Chris Columbus, one of the producers behind Nosferatu, has explained how an experience directing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone shaped his approach to the new vampire film.
Directed by Robert Eggers, the gothic horror movie stars Bill Skarsgård, as Count Orlok opposite Willem Dafoe, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Nicholas Hoult. It is a remake of the 1922 silent film of the same name, in turn an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.
Columbus toldThe Hollywood Reporter that he established an important ethos for the production company he runs with his daughter, Eleanor, while directing the first film in the Harry Potter franchise.
He explained that he hadn’t been satisfied with a sequence involving a magical and deadly plant, the Devil’s Snare, and had requested some improvements through the use of CGI for the 2001 film.
“One of the executives said to me, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter if that [Devil’s Snare] scene is not as good as the other scenes in the film. It’s fine,’” he recalled.
“So I told myself that I’m never going to say that if I’m producing for someone else. This is probably going to be the death knell for [production company] Maiden Voyage as a company, but our philosophy is we never say no to the director.
“I’m not kidding. And that attitude of ours has been very successful in helping Rob [Eggers] realise his vision [for Nosferatu].”
Nosferatu has been receiving glowing reviews from critics and is a box office hit after opening in the US on Christmas Day. It will be released in the UK on 1 January.
Xan Brooks said it was a film that, strangely, felt perfectly suited to the festive season: “It tells its old dark tale with such respect and conviction that it feels like being wrapped in a warm comfort blanket.”
In a five-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey said: “In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, the vampire is reincarnated. He has shed his sparkle, his languid melancholy, his cobweb-speckled absurdity. He comes for you now – yes, you – as the murmuring voice in the dark, the one that calls your desires perverse and your soul unnatural.
“This creature feeds on shame, of both the faithful and the faithless. And he is as true to us as he was to FW Murnau, director of 1922’s original Nosferatu, or to Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula provided the (unofficial, legally ruled as copyright infringement) source material.”
In another recent interview, Columbus recalled the “bizarre” Chevy Chase remark that caused him to quit working on National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
