Will William Dafoe and Robert Eggers be combining their talents on a new film after their acclaimed collaborations on The Lighthouse and The Northman? The two are reportedly in negotiation around Nosferatu, the gothic tale that Eggers will be directing for Focus Features, though it is not known what role Dafoe might be playing. The actor had earlier won an Oscar nomination for playing Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire.
Eggers, who will be writing and directing the new film, has already assembled a cast that includes Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, and Nicholas Hoult. In addition to the director himself, the producers of Nosferatu include Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Eggers, Chris Columbus and Eleanor Columbus.
Set in nineteenth-century Germany, Nosferatu explores the obsessive relationship between a young woman, to be played by Rose-Depp, and a vampire from Transylvania, to be played by Skarsgård.
The 39-year-old Eggers is noted for incorporating historical authenticity into his filmmaking. His first film, The Witch, was set in seventeenth-century New England. Eggers had been inspired by his New England childhood, during which he enjoyed visiting the old Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. With Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role, The Witch premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Eggers’s 2022 film, The Northman, was an epic set in the era when Vikings were battling for hegemony in northern Europe.
As a high-school student, the filmmaker had directed a version of Nosferatu for a school production. Eggers had originally wanted to work on a Nosferatu film as early as 2015, which he envisioned as a creative remake of the classic silent film released in 1922. Expressing surprise that this might have been his second film, he was quoted as saying in 2016 that “It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do Nosferatu next. I was really planning on waiting a while, but that’s how fate shook out.”
He ultimately did decide to wait a while, and if all goes well, Nosferatu will be Eggers’s fourth film.
William Dafoe, 67, has appeared in more than 100 films and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. His first leading role was in the outlaw biker film The Loveless, released in 1982. His breakthrough roles came in 1988, with The Last Temptation of Christ and Mississippi Burning.
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