• yesterday
Transcript
00:00And I think audiences know that, they know they're going to get something that feels kind of raw and real.
00:10Do you remember the first scary movie you ever watched in your life?
00:14Probably the James Will Frankenstein, and I was like very little,
00:19and I remember when you hear his footsteps and then he appears being genuinely scared,
00:24even though it's hard to imagine being scared of that now.
00:26Bambi.
00:29That was really good.
00:32I mean, yeah, Dumbo was definitely quite...
00:35Oh no, Pinocchio.
00:36Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
00:37The child catcher.
00:38That's some freaky stuff.
00:39Pinocchio has a creepy moment, man, when the donkey goes and turns into a freaking donkey
00:46and they all smoke cigars at this fairground bit.
00:48Alice in Wonderland, scary.
00:50So basically just Disney anime.
00:52All Disney movies are scary.
00:54Yeah, there's amazing horror movies.
00:57That's not your first experience with a vampire movie, and before you had played a ghost, a goblin,
01:03so what other mythical creatures do you think would be fun to play?
01:07You know, I can never set myself up, you know.
01:10When something's in front of me, I know what to do.
01:12That's probably why I'm not a director.
01:14I react to things and then I work from there.
01:16I mean, he is, you know, halfway a satyr anyway, so.
01:22I could see you as a werewolf.
01:23Yeah.
01:24Like an elf.
01:26A Christmas elf.
01:28A fairy, maybe.
01:30A fairy.
01:31Peter Pan.
01:32I want to pick Peter Pan.
01:33You could totally Peter it.
01:34Robert Eggers' Peter Pan.
01:35Oh, my God.
01:36Dark.
01:37Dark.
01:38Oh, man.
01:39Hook was sick.
01:40Yeah, Hook was amazing.
01:41Since we're talking about a story with such a huge legacy,
01:45what were your main contributions or new elements you felt you had to tell the story yourself?
01:51One of the things that's really cool about the Morneau film
01:54is that it becomes Ellen's story somewhere midway through Act II.
02:00Ellen becomes the protagonist,
02:02and so I wanted Ellen to be the protagonist from the very beginning.
02:05I think that's the most central difference.
02:07And then also that Warlock is this, like, folk vampire.
02:11He is an ambulating corpse and nothing more.
02:15As I was watching the 1922 Nosferatu,
02:18I wonder if there's something about the way of acting in silent films
02:22that is still present in cinema today, you know,
02:25or that may have inspired you in your work.
02:27There's always that expression that if you turn the sound off on a film,
02:33can you still see what's going on?
02:35So there's something about the gesture,
02:37there's something about actions that really drive everything,
02:41that root everything.
02:43It's not so much about dialogue or psychology.
02:48It's about movement.
02:50It's about the presence of the actor,
02:52at least from my point of view as an actor.
02:54You don't imitate that because it's all kind of extreme,
02:57but it is about the gesture.
02:59It's about doing things.
03:00As you did a lot of research to bring this war to the screen,
03:04was there something new about this mythology to you
03:07or something you had a new perspective about?
03:09Yeah, I mean, one of the things that was really super fun
03:13was to dig into things that I had known about
03:16and kind of relearn them.
03:18The history of vampire cinema is so ingrained
03:22in people's knowledge about what vampires are.
03:26And I've read Dracula like five times or something
03:29as a kid and a young adult,
03:31and to realize there are things from vampire movies
03:34that I had put in the novel that aren't there.
03:36And when you go back and you look at stories
03:39about folk vampires from the 18th and 19th century,
03:42some of them don't drink blood.
03:44Some of them don't drink blood from the neck,
03:45but from the breast, which we put in the movie.
03:47Some of them just came back to sleep with their widows
03:50until she died from too much intercourse.
03:53From Nosferatu to What We Do in the Shadows to Twilight,
03:57vampire seems to work in all kinds of movies.
04:00What do you think that made this creature so appealing on screen?
04:04I think there's obviously a fantasy and a sense of, like,
04:08intrigue into the world of darkness and mythology
04:11and vampires and things like that.
04:13And I think it's exciting,
04:14especially when Robert Eggers is telling the story.
04:17You know he's pulling out parts of details
04:20and, like, folklore history
04:22and pulling out real authentic things of that era and time.
04:26And I think audiences know that.
04:28They know they're going to get something that feels
04:30kind of raw and real.
04:32In this adaptation, I feel that your characters,
04:35especially, gain a lot of new background.
04:38How did you and Robert work together, you know,
04:40to build almost from scratch a story for this couple?
04:44I mean, that was very much Rob, I think, in the writing of the story.
04:48This film, as well as being terrifying and beautiful
04:53and like a visual feast, it's also very much like a...
04:56It focuses on love and different types of love
04:58and marriage and family.
04:59Those things coming up against darkness
05:01and how each of those things deals with it.
05:04I think our characters are very much there
05:07to be this pillar of, like, a nuclear family
05:09and to watch that fall, essentially, or crack,
05:12or how these people deal with it.
05:14He typed me out a sort of character backstory,
05:17which I found really, really useful.
05:19But then we sort of rehearsed it and talked about it
05:21like you were at a play almost, didn't we?