‘Nosferatu’ | Anatomy of a scene

“Hello, I’m Robert Eggers, the writer and director of Nosferatu. Nicholas Hoult is on a trip to Orlok Castle and stops at a Transylvanian village we built in the Czech Republic outside of Prague. We visited many vernacular architecture museums in Romania and Transylvania to study what we would build and this is based on all of this. It was a very difficult sequence to cast. We have Roma non-actors as well as Roma musicians and dancers from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania. It was challenging to work with everyone who spoke a different language, but it was also a lot of fun. These musicians are from Romania, so it was the woman who was clapping with the red headscarf. You may or may not have realized that this is all a one-time attempt. This sequence was very carefully choreographed and rehearsed in advance in a warehouse in Prague. And then we had to get everyone here and do it right. And I think we did about 30 takes of it. This guy Radu is a dancer who does a kind of traditional Roman dance combined with hip hop. But here he’s just doing the traditional thing. And this gentleman with the golden tooth is Jordan Haj, a Czech pop star. Why are they laughing at him? Is it the hat or is it something else? But it’s definitely meant to make you, the viewer, feel uncomfortable because he doesn’t know why they’re laughing at him.