When Lily’s in bed she does the table effect maneuver, and then she comes straight into the camera. I have to be aware of the whole action so that you don’t get hair all over the face and it’s distracting. The most challenging scene was of Lily lying in the bed at the end of the film. It was five hours and that blood came out of every orifice of Orlock. So it was quite challenging to restore the wig for the next day.
We built over 60 sets. Like we built all the houses, the monastery, and all the frescoes there. We built the chapel at the end where all the rats are. I built all of that so it could be decaying as well. The roof is falling but you can’t quite see it, which is a shame. We built the Romanian Village. Yeah, we built a lot for this film. All of that was built so for two reasons. One, so that we could get that decayed look, and also because Rob and Jarin liked to do very elaborate specific shots, and camera movements.
It’s all about the light and how you use the camera. We captured the moonlight that cast an interesting shadow of Lily-Rose Depp’s face on the pillow in the last shot. There’s this monstrous sort of distortion on the pillow that was accidental. I sort of engineered that, you know, the shadow being that crisp and that hard, it’s like a convex mirror.
I worked closely with Damian Volpe, who is one of the main sound designers. Essentially we tried to isolate what was most important. Rob wanted a lot of music for this film to be big and in your face. I also knew Rob wanted a lot of sound design, especially in like, a lot of the Orlok scenes. When we’re in the castle things need to suddenly start to feel otherworldly and kind of like off. You wanna make sure that those two things are in harmony and they’re not clashing or competing.
There’s only so much that you can do with the weight of, for instance, Orlok’s cloak, which was all fur-lined and it’s massive. It’s a massive costume piece. We devised a harness that went next to Bill’s body, came out through his inner clothing, and clipped onto the cloak, and it meant that we could do a quick release, and get it off him because his prosthetic makeup was very hot for him. Then you add all the costuming onto it and the hat and everything else and the poor guy was just boiling.
Which film is poised to make the holidays better? Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu, which he spent years trying to get off the ground. Finally, the filmmaker behind The Lighthouse and The Northman got the green-light and assembled a terrific cast, including Bill Skarsgård, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, and Willem Dafoe. Check out the latest Nosferatu trailer, teasing the December release date.
