The one thing Robert Eggers says he will never do as a director: “I can watch it, I just don’t want to shoot it”
Robert Eggers has only made four feature films but has already established a clear pattern. Starting with 2015’s The Witch and continuing all the way through to his latest release, 2024’s Nosferatu, the director has presented periods of history with meticulous detail. Whether it’s a story about two lighthouse keepers in 1890s New England in 2019’s The Lighthouse or Vikings in the year 895 in 2022’s The Northman, Eggers ensures that everything from the facial hair to the fabric of the clothing is as authentic to each period as possible.
The director’s obsession with historical accuracy has already become legendary in the industry. When recreating furniture for The Witch, for example, he insisted that it be made with the same tools and techniques as Puritan settlers would have used in 1630s New England and drew most of the dialogue from court transcripts and diaries from the period. When creating costumes for Nosferatu, his design team researched the exact type of embroidery that was used on the hoods of the folk clothing that people living in the Hunedoara region of Transylvania in 1838 wore.
Eggers, though, has repeatedly downplayed the importance of historical authenticity in movies, saying that it’s more of a personal preference than a filmmaking ideology. He’s even implied that it’s a lazy tool that allows him to avoid having to make things up from scratch. When you adhere to historical accuracy, he argues, you don’t have to make up a chair or a piece of clothing or a room purely through imagination. It’s all there in the history books.
For most people who love Eggers’ work, however, this dedication to detail is one of his greatest selling points as an artist because it provides worlds so immersive that they don’t feel like period movies at all. Few filmmakers have gone to such great lengths to show what these periods really would have looked like, and to couple this accuracy with the surreality that he so often blends into the stories is a cinematic match made in heaven.
Whether it’s lazy filmmaking or the calling card of one of Hollywood’s greatest auteurs, historical accuracy in Eggers movies is going nowhere. During an interview with fellow director Christopher Columbus on The Director’s Cut podcast, Eggers said that he would never, under any circumstances, make a movie set in the present.
“Making a contemporary film is just horrible to me,” he said, “Because, like, photographing a car is pretty unappealing for me, but photographing a cell phone is like death.”
When Columbus confessed that he was currently working on a film that would include the offending technology, Eggers said, “I can watch it; I just don’t want to shoot it.”
While most artists would be loath to say “never” about anything, the Nosferatu director has demonstrated better than anyone that historical accuracy can be the backdrop of some of the most creative movies to come out of Hollywood in years. In contrast, Marvel has demonstrated the opposite–that even when you open the narrative possibilities up to infinite timelines in an infinite universe, you can still end up with nothing more than formulaic redundancy.
