I refused to shoot at the castle

because I didn't want to use Herzog's castle again.

So then we scouted like tons more castles

and they all sucked.

And the location manager was like,

Look dude, like, Pernstejn Castle

is the castle that looks like right for the movie.

You just have to suck it up.

So then we went to the castle again and on the way back

I was scrubbing through Werner Herzog's Nosferatu

and realized that the places that we wanted to use

weren't in the Herzog film.

So we were able to use the castle, tip our hats to Herzog,

but not shoot it the same way.

And in fact, these gates here are gates that Craig Lathrop

and the rest of the production design team brought in

because I wanted even, like, bigger, more impressive gates

than were actually at the castle.

So we built, like, these gates in front of the gates

to make it bigger.

Bigger is better when it comes to castle gates.

I would like to, I like to imagine you going to castles

and being like, This place sucks.

And then they say, What was wrong with the castle?

They weren't atmospheric enough.

They, you know, there was one that was cool

but you had to climb a mile long staircase

to get up there.

That's not ideal for filming.

[tense music]

The snow is made from potato flakes,

like freeze dried mashed potatoes,

and coat of arms once again.

The snow, I'm sure I heard a story at some point

about you watching snow in different movies

and finding like the last few bags of snow in the '90s

or something?

Okay, so basically there's a thing called a snow candle

that is like a bucket that you light on fire

and swing around and then like snow goes all over the place.

Its very beautiful. Almost like ash.

Yeah, and that's like Ridley Scott movies,

like that's the snow that he uses

and I used it on The Northman.

But in between The Northman and Nosferatu

that snow became illegal

because the gas that makes the snow float is toxic.

Fun fact.

Production thought,

Okay, well we're gonna have to use CG snow.

And I refused to use CG snow and so yeah,

so then I was angrily watching a movie from the 1940s

called The Queen of Spades with some bourbon,

and there's like beautiful, beautiful snow.

And I'm taking pictures on my phone

and sending it to the snow effect guys being like,

Come on, like, they did it in the '40s.

Yeah. And yeah,

so it was these potato flakes things

and basically they stopped doing it in the '90s.

So yes, we bought all of the potato flake snow in Europe

to make this movie.

So no one will ever have better snow ever again.

Ever again.

Ever again.

There's something else interesting here.

Jarin, the DP, his lighting of this moonlight lighting,

he used a concave or convex mirror in the sky

that he bounced the light off of to create it?

This was something you developed

on The Northman too, right?

Yeah, yeah, to basically get like a light ray

that is closer to the large size

that would come from like the moon.

Was it a concave or a convex?

Vex. Convex.

I could draw that.

[both laughing]

But you get the idea.

This was an intimidating scene

to know that I was going to have to shoot.

People have said like, What's, isn't it hard

to do something that's been done a lot of times?

And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

Because there's so many Draculas and Nosferatrus,

like sometimes there's a lot of things that never ever work,

you know, in the story.

So you're like, oh, here's my opportunity to explore that.

But this scene of Hutter

or Harker going to Dracula's Castle,

like has been done well many times.

So this was quite intimidating

and a big part of making it work was the music.

So obviously there's this big crescendo as the doors open.

[dramatic music crescendos]

Kind of aleatoric 20th century classical music horror sound,

but also has some kind of nods

to James Bernard Hammer Horror.

But things get a little bit more abstract

and a little bit more quiet and dreamlike as the doors open.

That's Bill Skarsgard as Count Orlok, obviously.

He's shown in silhouette and at a distance.

Remember you talking about this bow,

that it's not actually a realistic kind of bow

as I normally would.

It's more like he's compelling me to do it

subconsciously. Yeah.

I think, you know, something that,

as much as I'm a massive, massive fan of Morneau films,

something that is slightly ludicrous about it

is that, you know, Max Schreck's vampire looks like a freak.

And Hutter comes to his house and, Very nice to meet you

and has a meal and it's fine

and he doesn't run away screaming.

And in our version,

Bill Skarsgard is very much a vampire of folklore,

from a time when people actually believed in vampires

and thought that they were real,

and these early folk vampires

looked like putrid walking corpses.

And if you were a putrid corpse,

you wouldn't want your house guests to know

that you were that.

I try not to let them know.

So, Orlok's always kept at a distance

to kind of conceal his identity.

And there is also a buildup to, you know,

finally revealing him.

Yeah, I remember you talking about that

when we get inside the castle as well,

him always being in the shadows

and not, for Thomas, not fully being able to understand

what he's gotten into

and still having some sort of doubt that he would stay,

that he would stay for dinner

and not turn around straight away and start screaming.

So this is Thomas thinking This is fine.

[both laughing]

Magic.

If you notice, as Orlok walks away

we don't hear his footsteps at all.

[tense music]

A little bit of a nod to the silent film.

But then of course

the sound design comes back more naturalistically

with this scraping sound of the door.

[tense music] [door clanging]

Also, this shot from behind was not storyboarded.

Jarin and I infamously like storyboard everything to death

and then do what has been storyboarded by Adam Pescott

the storyboard artist.

But this shot of the doors closing,

Chris Columbus the creative producer

who is known for directing Harry Potter and Home Alone

and writing Gremlins ran up to me and was like,

Check this shot from behind, blah blah blah.

And I was like, That's a really good idea.

And thank God we did 'cause we really need it.

Because of the feeling of watching Thomas kind of enter

and get trapped? Yeah.

I mean yeah, you know, it's game over clearly.

♪ Du-du-dun-dun ♪

[door clangs]

Oh, that's a spooky sound there too.