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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone. Julio here to spread some awareness about HIV. An estimated 1.2 million people from all walks of life are living with HIV in the U.S. if you're diagnosed with HIV, it's important to know that it doesn't have to hold you back from living your life. See your healthcare provider to find out about your treatment options. They can help you get on the right treatment for you. Check out treathiv today.com to learn about a possible treatment option. This message was sponsored by Gilead Sciences.
- [00:30]
B
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Erin Menke. Listener discretion advised. Today on the podcast, we'll be talking about a Hungarian Count, a 300 year old undead Hungarian count who also happens to be a vampire. Even though usually on this podcast we talk about real royalty, today we're making an exception to discuss Count Orlok and the rest of the characters in Robert Egger's phenomenal movie Nosferatu. Or rather more specifically, we'll be talking about the costumes. Expertly researched and entirely historically accurate, thanks to Oscar nominated costume designer Linda Muir. Linda has worked with Robert Eggers on the Witch, the Lighthouse, the Northman, and now Nosferatu, which required her to dive into the world of 19th century corsets, leg of mutton sleeves, boots and coats to transport viewers to Egger's vision of Germany and Transylvania. Linda, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [01:38]
C
Thank you very much.
- [01:40]
B
The costumes truly were one of the first things I noticed about this film. They're incredibly detail oriented and incredibly period accurate. Can you talk a little bit about just how you started the process?
- [01:54]
C
Robert Eggers is an incredibly detail oriented director, writer. He has this wonderful habit of creating lookbooks. So he gathers together images and he groups them not just for instance, by character, but he also groups them sometimes under an adjective like or atmosphere or a particular beat in the script. And so he uses those images while he's writing to embed detail actually into the scripts. And so we being his production team, Craig Lathrop, the production designer, his dp, Jaron and myself, costumes, you know, when we start prep and we usually do, you know, a considerable amount of pre prep on our own together, you know, sort of wading into it. And we have that as a starting point, which is absolutely amazing. And so, you know, really what I have to do or what each of us have to do visually is to, is to go through Robert's images because, you know, they're not necessarily dead on in terms of the period, but they, they give the essence and so, you know, checking for anachronisms is one of the first things that I do. And also try to broaden out and obviously have to broaden out the bank of images. And sometimes that is a hard slog to find things. You know, the Viking era that we did for the Northmen was exceedingly difficult because obviously there's this much fabric that exists. And so, you know, you're not looking at a number of extant pieces, but thankfully for Nosferatu, you know, the period is much more accessible. Still not photography, you know, no really fabulous snapshots of people, but beautiful portraits.
- [03:46]
B
Fashion plates, I imagine.
- [03:48]
C
Yes, absolutely. And so the challenge for fashion plates with Nosferatu was Robert set the story as a book that it's based on, obviously Bram Stoker's Dracula, Miranau's Nosferatu, you know, set in Germany at 1838. And so rather than just looking at English flash fashion plates or, you know, Parisian, beautiful as they are, I really wanted German fashion plates. And I don't speak German. And so really locating a full range of. I think it was Wiener modem. W E I N E R M O D E M I believe that was the journal that I was looking for. And eventually due to one of my assistant costume designers, Anna Munro, who lives in Berlin and speaks German, you know, I said, anna, Anna, Anna, can you please? You know. And she fabulously sent me the full range month by month. And I asked, I think I asked for 1835-1839. And I wanted, obviously leading up to, and then I wanted after, so that I wouldn't go. If anything was massively different in 39, I didn't want to go there. So that was really exciting because then, particularly for the gentlemen, you know, I mean, like, the women I could piece together and the women were more from portraits, actually. I got more inspiration from portraits paintings than I did from the fashion plates, though, you know, there was a whimsy in the fashion plates that I was trying to capture. And certainly the feeling of, you know, is it ever too much?
- [05:33]
B
It's a very interesting time for fashion. A bit of a transitional period, if I imagine, because 1838 is, if I'm correct, incredibly early Victorian. And we have these sort of leg of mutton sleeves that are transitioning away.
- [05:49]
C
Yeah, the transition happens prior to 1838, starts to happen at about 1836, 1837, and it transitions all through that period, 1839 and then 40, and then you start to really see the difference. That becomes the 40s and the 50s and so you've got this transitioning period. The forearm in the women's bodice sleeve is changing, and the pieces that. The actual authentic garments that I looked at, I was sort of chuckling, thinking, wow, they didn't cut any of that fabric out. They just peed it on, you know, and then I understand why.
- [06:26]
B
What would you say is characteristic of that period?
- [06:30]
C
The embellishments, trying to figure out Anna Harding, obviously much more wealthy than. Because of her husband's. He's a shipman and he has lots of money to spend on her and the children, and they are beautiful little replicas of her. And the story points really were that Ellen had less money, Hutter had less money, which is why he goes to Count Orlok. And so, you know, really trying to figure out what the garments would be that would tell Ellen's story and then use Anna's excess, really to also tell the story by contrast.
- [07:08]
B
And Anna's outfits are just extraordinary. If you haven't seen the movie yet, Anna Harding is the main character, Ellen's wealthy married friend. She has these sort of adorable, prim children who are always dressed up to the nines.
- [07:22]
C
Yes.
- [07:23]
B
One thing that I thought was a brilliant marrying of fashion and plot is Ellen's corset. Can you talk a little bit about the type of corset Ellen is wearing and how that factored in?
- [07:35]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So because Ellen does not have staff, she doesn't have a chambermaid, you know, I was trying to figure out really what would tell that story. And I came across a fan laced corset, which initially I was referring to, because I had been referring to it with my colleagues about, you know, self tightening. And I realized in interviews that kind of made it sound like the corset tightened itself, which of course it didn't. The wearer tightened it on themselves herself. And so it still laces up the back. It has a closed front. So the busk was a center front busk. And not quite the same boning as you have later. You know, there's a little less in this corset. So we still have the lacing, crisscrossing and coming up the back. But what the additional feature is is that all of those laces are longer, they cross over and they come to the front around the waist. And so you can use the body weight to pull against that and tighten it and then tie it at the front. And the reason that that was interesting to me, other than the fact that it's an interesting piece, was that in our story, Dr. Sievers has the now we know, and have known for quite a long time, misguided notion that tightening the corset can calm the uter. And so in the film, when we see this in Ellen, she's convulsing, she's communing with Orlok. She is not in the room with the men that are there. She is away in her mind. So her body is convulsing. And so the notion is that Dr. Seavers will tighten the corset. And Harding, Frederick Harding, who is her guardian, so to speak, friend of her husband, is holding her down. And so if we had used a typical corset that laces and ties in the back, she would have been flipped down, you know, face into the, into the mattress, and we would not have seen any of Lily Rose's extraordinary portraying of this state. And so the, the fact that the corset had ties in the front meant that they could start flip her over and continue tightening with her face to the camera, which was, you know, a real boon, obviously, because we want to see that foreign.
- [09:59]
A
Hi, everyone. Julio here to spread some awareness about HIV. An estimated 1.2 million people from all walks of life are living with HIV in the U.S. if you're diagnosed with HIV, it's important to know that it doesn't have to hold you back from living your life. See your healthcare provider to find out about your treatment options. They can help you get on the right treatment for you. Check out treathivtoday.com to learn about a possible treatment option. This message was sponsored by Gilead Sciences. Hi, everyone. Julio here to spread some awareness about HIV. An estimated 1.2 million people from all walks of life are living with HIV in the U.S. if you're diagnosed with HIV, it's important to know that it doesn't have to hold you back from living your life. See your healthcare provider to find out about your treatment options. They can help you get on the right treatment for you. Check out treathiv today.com to learn about a possible treatment option. This message was sponsored by Gilead Sciences.
- [11:00]
B
And now to talk about the man of the hour, the extraordinary costume of Count Orlok, who. Obviously this story takes place in the 1800s, but this is a man from 300 years earlier. His costume is just striking. I particularly love the coat he's wearing. Can you walk us through the process of creating his costume?
- [11:22]
C
Robert has had this in his head for a very long time. He initially saw the images of Max Schrack in Mirnau's Nosferatu when He was a boy, you know, 9 years old, 10 years old, and went to great lengths with his mom to obtain a VHS copy of it. So, you know, he's had this playing in his head for a very long time. And we also, as his collaborators, had many false starts. We were initially going to do it, you know, very briefly, right after the Witch and then the Lighthouse, and then we had a false start. The year before, we actually, I went to Prague for a week with my assistant, and I had done a number of the sketches already in Toronto. But then, you know, we had a cast change. So it was another year before we actually started and then continued through. So the point of me telling all of this is that we have all had this in our heads for quite a while. Robert has certainly had it in his head for quite a while. And for him, his version of this story is really rooted in as much as possible with these characters rooted in real time. And so he wanted to know, okay, so, Count Orlok, you know, what would a Hungarian count of roughly 300 years prior to our story line, you know, what would he look like? And the first thing I think that Robert really cottoned onto was the notion that he had to have a mustache. You know, just, there's no way around this. You know, he has to have a.
- [12:51]
B
Mustache, and what a mustache he has.
- [12:54]
C
And what a mustache he has. And so when I received the images, it was sort of like, this is interesting, you know, and so there were a number of different portraits and, like, a pastiche of images of this. And so, again, I start to. Because we have to make these pieces and we have to. And I have to know what they look like, and I have to get a sense of what fabrics I'm trying to find and what buttons and what, you know, embellishments. And that's always a challenge now, and it's becoming more of a challenge because mills are closing, and luxurious fabrics, if they're even available, cost the world. You know, I have to find textiles that will evoke these things. So I started research, research, research, and I started looking. I would love to be able to go to museums all around the world and look at these things. Unfortunately, that's not quite, you know, where we're at. And so I try to go on online and find museum. Online collections. That is obviously easier if it's something that is at the DNA or something that's at the method. These were not necessarily so, you know, I'm looking at museums, again, where I can't necessarily speak the language of the museum it is operating in. So I'll find images and then I'll have to have the text translated. And that also applied to, you know, the folk costuming in both the inn and the Roma and the monastery.
- [14:23]
B
For listeners who haven't seen the film yet, one of the characters, Thomas, travels to visit Count Orlok and interacts with a large group of peasants sort of outside of his castle, figuring out the.
- [14:36]
C
Garments that would make up an outfit for a Hungarian count of great wealth, entitlement and personality from around 1560, 1580 to, you know, roughly 1620 ish. And that consisted of the very large overcoat, which has the incredibly long sleeves, which actually I realized through researching the peasant costuming, that that is a feature that kind of seems to have come from shepherds wearing the sheepskins as cloaks, but without arms, and that slowly starts to develop into these sheepskin coats with arms. But the arms are always really, really long, and they don't seem to be always, especially for the nobility, intended to be worn with arms through the sleeves. It's more of a show of, I have all of this money, I can have luxurious fabrics that make up the body of the overcoat. It's all fur lined to keep me warm in my stone castle with no central heating. And I've got, you know, gold, gold galloons and incredible buttons. And the buttons were often painted glass buttons painted with gold images, you know, I mean, not possible to find these days. So we ended up actually crocheting gold buttons and then weighing them with fish weights to give them, you know, a bit of heft. And so the mente m e n t e actually has these slices that are like kind of, you know, here in the fabric, and they're fur trimmed as well. And the arms can go through that. So you can actually keep this big overcoat on by putting your arms through those slits, but you can't put your arms through the sleeves and keep it on, which I found really interesting.
- [16:25]
B
It gives it a sense of menace, too. It does make it look like sort of a cape.
- [16:30]
C
And for our purposes, because Bill, he's gliding effortlessly, you know, through this, this castle. But because of the weight of the overcoat, every time in fittings, it would just slide off his shoulders. And so for practicality and for the image of it, we in the costume department devised a harness that he wore underneath the dolmen, which is the tunic that he wears under the overcoat. And there were slices hidden in the shoulders, and they had quick release mechanisms that we could snap and then a You know, a companion piece on the inside of the mente so that it would just stay on his shoulders and float around with him and he could really recede into the bulk of it. When he wanted to not be visible, he could expand his chest and have not just the gallons that are visible on the overcoat, but also all of the incredible gold lace overlay that is present in the dolmen as well, and all that could be visible. So it gave Bill confidence that he could act with the costume and not have it be cumbersome. So then he had silk trousers, a tight fit, and they went into one of my favorite pieces, which were the boots. And in reality they would have been leather mules with about a 4 inch steel heel that is kind of horseshoe shaped, really freaky, and a leather sock that slid into the mule for safety and for convenience purposes. You know, I designed it so that it was all one. And Bill Skarsgar is a very tall actor man anyway, and Lily Rose is quite petite. And so, you know, there was a real overpowering presence. And then he had the Colpac hat, K O L P A K. And that is a crazy, weird design. It sort of is like a, like a large tube that folds back, you know, and so you've got this potentially quite overwhelming hat. Right. And then it had the embellishment of the hawk feathers and bejeweled at the front with the pearls and jewels. So all of that was intended to allow Robert, our director writer, to obscure. When Thomas Hutter first comes to the castle, it's such a weird world. As soon as he comes into the Carpathian Mountains, he encounters our villagers, he encounters the Roma, he encounters another very disturbing event in the woods at night that he's not quite sure. Did he see that or did he not see that? By the time he gets to the castle, his horse is gone and is met by this unbelievable carriage. You know, every event leading up to the castle is flummoxed to more and more and more. And so he comes in and the count has this luxurious voice, you know, deep, deep, deep, deep. He's certainly unique, certainly not in the same era, that almost empty castle. And he's terrified. And because Orlok is 300 years old and Robert has chosen to really go with the embodiment of a folk vampire, which is undead, he's reanimated. So he is a corpse that is reanimated, come back to life. And so he's rotting.
- [20:03]
B
It's such an interesting interpretation. I feel like we're used to seeing very sexy Vampires who are sort of dashing gentlemen, you know, Orlok is very sexy in his way, but not maybe in his physical body.
- [20:15]
C
It was always amazing to me to watch Bill in full makeup and costume, and still I could feel the power of the man from 300 years, what he would have been like as a living person. And that, I think, is an extraordinary accomplishment for him to have made in portraying this character. And so the idea of the huge hat, the fur collar, that comes up quite a bit. It has a sort of dual purpose. It's obscuring Warlock, obscuring all of that rot until he gets that signature. And also it's kind of an ode or an homage, a nod whatever, to the previous iterations of vampires, whether they be a black satin cape, you know, whether they be incredible costuming of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. The notion with that Dracula was that he was a shapeshifter. He could force people to imagine or see any number of different versions of himself. You know, the Dracula that Gary Oldman played in so many different extraordinary time periods and costumes, this Nosferatu has its feet in reality. So that, you know, the notion is that, and I certainly stand by this notion for myself, that it could be more terrifying. If what you're looking at is potentially real, then it really does close that gap between the fantastical and real.
- [21:47]
B
We don't have a ton of time left. So before I let you go, can I ask, did you have a favorite costume in the entire film?
- [21:55]
C
I'm asked this, and I realize over and over again, it's like choosing a favorite child. You know, I love them all, and for different reasons. But, you know, Orlok is. Because it could have been an incredibly terrifying notion to design such an iconic character. And, you know, due to the fact that Robert had such very clear ideas about what he wanted, you know, that fear was. Didn't actually really even come up. I think designing the menswear that is at that period, so romantic and so lush, that was a real treat.
- [22:28]
B
Willem Dafoe wore such an extraordinary, if I remember correctly, sort of floral coat in one scene.
- [22:34]
C
Yes. You don't see it a lot in his attic room because it's lit very sparsely with candles and oil lamps and things like that. But he had beautiful little curled cloth slippers and very Oriental gentleman's kind of evening wear. But, you know, the other thing you asked about, the folk costuming, and yes, it is incredibly authentic. In fact, I am moved beyond belief in my Instagram account. There's a gentleman. His. His page is called Transylvania heritage, I believe. And he's messaged me just to say finally, finally, respect given to the folk costuming of Romania. And I can't time I'm going to start crying, you know, because it was really difficult, really difficult to find the information because neither Robert nor I speak Romanian. And you know, you're looking at a lot of modern photographs of people who still create this costuming. But what we were looking for was pre photography. So we were relying on illustrations and written accounts and then having that translated. And then also in the monastery, the great schema Abbas. Robert's writing is often quite feminist and he was quite determined that the exorcism would happen with a mature nun. And as it turned out, we needed a priest because we couldn't quite escape the religious reality. But you know, the great schema abbess, her analev was so researched, so we had to give her a name, embroider that across the bottom in a Cyrillic Alphabet along with the psalm that she would have chosen from her Bible. That would have been indicative of her religious journey to get her to the place of great learnedness. And so the icons, there's the ladder, there are the angels, there is pillar. All of these different icons are things that were thoroughly researched and the colors that would have been used in the embroidery and the applique work was all researched as well. So that is really dear to my heart, you know, because it was such a journey to get there. And, you know, the hand embroidery took a good deal of time to do.
- [24:57]
B
I can only imagine. Well, thank you so much for joining me. The movie Nosferatu, the costumes are absolutely extraordinary. To any listeners who haven't seen it yet, watch it and then watch it again. Just with an eye to the costumes, especially that coat, those sleeves that go to the knees for Orlok. They're incredible. Thank you so much and best of luck at the Oscars. These costumes are Oscar nominated, so we'll all be keeping our fingers crossed for you.
- [25:24]
C
Thank you very much.
- [25:25]
B
Have a wonderful day. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Erin Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Hite and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk with supervising producer Rima Il Kayali and executive producers Aaron Menke, Trevor Young and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [26:16]
A
Hi, everyone. Julio here to spread some awareness about HIV. An estimated 1.2 million people from all walks of life are living with HIV in the U.S. if you're diagnosed with HIV, it's important to know that it doesn't have to hold you back from living your life. See your healthcare provider to find out about your treatment options. They can help you get on the right treatment for you. Check out treathivtoday.com to learn about a possible treatment option. This message was sponsored by Gilead Sciences.