Robert Eggers clarifies that, no, Harry Styles was never going to play Nosferatu‘s Count Orlok
Eggers also talked about the difficulties he's experienced with trying to get the movie made
Film Features Robert Eggers
For a brief moment last month, we believed that Robert Eggers’ long-awaited Nosferatu was both finally moving forward, and that Harry Styles himself was cast in it. Visions of an emaciated, bug-eyed Styles, his luscious locks shorn and his fingers shaped into long claws, have been burned away by the harsh light of day, however. Not only is Styles no longer attached to the project, but, as Eggers has explained, he was never meant to play the vampire Count Orlok in the first place.
Speaking to IndieWire while promoting his latest movie, The Northman, Eggers was asked about what was up with his version of Nosferatu. He said that the news we heard about last month came from him “trying to get the word out because the word did carry that Harry Styles was going to be in the movie.”
“I just want to be clear,” he continued, “that he was going to be Hutter and not Nosferatu himself.”
Instead of a rodent-toothed vampire, Styles would have played Nosferatu’s Thomas Hutter, the analog to Dracula’s Jonathan Harker that F.W. Murnau created for the 1922 film in an attempt not to get sued by Bram Stoker’s estate. While this casting choice would’ve been less fun than a singing, dancing, heavily tattooed version of Orlok, it does make a lot more sense.
Eggers’ clarification was given alongside some unfortunate news about the movie’s fate in general, though. “It’s fallen apart twice,” Eggers said of the film before adding that he’s “been trying so hard. And I just wonder if Murnau’s ghost is telling me, like, you should stop.”
Eggers, whose love of black and white filmmaking and creepy Germans is well established, went on to discuss his desire to make the movie despite the fact that another remake, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre, already exists. The writer/director preempts his opinion by stating that he loves Herzog’s work and the 1979 movie’s cast and score, but that he still “[feels] like it is uneven.”
He cites the “front-lit night scenes” (“…just Herzog doing Herzog”) as one criticism but finishes his thought by saying that “because of German history and German cinema history, it was [Herzog’s] right to do that film, and he needed to do that film.” Eggers, on the other hand, thinks maybe “Murnau’s telling me I don’t have the right.”
Hopefully the expressionist ghost lets up on him a little and gives the guy a shot. After all, even if an Eggers Nosferatu doesn’t turn out to be as great as it could be, nobody’s going to be harder on it than the person who made it.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]
10 Comments
It’s always interesting hearing about accomplished directors, actors and the like who can’t marshal the resources to make a film. The financing system must be completely byzantine, plus more than a little flaky.
Plus, he wants to remake a silent film in a silent film style.
I don’t think it’s that Byzantine. Movies cost a lot of money and, therefore, carry a lot of risk. Even smaller indie movies like The King’s Speech, The Queen, The Artist, The Imitation Game, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Pan’s Labyrinth, Brokeback Mountain, 12 Years a Slave, Sideways, Into the Wild, The Hurt Locker, Black Swan, Spotlight, The Fighter, etc. will cost between $10-20 million USD. Unless an investor feels confident that a movie will be profitable, there are a lot of more appealing options for spending $20 million USD than financing a film.
Maybe Byzantine was the wrong word, but regardless it’s amazing that highly successful actors and directors with track records can’t get funding for what seem like moderate projects.
Byzantine seems a fair word to me, it must be incredibly complicated to be simultaneously trying to hire talent and navigate schedules while fundraising to make the project actually happen. You’re trying to hire someone, but you don’t have any ability to actually pay them yet or confirm that the project will even happen!
He’ll always be Nosferatu in my heart!
I’m a big Herzog fan, but I thought his Nosferatu was boring except for 1) the opening credits with the skulls and 2) the plague feast scene with all the rats and the eerie Georgian song that Kate Bush later swiped on the Hounds of Love album.
I look forward to any new Robert Eggers movie, but if he ever makes Nosferatu, I will look forward to it slightly less than anything else. Except maybe if he tries to remake Metropolis.
Sorry, but he’ll never touch Herzog’s Nosferatu, because no one is scarier as the vampire than Kinski. For proof see Salem’s Lot, where they did everything they could to match him and the vampire is nowhere near as freaky.
All the Eggers press lately. Thirsty.