You acted in the show as well?
It's hard to believe, but I weighed like 115 pounds. And I had played Orlok. There are some pictures of it that you can find online.
Did you try to imitate the Max Schreck look?
It was like that, but it was a little bit more aggressive. At the time, because of Buffy the Vampire, there was this period where you could buy vampire makeup with an angry prosthetic forehead. So I bought a bunch of these foam latex, ready-made foreheads and cheekbones, and then I added the bald cap and ears. I fashioned some canine teeth that were too big.
You grew up in a very small town in New Hampshire, so I’m guessing Nosferatu wasn’t necessarily easy to find.
Yeah, we had to drive to the town that was populated and had a video store to order it, and then it came in the mail a month and a half later. The version that I watched as a kid didn’t have music. It might not have had the same impact if it had had a cheesy organ score or synth score. I think I was lucky that it was literally silent.
It must have felt more like found footage then, right?
I think that's part of the enigma for me. When you watch the restored versions, you can see all the detail and the grease paint and the bald caps and the fake, fake, fake stuff. And in this version that was made from a degraded 16-millimeter print, you couldn't see any of that. There were certain frames where Max Schreck's eyes looked like cat eyes. It's the version that gave rise to the legends of Max Schreck actually being a vampire.
Those rumors inspired the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, in which Willem Dafoe played him as an actual undead monster. Dafoe has worked with you a lot, and in your Nosferatu he plays the aging vampire hunter. Did he bring up the connection much?
Of course, but he always says they're two different animals. He's like, “Now I'm the age to play the Van Helsing character, and that's great.”
You grew up in New England, which, compared to other parts of the US, is especially old, with historical markers everywhere and buildings dating back to the Revolutionary War. Was this an important part of forming your imagination?
English (US) ·