From Robert Eggers, writer-director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, comes Nosferatu, a terrifying, gothic reimagining of a classic.
In Eggers’ Nosferatu, estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to Transylvania for a fateful meeting with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a vampiric prospective client. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), Hutter’s new bride, is left under the care of their friends Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin) in his absence. Plagued by visions and an increasing sense of dread, Ellen encounters a force far beyond her control.
As Nosferatu prepares to haunt Australian cinemas on January 1, Nick L’Barrow had the chance to speak with two of the film’s stars in Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin about reacting to the incredible contortion work of Lily-Rose Depp, and exploring fear within their characters.
Nick: Thank you so much to you both for taking the time to chat! Lily-Rose [Depp] does some pretty extraordinary physical things in this film that both of your characters see and are involved in the scenes of. I’m curious to know, when you see those contortions happening right in front of you, how much of the reactions are your characters reacting to the horror, and how much is it Aaron and Emma reacting to that intensity?
Emma Corrin: I mean, in most films, you end up doing quite a lot takes. But I reckon there’s a good few takes in there where you can tell [we knew] it was an extraordinary thing to watch.
Also, the first times we saw it was in the bedroom scene, and we didn’t really know what we were about to watch. It’s like, no wonder people think it’s CGI, because it’s extraordinary contortion. Our jaws were just on the flaw. I’m pretty sure Robert [Eggers] probably said that he needed a little bit less from both of us [laughs].
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: She’s so committed that like, even her rehearsals were even almost 90% of the way there. Some people just block out, but she was so committed. It was so remarkably disturbing.
I remember when we both stood there, and had this shocked look on our faces, and I remember going, ‘I don’t know if we should be here! Is this a closed set?’ I didn’t feel like we should be watching this. It felt like you were witnessing something that you weren’t privy to seeing. I actually felt protective. I wanted to cover her up.
It was so brilliant that Lily had these dimensions that made you feel just so empathetic towards her situation. But also, there was no vanity in it. What was really lovely to see, was Lily-Rose in a way that was so raw. So, as an actor, you go, ‘Fucking hell!’ It was so brilliantly shocking. And to me, that was the most terrifying thing.
And, yeah, I remember Robert—I had a shocked look on my face, and he was like, ‘Yeah, you do that face that you guys are doing now! That’s the face!’
Nick: Being a film that is set in such a particular era, I’m sure that dictates a lot about the work you do to find a character’s accent. But, I’m curious to know what things you found in Robert’s script that helped inform finding other aspects about your characters voice and nuances, like their cadence.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: Robert writes dialogue in a very specific way, and he also tends to ask you to perform it in a very specific way. He asks you to basically say the words, with not too much like embellishment or emphasis on random things. He’s very much like that in the same way that he approaches facial expressions, where he’s like, ‘Less is more. Stillness is more’. And I think that actually helps.
He writes the language very specifically. He took the period and has a great attention to the details. I think if you just deliver it as it’s sort of written, that he will get what he wants, period wise.
And then he created these sorts of… bibles for our characters, and put a lot of detail in there that hinted towards what they might be going through in that period. Their expectations, their opinions and views, and that kind of thing. And that helped a lot.
Emma Corrin: Yeah, mine was detailed in a way that you weren’t ever going to use that information explicitly in the film. But they were just these sorts of amazing facts. I remember mine saying that she was Lutheran from a conservative household.
And there was a whole bit about how Anna meets Friedrich at a ball, and how their eyes meet across the room to this particular piece of music. And Robert put a link to the song in there, and I listened to it a few times and that suggested quite a bit about, I guess, my characters sensibilities. But it was very detailed, and I think that was a nice little flourish.
Nosferatu is a story that explores the nature of fear and humanity colliding. I’m wondering how the themes of movies like this can reveal things about other people to you?
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: Oh, I love that. That’s very interesting.
Emma Corrin: I think people are really fascinated by fear. I think that’s why, sort of, we’ve had these myths and folklore, and being a bit obsessed with the darker side of things. I think maybe it helps comfort parts of ourselves. It’s like that thing of you don’t want to look, but you can’t not look. It’s like a morbid fascination kind of thing.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: I think what else is kind of interesting is the shame of it as well. Because she [Ellen] carries this sort of shame. There’s sort of a perversion to this sort of darkness. I think that’s just a metaphor for having this sort of shame.
She has this child like trauma that has come to revisit her, and her adult life that she wants to push away, she’s a newlywed, there’s prosperous things on the horizon, and I find it all to be a metaphor for love and relationships and marriage. We are hiding away and locking away these impurities that we are so afraid of. So, it’s about facing that fear head on, and that’s what she has to do to overcome it. It’s really interesting.
Do you feel a role like these allow you to explore parts of yourself as an actor that you felt previous roles maybe hadn’t?
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: I think working with Robert takes away your devices and your little safety nets. There was no room for improvisation. There was no doing 31 takes and trying something different on each one. I feel like your taught that each take should be different, and give some versatility so that a director has stuff to choose from in the edit.
But for this, it was one shot set up, this is your mark, this is where the light’s facing, and these are your lines. It was all timed out. It was very, very well thought out. You felt a bit like a puppet in some ways. There’d even be times where Robert would notice something like our eyebrows moving too much. And I was like, ‘Was it? I didn’t even realise!’
I guess it was a lesson in being able to constantly strip away. I think that added to the element of suspense of the movie, because all of our performances are quite stylised. It’s like that period of time, where everything was so matter of fact, and you get on with things. The emotional intelligence and everything was just pushed down, so it starts to bubble and could pop up at any moment. But it’s told through this stillness, and I think he is just a master at that. And I think we definitely grew in those kind of ways.
Thank you so much to Emma and Aaron for their time, and to Universal Pictures for organising the interview. Nosferatu is in Australian cinemas on January 1.
