Robert Eggers is known for a few things. Funky, old-timey titles, period movies with extreme violence, and comedies about what No Nut November would be like in a big phallus. What he won’t be doing, under any circumstances, is photographing modern technology. Thankfully, following Nosferatu, Eggers has his sights on Werwulf and Labyrinth, so the only technology he needs is a good, old-fashioned codpiece. But in a recent interview, Rotten Tomatoes wondered if he’d ever be interested in bringing things into the 21st century—maybe something where he could spell the name of his movie like a normal person. According to the director, don’t hold your breath. Like the poor villagers attacked by Nosferatu’s army of plague-infested rats, photographing a car would make Eggers “ill.”
“The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill,” he told Rotten Tomatoes. “And the idea of photographing a cellphone is just death. And to make a contemporary story, you have to photograph a cell phone — it’s just how life is — so no.” Eggers conceded that he could “potentially go to 1950,” but “before World War II is more inviting” for his imagination. Thankfully for Eggers, his imagination seems to be precisely what people are looking for. Nosferatu recently picked up four Oscar nominations. However, we assume he would have set an Academy record if, in the middle of the film, Count Orlock whipped out an iPhone and started playing Balatro.
Eggers is consistent on this front, save for a short film he made. “I like creating these worlds, it’s just not fun for me to show up at a location and shoot it,” Eggers told The A.V. Club in 2019. “I did a short film called Brothers that takes place in the 1960s… on a farm… in New England. And in some ways it has the best texture of all my pieces, because we didn’t have to build the farm, and we found old clothing that already had patina that we could add to, so we didn’t have to do any of that artificially. That is great about location work, for my taste. But the act of me and my collaborators building the world from scratch is so fucking enjoyable.”
