How Robert Eggers used his worst movie to become the director he was born to be

It takes real skill to avoid becoming trampled by a franchise if you’re a talented young director in Hollywood these days. Listing every filmmaker who went from budding auteur to jaded studio shill could take an entire afternoon, but suffice it to say that everyone from Colin Trevorrow to Rian Johnson to Chloe Zhao has found themselves caught up in the spiky jaws of the franchise machine, and only a few of them made it out untainted by the stain of defeat.

It seems that studios will promise every new auteur whatever amount of creative freedom they ask for in order to get them to sign on the dotted line, only to snatch the project away as soon as production begins. As a result, it’s hard to categorise Mufasa: The Lion King as a Barry Jenkins movie or Star Wars: The Last Jedi as a Rian Johnson movie. One is simply a Disney movie and the other is just a Star Wars movie.

So, how has Robert Eggers managed to escape this fate? How was the filmmaker who exploded onto the scene with a low-budget folklore horror movie able to follow it up with the even more unsettling and inaccessible black-and-white drama rather than a Star Wars prequel or a Marvel spinoff? In a recent interview on the podcast The Business for the release of his latest film, Nosferatu, the director joked about how he, like Charles Dickens, tends to tell similar stories over and over again.

“I think I have certain themes and motifs that I’m attracted to,” he said. “And I don’t think I’ll be, you know, making a live-action Kung Fu Panda or romantic comedy anytime soon.”

Eggers has made just four films –  2015’s The Witch, 2019’s The Lighthouse, 2022’s The Northman, and 2024’s Nosferatu. Each film explores, to one degree or another, folklore, the occult, and madness. All of them contain elements of horror, and each is steeped in painstaking period detail. For Nosferatu, for example, Eggers enlisted Romanian author and academic Florin Lăzărescu to recreate the extinct Dacian language, a dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Carpathian Mountains around the time the fictional Count Orlok was alive.

The reason the director has managed to maintain such tight creative control over his projects is that he has a very low tolerance for studio intervention. He tried it once, and it didn’t work. In fact, the reason Nosferatu feels like something of a homecoming to Eggers’ style is because of what he learned from making The Northman. The Viking epic was budgeted at $70-$90million, exponentially more than the $11m it took to make The Lighthouse. It was the director’s near-miss experience with the studio machine, and it seems to have cured him of any desire to make a big-budget film on someone else’s terms again.

The main issue he had with The Northman was having to put the film through multiple test screenings. He had done extensive test screenings for The Witch but had only used them as a way to figure out where his vision wasn’t translating to the audience. In contrast, the studio-led test screenings had more to do with digging through small data sets and trying to hit certain numbers. The Northman has plenty of Eggers’ visual flair, but it feels much more like a hyper-masculine action flick with unnecessary CGI than an elusive and darkly twisted fairytale.

Another issue was the on-set environment. Even though he was able to bring the heads of department that he’d used for his first two films, he had to prove himself to a crew made up of industry veterans. In the interview with The Business, he recalled the constant cycle of humility and self-confidence that he found himself in. “You have to listen to yourself and trust yourself and say, ‘When do I listen to all the people around me who literally know how to make a film more than I do, and when do I have to say ‘No, this is the time to reinvent the wheel’?” he explained.

In an interview with The Guardian around the time The Northman was released, Eggers struck a much more self-deprecating tone that spoke volumes. “The studio pressure made the film what I originally pitched to them, which was the most entertaining Robert Eggers movie I could make,” he said, adding, “It’s hard for me to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, for goodness’s sake.”

It’s no coincidence that The Northman was the worst-reviewed of all Eggers’ films and his most financially unsuccessful. It made less than $70million at the box office, falling short of its budget, let alone making a profit. In contrast, The Witch grossed $40m off a $4m budget, and Nosferatu has already made back more than twice its $50m budget just a couple of weeks into its theatrical release.

Reflecting on his experience on The Northman in a 2024 interview with IndieWire, Eggers found a silver lining. “It was a beast, a big learning experience,” he admitted. “After making The Northman, I finally felt like I know how to direct a movie, like I’m not trying to convince people that I know how to direct a movie.”

This is clear in every aspect of Nosferatu. His retelling of FW Murnau’s take on Dracula is not as surreal as The Lighthouse or as sinister as The Witch, but it feels like a return to authenticity for the director. The period detail, the use of composition and lighting rather than CGI to create spectacle, and its overriding elusiveness all harken back to the triumph of his previous films. What they lack in narrative structure is more than what is made up here. The final shot alone may be his single best image yet. 

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