Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I am walking along the banks of the Thames by the Tower of London, where I am due to meet Robert Eggers. It is late November, unrelentingly cold and grey. I am early, and he texts me to say that he is too and is just grabbing a snack. I wait for several minutes then I see him, a dark silhouette emerging from the crimson backdrop of Pret A Manger.\u00a0He is wearing the Brooklynite armour of black Salomon trainers, a black Arc\u2019teryx jacket, black cap and black trousers. I am struck by his pretty eyes and silver skull ring. Eggers, 41, grew up in New Hampshire and moved from New York to London a year and a half ago. He first visited the Tower, aged 17, on a family holiday. \u201cThere\u2019s more history here,\u201d he says, explaining the move. \u201cMore lions and unicorns.\u201d As we enter, he suggests we wander around rather than visit the top attractions. \u201cI don\u2019t think we are going to do much talking if we go to see the Crown Jewels.\u201dWe are here to discuss Nosferatu, Eggers\u2019 adaptation of FW Murnau\u2019s 1922 silent film of the same name. The original is based on Bram Stoker\u2019s novel Dracula (1897) and follows Thomas Hutter, an estate agent from the German town of Wisborg, sent to Transylvania to meet Count Orlok, who plans to buy an abandoned house opposite Hutter\u2019s. Orlok (played in the 1922 film by Max Schreck) is, of course, a vampire, and becomes obsessed with Hutter\u2019s beautiful young wife, Ellen. Sleepwalking and hysterical, Ellen finds herself possessed by the Count, who sails to Wisborg to find her, bringing a plague with him. While it may seem simplistic to modern eyes, Murnau\u2019s film was a pioneer of the horror genre. \u201cYou feel like a bit of an asshole, having only made a few films, taking on such an important title,\u201d Eggers admits.His Nosferatu combines the epic scale and budget of his 2022 Hamlet-inspired Viking saga The Northman with the psychological claustrophobia of earlier films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). The director has found a cult following for his dark, meticulously researched historical fictions, which bring an art house sensibility to a mainstream audience. Unlike the original, Eggers\u2019 Nosferatu is anchored in the psychology of Ellen (played by Lily-Rose Depp). In the opening scenes, she moans ecstatically, levitating in her nightgown towards an open window, and we see the shadowy hand of the monster cast over her, a recurring motif in both Nosferatus. \u201cA visual representation of her hypnotism,\u201d says Eggers, chewing on a protein bar. (\u201cI\u2019m literally always hungry,\u201d he explains.) The eeriness continues as Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) makes his journey to Orlok\u2019s castle.Played by Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd, with tarantula-esque hands, reptilian skin and golf-ball eyes, Eggers\u2019 Orlok is no heart-throb, though his relationship with Ellen is unmistakably erotic. \u201cThe vampire as a hero who is not even scary kind of climaxed with [Twilight\u2019s] Edward Cullen,\u201d says Eggers. \u201cDracula in the book is a more demonic, masculine asshole.\u201dShot in colour but desaturated to appear black and white, the film is palpably gothic. It maintains \u201ca constant state of dread\u201d, Eggers says, by ending each scene with a new problem, and \u201cnever turning off that fog machine, ever.\u201d The director, who is in general pensive, has a dry sense of humour that catches me off guard.We walk along a wooden gangway. Just beyond the Tower\u2019s cobbled buildings lie the glass monoliths of the City of London. The incongruity is starkly beautiful, but Eggers seems unfazed. \u201cI\u2019ve been in so many spiral staircases at this point,\u201d he jokes, as we step into our first tower.\u00a0Produced by Harry Potter\u2019s Chris Columbus, at times Nosferatu has the undeniable feel of Hogwarts, with its dungeons, forests and battlements, sweepingly shot with camera dollies. Exterior shots of Hunedoara Castle in Romania and Pern\u0161tejn Castle in Czechia were used for Orlok\u2019s castle, while the interiors were purpose-built. \u201cYou could never fit a crane up one of these,\u201d Eggers notes, gesturing up the narrow staircase we are climbing. In a departure for the director, whose horror movies tend to be more intellectual than truly terrifying, Nosferatu also contains numerous jumpscares. \u201cIt\u2019s not something I\u2019ve attempted to do before, but because this movie invented horror films, I am in conversation with cinema history whether I want to be or not.\u201dHe first came across Murnau\u2019s film aged nine, after seeing a picture of Max Schreck\u2019s Nosferatu in a library book. \u201cI thought it was the coolest thing I\u2019d ever seen,\u201d he recalls. His mother helped him mail order a VHS. \u201cIt was made from a 16mm print, and the degraded quality made it feel like something unearthed from the past. In restored versions you can see Max Schreck\u2019s bald cap and the grease paint of his eyebrows. But here, he felt like a real vampire.\u201d Aged 17, Eggers staged an amateur theatre production of the film, which set him on course to become a director after it was spotted by a local theatre producer. After making The Witch, he wrote a vampire movie script, but for 10 years struggled to get it made. \u201cIt\u2019s not a phrase I\u2019d want to say, but it\u2019s been a lifetime in the making.\u201d Right on cue, one of the Tower\u2019s ravens starts to crow. \u201cHandsome guy,\u201d Eggers notes.We sit down in a courtyard with sloping medieval buildings that we agree could be Wisborg. Knowing Eggers\u2019 distaste for anachronism, I wonder whether he saw the vampire as a modern metaphor for a parasitic elite, perhaps, or for hyperconsumerism? \u201cNo,\u201d is his short answer. The original script, written before the Covid-19 pandemic, included face coverings, \u201cbut I removed them because I didn\u2019t want to make a point about it.\u201d His hope is that, in its historicity, this new Nosferatu will find its timelessness. \u201cOnce you start to make interpretations and bend it to deliberately say something contemporary, it\u2019s hard for it to have a life beyond that,\u201d\u00a0he says.A couple of years ago, Eggers came to the Tower of London \u2014 which, from the 1200s to 1835, housed a zoo of exotic animals \u2014 after the actor Ralph Ineson, who starred in The Witch and now appears in Nosferatu, suggested Eggers meet his friend, the Ravenmaster of the Tower. Watching the original film, I was struck by its menagerie of animals: cats, rats, flies, a hyena, a man-eating plant \u2014 non-human beings that have also found their way into Egger\u2019s adaptation. \u201cIt\u2019s all about the accumulation of details,\u201d he says. \u201cThe oxen that go through the streets of Wisborg tell you this is not a modern city. The stray dogs. I hope it all adds to the atmosphere.\u201d We step into the Bloody Tower and Eggers becomes engrossed in a display about princes Edward and Richard, incarcerated as children by their uncle in a battle for succession. I ask him about the final scene of Nosferatu, where beauty and horror are mixed together, a tangle of corpses and bones. \u201cAt the end of his life, [the director] John Huston was asked why he made such dark films,\u201d Eggers replies. \u201cHe answered thoughtfully and ruefully that \u2018the dark pearl glistens.\u2019 I\u2019m definitely attracted to that glistening pearl.\u201dWe exit the Tower via Traitors\u2019 Gate, where prisoners once entered. Eggers tells me that he currently lives in a \u201cvery modern house\u201d, but dreams of owning an old townhouse in Spitalfields, inspired by a trip to Dennis Severs\u2019 House, a museum that recreates the home of Huguenot silk weavers, where he saw \u201cunfurled bolts of fabric rotting into each other\u201d. As we say goodbye, a tourist asks Eggers to take a photo of him and the director takes several shots, artful and mysterious. I feel like I\u2019m watching a magician at work. \u201cNosferatu\u201d is in UK cinemas now Find out about our latest stories first \u2014\u00a0follow FT Weekend Magazine on\u00a0X\u00a0and\u00a0FT Weekend on\u00a0Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I am walking along the banks of the Thames by the Tower of London, where I am due to meet Robert Eggers. It is late November, unrelentingly cold and grey. I am early, and he texts me to say that he is too and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":161406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-161405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161407,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161405\/revisions\/161407"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}