Nosferatu’s Jarin Blaschke Chats Oscar Nomination, Robert Eggers, and That Ending Sunrise

In one of the warmest moments during Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, a kindly professor inquires about the ownership of a cat. The feline in question is keeping company with a woman cursed by a vampire’s attention. Even so, she has the good humor and sense to know that a cat is neither owned, or waits on, on any human. “She has no master or mistress,” young Ellen Hutter smiles.

One suspects cinematographer Jarin Blaschke can relate. After all, despite earning his second Oscar nod last week for his entrancing work on the vampire epic, not even the afternoon of the Academy Award nominations being reported live from a laptop in his English home was cause enough to pause these deified creatures’ needs or demands.

“I was waiting for a cat sitter to arrive,” Blaschke chuckles a few days after finding out about Nosferatu’s Oscar nominations. “[And when she gets there], I’m like, ‘Oh sorry, they’re announcing the Academy Awards.’ And she’s like, ‘Okay. Anyway, where’s the cat litter?’”

Sure enough the Best Cinematography category’s announcement came and went while Blaschke’s had his head turned half away. By the time it was over, all he could get out was “oh my gosh, I’m nominated for an Academy Award.” How nice. “Well done you,” the cat sitter even acknowledged. “Anyway, where’s the cat litter?”

It’s an amusing turn of fate for a movie that seems to channel the ancient, pagan powers of Isis and Bastet. And it’s still one to be incredibly proud of for Blaschke, who received his second Oscar nomination after previously earning one in 2020 for his work on another Eggers picture, The Lighthouse.

“It’s not something to get used to,” Blaschke considers, “but I guess there is a part of you that goes ‘oh it’s not a fluke.’ … It just feels much fuller.” It also feels a little better on this go-round because while the cinematographer was inexplicably the only artist nominated for The Lighthouse (and stranger still, none at all were recognized for stunning work on The Northman), with Nosferatu he is joined by collaborators like Costume Designer Linda Muir and Production Designer Craig Lathrop.

Says Blaschke, “It feels much richer being there with three other collaborators. You know, with Craig, if I don’t have amazing sets to light, I don’t look as good.” Still, he adds it would have been nice to see their director on that stage too. “I really wish Rob was in on it, just because obviously he’s the center of it all, and he really directs us to do our best work.”

That best work goes back a long time between Blaschke and Eggers. While the pair have worked together on every one of Eggers’ feature films to date, beginning with The Witch in 2015, the collaboration began nearly a decade before when both were young film professionals trying to crack the industry in the mid-2000s. Their first professional collaboration was a short film Eggers directed and Blaschke lensed, a 2007 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

“After that first short, we would just hang out all the time,” says Blaschke, “because we weren’t working, and there’s like seven years of that, really, just becoming friends and kind of aesthetic snobs together, and really connecting.”

Over the time they got to know each other’s filmic tastes, which any fan might recognize leans into the dark and shadows.

“What DP doesn’t like some patina?” the cinematographer jokes. “Everything I do doesn’t need to be dark, but the director I connect with the most just [taps into] the dark side of me, and I get to explore that fully. Within that realm our tastes overlap a lot. I know that if I’m going to send him an illustration or a photograph or whatever I think is great, he’s probably going to like it. There’s just a huge sharing of taste.”

Indeed, the two’s working method has become distinct and celebrated in cineaste circles for their ability to pinpoint a look or movement from the past and translate it to modern cinema. In the case of The Lighthouse, for example, that meant deliberately recreating the photographic aesthetic at the turn of the 20th century.

“[On] The Lighthouse, we’re being very specific with the photography,” he says. “The references are photography, so we can get technical and get specific as to what an orthochromatic film looks like, and what micro-contrast we’re going for.” By and large, however, Blaschke notes the pair have established a shorthand as collaborators and storytellers since The Witch that informs their storytelling choices more than any particular visual reference.

“When I’m working with Rob, my brain just goes into Rob composition mode,” the DP explains. “So even if it’s a frame that I might find, I’m filtering it through the Rob filter. Which means we tend to shoot things symmetrically, we tend to shoot things graphically, we tend to make things [that] look a little bit two-dimensional, a little bit storybook. Maybe The Northman you could call a tapestry rather than a storybook, but whatever we do just tends to be graphic.”

In the case of Nosferatu, this was channeled by studying the oil masterworks of painters participating in the Romantic movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The choice was partially done as that was the popular artistic style of the era in the film’s central European setting, however it also visually separated this Nosferatu from the more Expressionistic techniques utilized by the original version and a century’s worth of  imitators.

It also allowed Blaschke and Eggers to keep their feet firmly planted in their naturalistic preferences. In fact, to achieve a certain painterly aesthetic, the choice was made to film all the scenes set in Germany at night by gaslight (or at least single-source electric bulbs in gas-seeming lamps, Blaschke points out), while the Transylvanian scenes, which are by design located in more ancient and antiquated locales, are filmed entirely by candlelight.

“The gaslight tends to be a single lamp, almost Lighthouse style, and it tends to be a little harder,” Blaschke explains while noting that a single gaslamp is also far too dim to light a face on celluloid. Candles, on the other hand? “We’ll just add candles, we’ll multiply more candles, and we’ll get a light level that way.” In some wide shots, this could mean maybe as many as a hundred candles, plus special T1 lenses designed specifically for Nosferatu to capture that low light on film. It all shows up on 35mm celluloid, creating a rich, ghostly effect.

With that said, sometimes the old ways are the best at creating a lush romantic aesthetic. Anyone who has seen Nosferatu will not soon forget that final scene where the sun finally rises on Eggers’ Wisburg, and this often dark and wintry tale’s shadows are banished by a blindingly resplendent sunrise. It’s one of the most exquisite dawns seen in a long time on screen… and it was done all on a soundstage lifted off the ground so Blaschke could get 20 HMI lamps underneath to bounce light around the set. There were many other tricks involved, too, including a motorized mirror out the window to mimic the rising of the sun. Furthermore, Blaschke insisted on having the motor-mirror be able to turn.

“So then it’s actually turning so you get the moving shadows in the background that no one’s going to notice because we’re looking at Orlok melting,” the cinematographer cracks. Few might notice, but as Blaschke muses about another fancy trick in Nosferatu, “I like to have fun. You know, going upside down during sex scenes and all kinds of stuff, especially in heightened scenes.”

Whether you notice or not, his perfectionism is transportative and worthy of a storybook. Perhaps an Oscar as well.

Nosferatu is available now for digital rental or purchase. It will be released on Blu-ray and 4K home media on Feb. 18.

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