PRODUCTION NOSFERATU
explains. “Rob scouted it the first time around in 2016, when the patina was rich. When we went back a couple of years ago it was completely freshened, lime washed and painted. It’s supposed to be a crumbling castle, but that atmosphere was just sort of scrubbed off it.” Production also scouted Pernštejn Castle, which featured in Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre . “It has a courtyard in the centre that was very tight,” Blaschke details. “When you watch Herzog’s movie, it’s shot quite awkwardly on an 18mm lens, just to see the thing, which is not what we were about. We wanted these formal compositions. However, we did find a good place there for Thomas to meet Orlok. We had to build our own door for the first reveal of the vampire; it was quite a build to put in one that opens on location. Lighting-wise, only certain compact lifts can drive to set through these medieval doors, and we could barely light the scene well enough.” Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre was notoriously riddled with problems when it came to rats. Eggers’ film required roughly 5000 live rats, with the rest added digitally in post. “To fill that chapel would have required at least 20,000 rats,” notes Blaschke. “So you want enough rats to be crawling over each other. Beyond that, we also used what we call rat mats. These make a tile of rat shapes, and you have the real ones climb over the mats. They were incontinent and pooping all over the place – it’s a horrible, sour smell. We even had them pooping on Emma Corrin during one scene, but she was a real trooper and kept very calm about it.” Blaschke felt that a lot of his ideas over the last two decades came to fruition making Nosferatu . “I think I finally got night lighting down. I got to expand into
moonlit interiors, which is a finicky realm. There are so many moonlit shots in this movie, which are very tedious and slow because of how delicate they are to achieve. The realm that exists between too dark and too fake is narrow, and with light quality, what works for moonlight doesn’t really work for daylight. With Rob, he will not shoot under direct sun for day scenes, period. There are a couple of times when we had direct sunlight in The Northman – it was OK because it wasn’t horror, but even those he really didn’t like. Nighttime exteriors need the opposite – soft moonlight doesn’t work well.” For interiors on stage, Blaschke invented a somewhat beleaguered
system, using mirrors to distance the light source as much as possible. “A smaller source is a harder source. If you can’t physically shrink it, you have to move it further away. Our 18K ‘moon’ or ‘sun’ was often at the most distant wall on the other side of the stage, shooting across the set to strike a mirror, which then sent it back through a window. Each window got its own light and mirror. I used two kinds of mirrors; one is flat – normally a 4x4 mirror on a stand. It’s standard lighting equipment, but will only illuminate a 4x4ft space. I also got some 5x5s to cover larger windows, doubling them up for the tallest, gothic-style windows. “In addition, we used convex mirrors to spread the light, which makes it harder since it optically shrinks the source,” he adds. “It’s like a wide-angle lens on a camera, with its image being your light source. It’s a shortcut for when you can’t get the source far enough away to make it as hard as you want it. This is how we created the sharpest shadows in the film. One of the drawbacks is that it spreads the light very wide, so that the sliver you end up using is diminished – by about three stops. We only used it with 18K ARRIMAXES that were installed with spot reflectors. Spreading out the rays also
CHECKING THE LIGHTS Blaschke (right) worked hard on the effects that would create Eggers’ (middle) singular vision for scenic lighting
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