You’ve been wanting to make this film forever. You first saw F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original Nosferatu as a nine-year-old boy — why do you think it became a lifelong obsession?
I [recently] found the VHS that I watched as a kid and discovered that it didn’t have any soundtrack. It didn’t have a cheesy organ score, or a synth score — it literally was silent. It is more haunting that way. When I started watching it as a teenager, I would put on other music that I thought worked well, but I think had it had one of these corny scores, it wouldn’t have had the same magic. Of course, it’s incredible to see the restored versions, where you can really see all of Murnau’s intention and it’s all super crisp and clean, but you also lose a little bit of the magic. Because [lead actor] Max Schreck’s make-up was seamless in the grainy 16mm version put on VHS that I had as a kid, you couldn’t see the bald cap and the grease paint. So there was a magic about it that felt real to me as a kid.
NOSFERATU