Mastering Moonlight: ‘Nosferatu’ Pulls You Into Night Like Few Movies Before

“Nosferatu” director Robert Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke have made four features together. It’s a close collaboration that pre-dates their breakout “The Witch,” as they came up through the industry together, and Blaschke’s role on the director’s films goes beyond his incredible lighting and ability to execute Eggers’ precise compositions and camera movements. For months, and even years, before cameras start to roll, Blaschke works hand-in-hand with Eggers to create the visual plan for his films, including months of pre-production on location and multiple drafts of storyboards, as they constantly hone and push their visual language.

“Nosferatu” is their biggest ambitious endeavor yet. Eggers told IndieWire it took the previous three films to develop the level of visual control necessary to execute his ambitious remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire classic, which is set in a stylized but remarkably period accurate 1838 Baltic Germany that was, in large part, recreated on soundstages in Romania. IndieWire interviewed Blaschke the day after the film’s Los Angeles premiere. It was the first time the cinematographer saw the complete film with sound, and 10 months after he finished his four-month color grade of the film. It’s an experience that left him contemplative and with a new, more zoomed-out perspective of his and Eggers’ creation after working on the film on such a granular level for years.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

IndieWire: I wanted to start with how this film peers into the night. I haven’t seen something quite like this before. Could you discuss what you and Rob were going for, and how the heck you pulled it off? I’ll be honest, I was shocked to read you didn’t do any day for night.

Blaschke: Yeah, I was at the premiere last night. I had a very old friend there who I’ve known for 24 years, and she’s like, “How’d you get that look in the day for night?” I’m like, “What day for night? There’s no day for night.”

It’s essentially a continuation of what I did on “The Northman” with some little tweaks because the movie is just stylistically a little different. “Northman” I was really trying to almost be scientific as an experiment to see how much could I make moonlit night look like it does to my eye, which is monochromatic, and I know biologically we all share this, so that’s what I was going for.

I had a filter that was kind of related to the filter I used on “The Lighthouse.” During prep on “The Northman” I just threw on “The Lighthouse” filter, which is what you call a short pass filter, it allows ultraviolet blue and most of the green, but no yellow, orange, or red. So anything that’s red, or warm in color, gets darker.

During prep of “Nosferatu” I was trying to think of how to make nights in color, which I hadn’t done since “The Witch,” and on “The Witch” I had just desaturated it, and it was all low contrast, and it didn’t really work because in a lot of theaters you couldn’t see what the heck was going on, so I know I needed something high contrast. And after “Lighthouse,” which had a very textured, high contrast look, I threw “The Lighthouse” filter on it and, for whatever reason, it just looked right. And later I learned that was because our eyes actually, not only do we not see color, but we don’t see colors beyond a certain wavelength, so actually your eyes do see like a orthochromatic film at those hours, or in that low light level. So we just put “The Northman” filter on, frankly, but this movie is a little more stylized, so we just in the gray [we] put in a little more blue, so it’s a little less literal, a little more stylized in that way.

‘Nosferatu’Courtesy of Focus Features

Yeah, and the moonlight in general, I always found I really like high contrast moonlight. And I like it as high as possible, partially because I never see it in movies, usually you can tell it’s like off on a lift somewhere shooting horizontally, and for me, I grew up in the desert of central Oregon, and moonlight to me is almost like a high noon sort of look. I try to get as high as I can, you know to varying success, depending on the logistics of the location, etc.

What are we talking here, the highest cherry picker you can find?

Blaschke: Yeah, kinda. Like the crossroads, for example, it was 120 feet, and we were grounded, we didn’t shoot that whole first night because of the wind, and people were not happy. We tried to lower it a little bit, but it would have come into the shot, or right at the edge — we had to get under the treeline and it was kind of flaring, so we couldn’t get our wides, so that opening wide shot at the crossroads wouldn’t exist in that version. So, they obliged us, and hopefully they got an insurance day, and we went and tried again.

And it’s just about trying to get as hard as possible, which hardness is all about having a really small source, or a relatively small source, I was pushing it as far back as possible, but when I can’t get it far enough away, like on stage for example, then I actually shoot it across the stage into a mirror and then come back into a room. And then if I still don’t have the distance — I like to get 50 meters for moonlight — then I would use a convex mirror, which optically shrinks the source, that has some baggage because as it comes in the window it’s magnifying any window patterns, so if you had the sort of Gothic cross hatch in the glass, that’s all magnified, which stylistically was fine. For example, there’s a nightmare sequence where Orlok’s attacking Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), and that weirdness I could just roll with that.

The reason I’ve learned that I really like very hard light for night exterior is because they’re darker, it needs to be graphically stronger to read when everything’s dimmer. So I’m not a follower of the soft moon source right now.

‘Nosferatu’Courtesy of Focus Features

But the other thing about it is we’re taught digital is what’s going to allow us to peer into darkness, and you guys are shooting film. Is it just about getting enough light?

Blaschke: Yeah, it’s about what your film sees, forget what your eyes sees. So my eyes, personally, I find is about 400 ISO. [Laughs] No, it is, if I’m shooting let’s say “The Lighthouse” I’m shooting at 80 [ISO], I can’t see really what I’m doing. I have to have full faith in the light meter, and get some dailies back. I have to start seeing the film. And if it’s faster, like it’s 800 or 1600 [ISO], then it’s brighter than what my eye is seeing, so that’s not really natural either. So, because of the stock we’re using and the way I like to expose it, [“Nosferatu”] is mostly at 250, so it’s a little brighter. So those night scenes in the crossroads, or the other night exteriors were a little brighter to the eyes, and they don’t look good [to someone on set], but it’s about testing, on a small scale, before you go big on a scene, to know what things look like on film.

I don’t mean to jump right to the end, but because we were talking about the moonlight being monochromatic or desaturated, the other element of this is after spending so much of the movie in that quality of light, is part of this about how that sunlight is going to feel for the audience in the end?

Blaschke: Yeah, I saw it for the first time with an audience. I mean, I’ve seen this movie over and over and over, we graded it for four months.

Four months?

Blaschke: Yeah, I think for the most part it’s a good grade. There’s two funky scenes that we didn’t know how to fix, but yeah, I think I’m pretty happy with it otherwise.

But I saw it for the first time with the audience last night at the premiere, with full sound. I’ve only seen it without sound. And we finished the movie 10 months ago, but yeah, I will say that I can finally just see how this all fits together. I mean [the end] is odd, it is weird to see that monster in that light — bright, clear as day, literally, and it’s almost kind of pastel and peach and pink and all this stuff that you would never imagine in a Rob Eggers movie, but it was just telling the story.

I bring it up because it’s striking, that light and those colors have such an impact after having spent so much time in this other palette and world.

Blaschke: Yeah, and in watching it I realize that we’re really striving for an earnestness in making beauty. Just earnest beauty. Even the moonlight, it is a very storybook movie now that I have had 10 months of distance and watching it, we’re going for a pretty fairytale, even the ugly stuff. I think that the sunrise still jives with that when you get to it, just being a different kind of beautiful, hopefully.

Jarin Blaschke on the set of ‘Nosferatu’Aidan Monaghan

Candlelight is a big—

Blaschke: —I do feel like there’s an aversion to beauty, and there is an aversion to being earnest these days, generally, by the way, I was just thinking about this today. There’s kind of a grunge going on, a lot of available light. [Pauses] I like being able to, I don’t know, it just occurred to me yesterday, it’s nice to buck a trend and just be [pauses]… I don’t know, just strive for something beautiful and not have any embarrassment about it.

Well said. Candles?

Blaschke: Yes.

It’s such a huge source, how much of this is actual candles?

Blaschke: Yeah, if a scene is about flame, that’s what’s lighting it, period. So if we need more, then we would reach for a flame bar of a certain shape or size or a number. Like the roof of the monastery, the candlelight wasn’t gonna reach up there, so I had to hide a flame bar and some mirrors under it.

I apologize. I don’t know what a flame bar is.

Blaschke: Oh, it’s just a pipe. You run gas through it like your oven or your range, you light it up and it makes a torch, just a flame coming out of a steel pipe. Nothing electric was used, unlike some other movies that we did.

I don’t mean to be mundane here, but that has to be a lot of candles and fire.

Blaschke: Yeah, the widest shot in the monastery, the first one, it’s kind of a tableau of the monastery, I don’t know how many that was, but it’s a lot. They’re all triple wick, of course too. So a shot like that for film you need a very high speed lens. I think, we probably shot that at a 1.4, or even a 1.2 [T-stop]. You kind of lose the flicker of that many candles, it just kind of becomes a really pretty soft source, they all kind of meld into one light, which is cool. And of course it’s a mess, and you’re constantly chasing it, and just when you have the exposure, 15-20 candles turn into a blob and you have to chip away the wax, and put in more, you’re always chasing these things. You’re just not going to get that quality [of light] any other way. It’s a simpler technique. It’s pretty rudimentary, and it’s a bloody mess — the picture candles in the chandeliers are dripping all over 80-year old nuns and everything, but, I thought it looked good.

I’m hoping you can expand upon and give some context to a line in the press notes discussing your interest and experience in developing still photography, “He brought his knowledge of 19th-century view camera lens designs in creating the film’s look.”

Blaschke: Yeah, lenses are always a subtle — I mean in comparison to everything else, lenses are like three percent of your look, probably, or maybe five. And I think, considering how much they actually affect the look, there’s a lot of discussion about it. Maybe we all just enjoy nerding out about lenses.

But yeah, I have four view cameras, plate cameras essentially, varying from “whole” plate, which is a 19th century format that’s six-and-half by eight-and-half inches, and I have an eight by ten, this is all taking sheet film, and I also have a 14×17-inch film camera and a 12×20. I got into this thing, finally not being broke anymore, which was collecting lenses, so you learn what the classic lens designs are. So I asked good old Dan Sasaki [read more about the Panavision custom lens guru here], “Have you ever made a Dagor before, you ever made a Heliar?” There were a lot of these early lens types, the early ones that were not really made for cinema. Dan made a miniaturized version of sort of a classic lens that a modernist photographer would have used, you know from like 1900 to 1940, just to see what it’d look like and it’s amazing.

Is this tied in at all with Rob’s obsession with historical accuracy? It doesn’t feel like it brings a 19th century feel to it.

Blaschke: No. 1838 [the year “Nosferatu” is set] has nothing to do with it. That was the year of Henry Fox Tablet’s first plate. Culturally and historically, it has no significance. I just liked the way it looked. The way it fell out of focus behind the subject was unlike anything else I had ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of lenses at this point, so I ended up using it. And the lens really changes based on where you set the aperature. Like wide open, it’s a disaster, it’s useless. But you just go in a stop and it has almost pictorialist quality, that I wouldn’t use for everything in the movie, but I used it for kind of anything with Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) that was just a little dreamlike. Any highlights, they glow and halate. So if it’s a nightmare dream sequence, I would put the Dagor on. And there’s another lens called the Heliar that’s a little more sophisticated, that was big in the 1920s, I just wanted to see what it’d look like. Dan made one, I hope they still have it. It just wasn’t right for the movie, it was just a little too clean, but it looked great.

‘Nosferatu’ Courtesy of FOCUS FEATURES

Big picture, where did you and Rob come down on how and if you wanted to reference the original “Nosferatu?” I’m thinking specifically of “The Shadow,” but that comes in the last part of the film, almost like you were keeping it in your back pocket.

Blaschke: That’s the only reference. It’s not an expressionist movie at all. I mean, if you look at that movie, it’s pretty basic lighting, I mean it’s an indie film. That and the [Werner] Herzog movie [“Nosferatu the Vampyre” (1979)] are very indie looking. When he shows up at the gate in the Herzog version, it’s clearly just a 2k shining right on the vampire. It’s not very evocative photographically. I don’t think you watch that movie for that aspect of it. But the original, I think it was more about the texture of the multiple duping that maybe Rob was reacting to, but it’s pretty raw actually. So with ours it was easy for us to distinguish ourselves, [our approach was] “let’s just go off and try to make something that feels romantic and sublime,” and it’ll already be different.

But what about the decision to do the shadow?

Blaschke: That was in the script.

So Rob had already made that decision.

Blaschke: Yeah, that was made for me. It’s just, how do we use it in our way? We’re very ambitious with camera these days, so what’s the surprising way to use the shadow. Just like any scene, what’s the way to block the scene that would be interesting and, in a small way, surprising? And also storybook, we can have these storybook compositions, but also having the tension of holding that shot for awhile.

Probably an unfair question, because it’s so big, and we can chop it up into smaller pieces, but why are oners so important to you two? Because obviously, so much time and effort goes into getting those so fine-tuned, including building the sets to accommodate the camera movement, and it’s a commonality across all four features.

Blaschke: They are trendy, so following trends here [laughs]. You know, I don’t [pauses] — I wonder how Rob would answer that?

[Editor’s Note: IndieWire asked Eggers the same question on the Toolkit podcast. The director’s answer was similar to Blaschke’s below.]

I know we would both say that it focuses everybody on set. I think, and he believes this as well, it just focuses the audience, there’s a tension in it — unless they’re \shock cuts or hard cuts, cuts are like a release valve, and if you don’t open them for a minute or two, then that has an effect. And I think you kind of get hypnotized, or I know do, in that world, especially when you can sort of move the camera in an unexpected way, or pan when the audience doesn’t expect it, or in a different direction than they expected, or someone leaves frame in one direction and you pan around and they enter in the other. It’s like magic tricks really. You’re used to seeing things kind of surprise, shock cut, okay, it’s just a slideshow, but the long take sets up an expectation and you can subvert it, that’s rewarding.

But you guys also have a process, we’ve discussed this before, of boiling it down to its essence–

Blaschke: Right.

Which I imagine takes a lot of time, because I think one of the reasons that long shots often don’t work is because they feel—

Blaschke: —superfluous, completely. I mean we storyboarded for five months, and there’s a scene we didn’t get to either. Yeah, and some scenes have multiple drafts, and some scenes go back a year and a half. An early idea of scene one, we probably worked on that for at least a year and a season. That first scene started as a oner, and then we thought there’s no way it could be, he wanted an insert of a pupil going [crazy], but he cast Lily-Rose Depp and she has dark eyes, so it wouldn’t read the moonlight anyway, so we went back to the oner.

Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke on the set of ‘Nosferatu’Aidan Monaghan

I like making movies as like a reduction, or distillation, just because I see films as a distillation of life, because life is very confusing and chaotic, lots of things are going on at once, and I think having a film clear all that away, it does something for me. It’s about editing in a shot. You have the script that’s distilling real life into a story, and then if you read it, there’s a lot going on, and a lot of times we are trying to lay it out in a nice clean thread and chopping away the superfluous, or any redundancies — if you have something early on in the scene and later on in the scene, which one’s stronger, and just do it there. That’s what a single take can do often times.

What you just said I think apples to all four films. But I’m curious, in context of “Nosferatu,” was there a change, or a slightly different turn of the dial, in thinking about what motivated the camera, or what guided the camera in how it moves?

Blaschke: Yeah, especially, in the castle. The castle stuff might be my favorite, generally. The camera does what the camera does, and you mark the actor to what the camera is doing, the camera is the boss. That’s not just my ego, there’s a suffocation in that, there’s an oppression in that, and that works for this movie.

And that thought process is unique to this one?

Blaschke: Yes, in the castle, but in general too, sure. I’m always just trying to think of surprises all the time. Like if you pan over here, what are you expecting to see? What’s the conceit of even a jump scare? Like in the hallway, you are expecting the scare here, but what makes it effective is it happens when you think you’re fine. You have tension, and then you show that’s it’s fine, but you’re not, and then you hit them. It’s always thinking of what’s expected and how to play with that.

When we first see Orlok in the castle — I think I saw it at a good theater with a strong bulb — but it felt like a conscious choice to light him so we could just barely see him in the beginning, like we are straining to get details of his face. Was that a conscious choice and what was the discussion behind how you lit and presented Orlok?

‘Nosferatu’Courtesy of Focus Features

Blaschke: Yeah, you do it in stages. Scene one you don’t even see his silhouette, you see his shadow, which is even a little more removed. And then, yeah, Thomas sees him at a great distance across a bridge and Gothic doorway, way beyond through the mist. And then he’s in the staircase, and you just see his legs, and then you get up there, and I had a fireplace moved so he could be backlit so it could look just like you’re describing — initially the fireplace was on the side of the room — we wanted to introduce him in stages, so that was all very thought out. When he signs the deed you see a little bit more, but he’s still severly out of focus, the only thing you get is a wide shot, the last shot of the scene, and then you finally see him in the crypt as the reveal. There was a lot of thought put into that.

Thank you for your time.

Blaschke: No problem, talk next time. Thanks.