The one thing Robert Eggers never lets actors do: “You just waste a lot of energy”
Robert Eggers is known for his meticulous approach to filmmaking. Whether he’s commissioning a Romanian scholar to recreate a dead language for Nosferatu or ensuring that all the furniture in The Witch was made with the same materials and techniques as carpenters used in 17th-century New England, he painstakingly recreates historical settings for his movies to preserve authenticity.
Although the period detail is Eggers’ most famous hallmark as a filmmaker, it is also worth noting that, in just four feature films, he’s managed to produce some career-best performers from his actors. Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance in 2015’s The Witch instantly marked her as one of Hollywood’s most promising young talents, while Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in 2019’s The Lighthouse provide a claustrophobic feedback loop of rage, bitterness, and attraction that carries the film through its many surreal turns.
In his most recent film, Nosferatu, Lily-Rose Depp gives the best performance of her career so far as a woman tormented and enthralled by her connection to the occult world. An enormous amount of preparation went into the role, including extensive training in the Japanese dance method known as Butoh and extensive studies of classical drawings and paintings. But there is one much simpler technique with which Depp and every other actor in an Eggers film must comply.
In an episode of The Director’s Cut podcast from The Director’s Guild of America, Eggers spoke to Chris Columbus, the director behind hits like Home Alone and the first Harry Potter movie, and one of the producers of Nosferatu. According to Columbus, he learned something about directing by watching how Eggers worked with actors.
“Through the first few weeks on this movie, Rob keeps saying to the actors, ‘Eyebrows!’ He’s pointing to their eyebrows,” Columbus remembered. “And… finally, I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean eyebrows?’”
It turned out that Eggers has a strict anti-eyebrow policy that he establishes at the start of all of his movies. “I don’t like actors to move their eyebrows,” he explained, “[B]cause you just waste a lot of energy and the actor doesn’t seem as focused and doesn’t seem as committed.”
Beyond that, he also asserts that it undermines their emotional range. “When the performances are more stoic and contained,” Eggers said, “Then when they go crazy… you see the difference.”
We’ve all seen an unfortunate incident of bad acting or two, and while it can’t all be attributed to eyebrow waggling, it is also true that the eyebrows are usually the first domino to fall. In contrast, some of the most stunning performances unfold with the smallest flickers of expression.
It’s probably a natural instinct for an actor to contort their faces when they’re trying to convey thoughts or emotions, but the beauty of the cinematic close-up is that they don’t actually need to do anything because the audience will read meaning into even the blankest of expressions. Despite being an industry veteran, Columbus clearly found this enlightening, and may well adopt it on his own movie sets. As for the rest of us, the main bit of information to glean from this exchange is that Eggers will almost certainly never work with Jim Carrey.
