Earlier this month, we had the privilege of moderating a 90-minute conversation with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and his longtime collaborator, Robert Eggers, at the Kodak House in Hollywood. The discussion was a deep dive into the creative decisions that went into Eggers’ massive critical and global hit, “Nosferatu.” Focus Features has widdled the conversation down into a two-minute video which you can watch embedded in this post.
Earlier, I caught up with Blaschke to talk about working with his longtime friend. The duo have already made four features together and will reunite on another Focus release, “Werwulf”, which will hit theaters on Christmas Day in 2026. To say they have a shorthand and patience for each other is something of an understatement.
“If I really believe in something, I’m just going to be a little relentless, but I won’t yell and I won’t cry. I’m going to bring it up three times,” Blaschke says. “And Rob’s known me long enough that if I bring it up more than once, and if he can’t convince me, it might even come back three weeks later. It might come back three years later, three weeks later. I’m just like, ‘I considered what you said, but I really still believe that this is the best way’ and he knows what to do with that, whether it shut me down or not, but it’s nothing personal.”
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The more Blaschke and Eggers discuss “Nosferatu,” the more you realize how much of an artistic continuation it was of their previous endeavor, “The Northman.”
“The Northman was the first movie where it’s like, “O.K., it’s a color movie, but I see when I’m out in Moonlight in real life, I don’t see color. So let’s do that in a movie. Let’s see if that works. Roll the dice and let’s do it with $90 million. O.K. let’s go.’ And somehow I got away with it,” Blaschke admits. “And then we look at that and it’s like, ‘Well, this movie is a little more romantic and maybe it could be a little more stylized, but the base technique is the same. We just put a little more blue in it and that’s it.’ And then the next movie, it’ll be the next level of nuance where each one you kind of get more and more advanced and more nuanced and layered in your approach.”
One pivotal scene for production was the “crossroads” moment where Thomas Huetter (Nicholas Hoult) is picked up by a ghostly-driven horse carriage. Eggers, the cast, and crew waited hours for Blaschke to set it up. It turned out to be worth it in the end. Even the quite humble Blaschke can admit that.
“That’s probably my best night exterior that I’ve done in my so far that looks pretty good,” Blaschke says. “A lot of stuff like the 540-degree shot into the Roma Village and coordinating all those extras, we had similar scale, like the battle or the post-battle sequence of ‘The Northman,’ which I like even better. But I turned out happy with that.
Blaschke adds, “The movie has such diversity, which made it so fun to shoot. We have 169 scenes, we have 60 built sets. A lot of interiors, and exterior finite moonlight. Yeah, it’s hard to even play it in my head just because it’s, it’s such a rich movie with so much scale. So much scope to shoot.”
“Nosferatu” is still in theaters and available on digital download services.
