Interviews
Robert Eggers Explains Why He’s Drawn to Remaking ‘Nosferatu’ [Interview]
Robert Eggers is quickly making a name for himself as a filmmaker with, shall we say, esoteric tastes. The director of The Witch and The Lighthouse makes horrifying folk tales set in isolated locales in unusual pockets of history, with dialogue ripped from the pages of actual documents. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a mainstream bone in his body. One of the movies he’s developing right now is an old-fashioned horror remake. Very, very old-fashioned.
In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Robert Eggers talked about his upcoming remake of the influential classic Nosferatu. The original silent film, directed by F.W. Murnau, was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula about a rat-like vampire named Count Orlock, and it frequently ranks amongst the best motion pictures ever made in any genre.
And despite that classical pedigree, Eggers says his version of Nosferatu will have a broader appeal to moviegoers than The Witch and The Lighthouse.
“Yeah, Nosferatu would need to be more accessible than these two films,” Robert Eggers laughs. “Particularly more accessible than The Lighthouse!”
That doesn’t mean that Robert Eggers is planning to go completely mainstream in the future; when asked if he ever wanted to make a romantic comedy or a superhero film, his response was “Absolutely not.” But as a filmmaker his tastes aren’t entirely idiosyncratic.
“I definitely hope to create, to tell some stories on larger canvases, which does mean making something that is narratively more broad,” Eggers explains. “But that’s not a bad thing. Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it’s not obscure, and that’s just fine.”
Of course, the most mainstream version of Nosferatu would actually be Bram Stoker’s Dracula, itself a horror classic which – like Murnau’s version – is long overdue for a new major motion picture readaptation. But Eggers is quick to explain why Nosferatu is more befitting his sensibilities than Stoker’s original.
“I mean, that movie [Nosferatu] is really important to me for many reasons, but I think Nosferatu is closer to the folk vampire,” Eggers says.
“The vampire played by Max Schreck is a combination of the folk vampire, of the literary vampire that actually has its roots in England before Germany, and also [has roots in] Albin Grau, the producer/production designer’s occultist theories on vampires.”
“So he’s not a traditional folk vampire but it’s much closer to that than Stoker, even though obviously Stoker is using a lot of folklore that he’s researched to create his vampire,” Eggers continues. “But Dracula is finally much more an extension of the literary vampire that was started by John Polidori, based on Byron.”
It’s far too early to cast Nosferatu, but one possible cast member is right in front of him. Could Robert Eggers cast his The Lighthouse star Willem Dafoe as the title creature, Count Orlok? Especially since Dafoe already earned an Oscar nomination for playing the vampire 19 years ago, in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of a Vampire?
“You can ask Willem Dafoe,” Eggers says. “If you look, my next movie has been leaked [the Viking drama The Northman] and we’re trying to cast Dafoe in that, so I clearly enjoyed working with him.”
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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