Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. It's holiday movie week here on All Of It and we are going to be talking about some of the year's most anticipated films. Here's a preview. Tomorrow we'll speak with Adrian Brody, the star of the new film, The Brutalist, along with its director, Brady Corbett. It's about a celebrated architect who tries to build a new life in America after surviving the Holocaust. On Wednesday, we'll talk about the film September 5, about the 1972 terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Olympics. Stars Peter Sarsgaard and Leonie Benesch will join us to discuss. On Thursday, we'll discuss Conclave. It follows the intrigue and danger surrounding the election of a new pope. Stanley Tucci joins us as well as director Edward Berger. That is the plan. Let's kick off this movie week right now with Nosferatu. [music]

The film Nosferatu is an examination of evil, sin, suffering and a lot of rats. Set in Germany in the 1800s, Ellen Hutter has been having horrible dreams. These nightmares are messages from a demonic creature, one that wants her and only her. Here's a clip from the film featuring Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen and Nicholas Hoult, who plays her husband. He's preparing to travel to Transylvania to meet a mysterious count named Orlok. Ellen is describing a dream.

[movie scene-Nosferatu]

Alison: Nosferuto was recently nominated for four Critics Choice Awards. Lily-Rose Depp joins me in studio. Nice to meet you.

Lily-Rose Depp: Hi. Nice to meet you.

Alison: And Robert Eggers, welcome back to All Of It.

Robert Eggers: Glad to be here.

Alison: When you were a teenager, the story goes that you created a stage play of Nosferatu.

Robert: That is true. My friend Ashley Kelly Tata, who's now a theater and opera director, we co directed this high school play of Nosferatu that was black and white on stage with black and white makeup and costumes and cardboard sets. It was very humble. Edward Langlois, who was the artistic director of a local theater, saw that and he asked us if went want to do a more professional version of it at his theater and it changed my life. It cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director. Ever since then, Nosferatu has been an important part of my identity as someone who's attempting to make creative work.

Alison: Lily, what was your relationship with vampires and Dracula before this film?

Lily-Rose: It's always been a myth that I've been interested in and fascinated by as kids. My brother and I used to love the classic Dracula movies, like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee and randomly starting with Abbott and Costello, because they have the Meet the Monsters movies, and they had the Meet Dracula one. It was a favorite, a big favorite of my brother and I. My brother used to dress up like little mini Dracula when we were kids, and he was three and do very dramatic line readings of the movie. I grew up with him, in a way. Then growing up, it was always a tale that I found fascinating and very intriguing. I was very excited when I heard that Rob was going to be telling his tale of it.

Alison: It's what my friends and I discussed after we saw the movie. What is it about this vampire theme that people continue to want to investigate? What do you think it is?

Robert: It's always a combination of sex and death. Even Twilight that is twee, is still sex and death. I think as a kid, you don't know that that's what it's about exactly. Those are taboo subjects, but you can feel the power of that, which is I'm sure myself, your brother and yourself sense that. It's interesting though, because the most popular vampires of certainly the second half of the 20th century into the 21st century are relatable outsiders and that is not what we were after in this film.

Alison: No, no. You're not. When you heard that Robert was doing the film, what was next? You heard it was happening. Did you audition? How did it go?

Lily-Rose: It came to me quite classically. My agents told me that Rob was making this movie and that he was interested in meeting with me to talk about the role. I read the script. I loved it. I knew that I would love it before reading it. It was more beautiful than I could have even imagined. There was already so much there on the page, which is not always the case. It was written in this beautiful prose. It was just coming alive in my head as I was reading it. I was over the moon to get an opportunity to talk to Rob about it. We had a Zoom meeting, and we talked. Then a few days later I did a Zoom audition with Rob and his casting director. Then Rob texted me that night and told me that I got the part. I was over the moon. I was so excited. It all felt very surreal because it happened very fast. It was very exciting.

Alison: What did Rob give you to watch? What kind of films?

Lily-Rose: Rob gave me a long list of movies, which I loved. The longer the better. There were so many great references. The one that stuck with me the most was Cries and Whispers. That one was very interesting to watch. The Devil also was one of them. I'm trying to think of the other ones.

Alison: What did this list have? What did you want this list to accomplish?

Robert: The fact is, Lily didn't really need this because her audition was so powerful. Really, like myself, the casting director, and the impartial videographer who was managing the Zoom, everyone was in tears because it was so raw and Lily has this incredible ability to just access these deep emotions immediately. When we were talking, we were talking about Abbott and Costello and Meet Dracula. Lily also brought up Żuławski's Possession. She had my number already.

The more that you can be marinated in the world while you're preparing, I think the more helpful it is. There was melodramas, like a Russian adaptation of Dostoevsky's Humiliated and Insulted that had melodramatic performances that were somehow naturalistic. Cries and Whispers is very detailed and small, but the depth of emotion is very strong. The pain of Harriet Anderson dying from cancer or whatever, there's something really evocative about it. Finally, Lily, I don't know how much you actually needed to watch all of that.

Lily-Rose: It's always helpful. As an actor, I feel like at least I never Know quite if I'm doing the prep right. I was doing an interview with Natalie Portman recently, and we were talking about this, how prep is this random ephemeral thing where you're just grasping at straws. Then once you get on set and you start actually living as the character, you realize more what you actually need and what's actually helpful. The more information, the more references, the more ideas, the better.

I'm forgetting some of the names, but there were some very obscure things that you gave me to watch that I would have never found myself, which were incredibly helpful because also like, Rob, even in the list, I remember you saying why you wanted me to watch certain things. It was helpful for me because I knew what to watch for. There were things that you had me watch that even sometimes had nothing to do with performance. It was just the general tone that was interesting. T

here were different aspects that were helpful. Then you gave me this incredible text called Peor, which was this story, this text about this young girl who's this very pious religious young girl. She has a love story, sexual awakening with this demonic force, which of course was very interesting for me to read. That was really helpful for me as well as all of the films. The text in particular, there was so much to grab onto there. That was a big part of the prep for me.

Robert: Lily also on her own volition was like, "I need a dialect coach ASAP." She worked on her British accent for months ahead of time so that by the time she arrived to Prague to start rehearsals, that was a non issue because she knew that the training she was going to have to do physically to do all of the ,"Hysterical fits and the seizures and the demonic possession," that that was going to-- You didn't want to be of two minds.

Lily-Rose: Of course there was going to be all of that, but even if there hadn't been, I just feel like an accent is like, first of all you don't want it to sound bad because otherwise it just takes you out of the story completely. Also you don't want to think about it because there's already so much to think about when you're shooting something.

Alison: It was interesting you said that the script you just said was beautiful. That you saw great beauty in the script. What's an example of that beauty?

Lily-Rose: Just Rob is a fantastic writer. The writing was so beautiful, and it was like things weren't stated quite simply, as stage directions sometimes are. It was so full of life. It was written quite poetically, and things were described in a very visceral way. It landed itself to that life that was already there. You could feel what the characters were feeling, or you could even feel the music in it. There was a real theatricality to it. It's a fairy tale. It's a super dark fairy tale. There's a lot of magic in it, I feel like from the outset.

Alison: My guests are Robert Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp. We are talking about their film Nosferatu, which opens in theaters on December 25th. Alan's character is a lot more central to this particular story than other stories. When did you know that that character was going to be so central?

Robert: Obviously I've been obsessed with Nosferatu since I was a kid, but it's not enough to be obsessed and passionate and dorky about something. You have to have a reason to do it. When I sat down to work on a screenplay, I figured if I-- The Mournel film ends with Ellen as the heroine, which is great. I thought if it's her story from the very beginning, the female protagonist story from the beginning, and it's seen through her eyes, probably I have the opportunity to have the film be more emotionally and psychologically complex. In the Mournel film, Ellen is described as a somnambulist. Sleepwalkers in the 19th century were thought even by medical professionals of the time, to be able to see into another realm, have access to another realm. Once I started digging into that and amplifying my knowledge about how that was viewed in the 19th century, that's when things became really exciting, really exciting.

Alison: Her sexuality is a really important part of this film, Lily? Why do you think it's so important?

Lily-Rose: Because I think it's yet another aspect of female existence and just existence in general that was heavily repressed at the time. I think Ellen is dealing with a lot that she is suppressing. I think she's dealing with a lot that she doesn't know where to place because she's inhabiting a society that doesn't have a lot of room, and that has a really clear, laid out path for women to live a certain way and if you stray from that path, it's very quickly looked down upon or you're ostracized. I think that that's a big part of it.

I think that you feel this nascent sexuality in her from the beginning of the movie. I think the shame of that creates loneliness, that creates that desire to call out to something to feel companionship or kinship with something or someone. As we go forward in the movie, I think she's married and everything, but it's like she's still-- She's a young girl. She's supposed to be 22 or something like that. I think although she's living the life of an adult, this is still a young woman trying to figure herself out and dealing with a lot of this darkness and this thing that she's felt this real extraterrestrial tie to. I think that her sexuality is a big part of that.

Alison: Better tighten that corset.

Robert: I know. She's being called crazy. They're literally tightening her corset and tying her to the bed. Ellen's also really cool because it's a character who is a victim of 19th century society and a victim of a demon lover, vampire, but also has a ton of agency and strength. To see her battling against all this stuff is powerful. I find that she's also quite tragic because I think it's beyond sexuality. She has an understanding about a shadow side of the world that she doesn't have language for. Clearly, as much as the vampire is the only person who can understand this dark side of her, she's the only one for him, so she has a strength that she never got the opportunity to hone, which is sad, but she gets to ultimately save the day.

Alison: She's Able to use that strength that she has.

Lily-Rose: Yes, but it's cool because it's like as much as she's wrestling with the society that she's a part of and that doesn't quite understand her and that she's at odds with, at the same time, she's also floating above it all in a way, because she has an understanding of something that is so much bigger than the world that she's inhabiting. In a way, she's already on the other side.

Alison: No, go ahead.

Robert: Thankfully Willem Dafoe plays a character who's similar to Van Helsing, but his name is Von Franz and he's an occultist, alchemist, scientist who likes modern science, but also thinks that maybe sometimes the enlightenment went a little too far. Because he is an inquisitive person who wants to look at everything, he's able to see what is going on with Ellen and is a great cheerleader for her.

Alison: This role required a lot of you. It required you to go from frantic to sexuality, to being-- You have to conful sometimes, you have to be very tender sometimes. When did you realize what this role was going to take of you?

Lily-Rose: I think when I got to Prague. Like I said, it really was all there in the script. I knew that it was going to be demanding emotionally and physically. I'm very much down for that. That's the work that I am the most interested in. That gets me going the most as a performer. I love that. That was what I was most interested in exploring. I think when I got to Prague and we started rehearsing, that's when I got a real tangible idea of what it was going to be. Because I think I had maybe like, thought of it more improvisationally, I thought. Because of course it was my first time working with Rob. In the script, there's a wildness to those moments and there's a wildness to those moments in the movie as well.

I think when I got there and I started working with our movement coach, who's amazing and also rehearsing with Rob and Jaron, that I saw how specific the blocking was going to be. Because of that, you need to have a preparation that is structured as well. I think that's when I realized what it was going to be like. I was so grateful for that structure because it's-- Willem was talking about it and saying quite eloquently last night about how when you have a structure, there is freedom to be found within that because there's so much that you can hold onto and then your inner life can soar.

Alison: How did you decide what Nosferatu would look like?

Robert: In the cinematic evolution from Max Shrek's fantastic ratty creature to sparkling Edward Cullen, vampires are no longer scary. I went back to the folklore. I like folklore. This early vampire folklore was written by and about people who actually believed that vampires existed and were terrified of them. There clearly had to be some good stuff in there. These early folk vampires were not seductive, pale faced aristocrats in dinner jackets. They were festering, bloated, maggot ridden corpses that were undead and walking around. The obvious question is, what would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like?

You start looking at the portraits and reading about it and this elaborate Hungarian costume with a furry hat and sleeves that reach down to his ankles and shoes that are shod with horseshoes, which you don't quite like. Totally see what you hear, the hairstyle, it's all there. We have some nods to Max Shrek's iconic design. Fingernails, the shape of his skull. Every single thing I do because I'm not very creative-

Alison: That's not true.

Robert: -comes from research. It all comes from research because you find unexpected things when you dig deeper and don't just rely on cinematic tropes and the low hanging fruit. When you dig deeper, you find things that appear to be original but are in fact not.

Alison: What's a piece of research that you used?

Robert: All that stuff about Bill, how we designed--

Alison: Bill Skarsgard?

Robert: The character, Bill Skarsgard, who plays the vampire. That's the design. Also just one thing of many, folk vampires very often didn't drink blood. They could strangle you. They could fornicate with you to death. If they did drink blood, they more commonly would drink blood from the heart, from your chest. Obviously for a film that is a tale of obsession and love and is a love triangle, there is some visual, poetic motif about that, which is nice, but it comes from old hag syndrome, from sleep paralysis.

When you have a waking dream and you feel the pressure on your chest, that's where that idea came from, is people who were having sleep paralysis and thinking that vampires were attacking them. Not only is it different, we haven't seen it. It makes sense, the story. It also feels like, of course that makes sense, minus breaking the breastplate seems a little tricky, but hey.

Alison: I understand you were not frightened of Bill Skarsgard as Nosferatu, but a little unnerved by him. Is that true?

Lily-Rose: I think of course you're aware that you're making a movie and that you see the bells and whistles around you and everything. I wasn't literally fearing for my life, but he was--

Alison: I know. He was weird though.

Lily-Rose: He was super, super scary. He's an incredibly transformative actor and he's very committed. He might be joking around or not even that much, but he might be in between takes or speaking with more of a normal voice when you're trying to block the scene or whatever. For however many minutes, you're in between action and cut, like he is real and he's there. It's a gift as an actor because you can only go as high as your scene partner will allow you to go. He's at 100 all the time. It's amazing because I didn't really have to pretend that much. He was really freaky, but only by way of him being as talented as he is.

Alison: Something that really got me during the film was the juxtaposition between how close you are and how far away you are. There's this great scene when you go into your bun, your hair, and then all of a sudden, it's wide. I was curious about that. The close and the far.

Robert: Jaren and I just like to try to have visual contrast in how the flow of the cinematic language moves. You don't want to have whiplash from it. There can be power of cutting from a close up to a close up, but a close up to a landscape is generally more refreshing or something.

Alison: Was this always going to come out at Christmas? Nosferatu, vampires? Christmas? Yes or no?

Robert: No.

Alison: No is the answer.

Robert: No is the answer. We were almost done with the film in post production and Focus Feature said, how would you feel about a Christmas release? I became very excited, very excited.

Alison: Why?

Robert: I think people like most normal people think, "Counter programming, cute." I think that, not here, but in a lot of European countries there's a tradition of ghost stories for Christmas. I think that there is something nice about telling a ghost story around the fire when it's cold and cozy. This is basically my ghost story around the fireplace at Christmas.

Alison: Oh, Krampus. Krampus needs something [inaudible 00:25:16] [crosstalk]

Robert: Yes. The Christmas Carol is a ghost story. Hello.

Alison: That's true.

Robert: A ghost story for Christmas.

Alison: Lily, what is a part of the film, I'm going to ask you to be-- What's a part of the film that you would like people to pay special attention to? Something you had to work hard on. I'm serious. Or something that you just really are like, "I'm really glad this happened. I'm glad this is on film."

Lily-Rose: Oh, God. I'm glad All Of It happened. I have a hard time picking a moment of myself and being like, "Please watch this."

Alison: Rob, how about you? You pick for a Lily, something that she does extraordinary well.

Robert: Obviously all of the physical work that she does is crazy. People tend to think that it's CG enhanced or manipulated with speed ramps and stuff, but she does all of this stuff herself. I know I lost a lot of sleep about this scene where she has this big confrontation with her husband towards the end of the movie, because around the middle of the film I knew that I would need to do a hopefully competent version of a exorcism possession scene that we've seen in a lot of other movies. That had to be at least competent to get us through. Then I had to do something crazier. Lily had to do something crazier. I was very, very afraid of how this scene would work, but she nailed it.

Lily-Rose: Thanks. That was a toughie, but it's beautiful. I'm happy with it.

Robert: You should be.

Lily-Rose: Thank you.

Alison: No CGI rats? Those were real, weren't they?

Robert: There were thousands of real rats, but they were very intelligent and well behaved. 200 of them were trained to enter on cue. We do have CG rats that extend into the background. When you see lots and lots of rats out of focus, because it's not 1922 or late '70s, you can't just release rats into the street. You have to take good care of the rats.

Alison: I felt I had to say that on behalf of New Yorkers. That's the scariest thing in the film. The name of the film is Nosferatu. It is out at Christmas. My guests have been Robert Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp. Thanks for coming by, the studio.

Lily-Rose: Thank you so much.

Robert: Thanks for having us.