Although Willem Dafoe appeared in dozens of films, he also acted in films Nosferatu offered him the chance to try something he’s never done before: filming with thousands of rats.
“That was really special,” he told Yahoo Entertainment about sharing the screen with 2,000 trained rodents. “My only fear was: I love animals! I was afraid I would step on them. But luckily that didn’t happen. They were excellent co-stars.”
Dafoe plays an eccentric occult expert in the film, which hits theaters December 25 and follows a woman terrorized by a vampire. It’s a full-circle moment for the actor who played the original Nosferatu actor Max Schreck in the 2000 film Shadow of the vampire. It is also his third film with writer-director Robert Eggers, to follow The lighthouse And The Northman.
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“He’s a great writer. He’s a great director. He knows my triggers,” Dafoe said. “I enter the world he creates, and it tells me what to do. I feel involved. I feel inspired. He’s a good guy.”
“I want to be in all his films,” he added, laughing.
Willem Dafoe in Nosferatu. (Focus Features/Courtesy of the Everett Collection)
Dafoe said Eggers has a knack for making films “from another time” that still “feel so real and relevant.”
“To have the opportunity as an actor to find a different way of being, a different way of thinking [and] Getting a different perspective on our lives is wonderful,” he continued. “He is the whole package.”
Emma Corrin, who uses these pronouns, plays a close friend of the film’s main character. They told Yahoo Entertainment that they were honored when they received a letter from Eggers asking them to participate Nosferatu.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t need to see anything. I’ll do anything you want!’” Corrin said. “Then I read the script and it was just beautiful. He writes these incredible, long, prose-like descriptions of scenes, and you can immediately tell what he wants. It was kind of a no-brainer.”
Eggers’ enthusiasm for his work has earned him the reputation of a “visionary,” as Corrin described him. But Nosferatu was a particularly meaningful project for the director. He told Yahoo Entertainment that in many ways this is his most personal film yet.
“I’ve always loved vampires since I can remember,” he said. “My first Halloween costume I chose for myself was the Count of Sesame Street. I saw Nosferatu for the first time when I was 9 years old and fell in love with it.”
Eggers staged a play of it in high school, which was then picked up by a local professional theater that was impressed with his work.
“Nosferatu has always been a part of who I am,” he said. “I got into this [project] a bit unhurried and with the feeling of making a first feature film, because it has the energy of things [I’ve] have been living together for a long time.”
“But of course it’s not enough to just be a jerk about this. There has to be a reason to do it,” he added.
The original Nosferatu is a 1922 silent German expressionist film directed by FW Murnau. It was based on the vampire story from the 1897 book Dracula by Bram Stoker but features different characters. from Eggers Nosferatu takes the original film’s female victim, Ellen Hutter, and makes her the main character.
Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp enter Nosferatu. (Focus Features/Courtesy of the Everett Collection)
“I loved telling the story through the eyes of a female protagonist, which hasn’t been done before,” Eggers said. “Murnau makes Ellen the heroine in the final act, but I thought if we started with Lily-Rose Depp’s character from the beginning and experienced it through her eyes… the film could be more psychologically and emotionally complex .”
In preparation for writing the script, Eggers first wrote a novella about Nosferatu. He wanted to find out the backstories of his characters, although many of them are never seen on screen.
“People ask me one thing [is if it’s] It’s hard to write a story that has been done so many times,” he said. “It’s true! But there are some advantages: you can see what always works, what works sometimes, what never works and what is always missing.”
Nosferatu himself, also known as Count Orlok, is played by Bill Skarsgård. The film’s marketing hasn’t spoiled what he looks like in the role yet, instead focusing on the character’s sinister-looking chest. There is a new coffin-style popcorn bucket for sale, as well as a huge replica of the sarcophagus worth $20,000.
Eggers said he was surprised that this was the most important footage from the film, but he’s not angry about it.
“Myself and Craig Lathrop, the production designer, spent a lot of time thinking about the box,” he said. “Willem always talks about how I don’t point at things in my films. You know they are there. We experience them as the characters experience them, and no more.”
However, he acknowledged that the ancient vampire bed is absolutely amazing, and he’s excited for people to see all the “cool details.”
“It’s got all these damn skulls and stuff on it. It’s a really cool box,” Eggers said.
Nosferatu can be seen in cinemas from December 25.
