fourth film — “Nosferatu,” in theaters today via Focus Features — is a bold, starry reimagining of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterful silent film of the same name. Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård star as the gorgeous Ellen Hutter and grotesque vampire Count Orlok, respectively, alongside Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Eggers regulars Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson. The gorgeous and sinister tale builds on the dark historical lore of Eggers’ previous films — 2015’s “The Witch,” 2019’s “The Lighthouse” and 2022’s “The Northman” — and infuses it with drama, desire and an electric erotic undercurrent. Eggers, as funny and self-deprecating in conversation as his films are dark, spoke with Variety about creating a new vision of a film that has influenced him since childhood, his unique partnership with director Chris Columbus and the viral “Nosferatu” merch.
Why do you think the original film struck you from such a young age?
I was already into vampires and I’d seen the Bela Lugosi movie a few times, and I would be Dracula for Halloween. But “Nosferatu”… In the new versions that have been recently restored, you can see the bald cap on Max Schreck and the grease paint that makes his eyebrows. On the VHS I had when I was a kid, it was made from a degraded 16mm print and you couldn’t see any of that stuff, and he was a real vampire somehow. Because the thing was so degraded, it felt like an unearthed archive of the past, and the atmosphere seemed more haunting. To use a word that I seem to be obsessed with, it was “authentic.”
You wrote a full novella to h
elp you prepare for making the movie. Is that something that would ever see the light of day?
It’s written quite poorly because I’m not a novelist. Some of my screenplays aren’t so bad if you’re into reading them. But the screenplay is an unfinished thing to get you to make the film. The novella was also very much a tool to get me to write the screenplay. So no, it sucks.
You’ve said you’re grateful that it took you 10 years to get this film off the ground so that you could direct it at a point in your career where you can tell the story the way you wanted. What do you think you were able to accomplish now in your directorial career that you might not have been able to pull off in your younger days?
It’s the accumulation of knowledge that helps me get my imagination onto the screen with more specificity. I’ve only made four movies and it’s not such an illustrious career. But I had more control: It was a story and, frankly, an IP and budget that made it so Focus Features was able to give me an incredible amount of creative freedom, and also unparalleled support. So I was put in the incredibly fortunate situation of being able to just make the movie I wanted.
