"Murnau, I consider to be the greatest German director, and Nosferatu the greatest German film."
- Werner Herzog
After capturing the attention of critics and public with ambitious, unique, and powerful films, Werner Herzog remade what he considers to be the most visionary and important of all German films, F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent masterpiece, NOSFERATU.
As with most of Herzog's films, the story behind the production is almost more interesting than the film itself. Unable to shoot in Bremen, as Murnau did in 1922, Herzog prepared to settle for the Dutch town of Delft. Still bitter over their occupation by the Nazis during WWII, the citizens of Delft were less than enthusiastic about this small army of German filmmakers invading their town. When Herzog announced his plan to release 11,000 rats into the streets of Delft for the scene in which Nosferatu arrives (the director wanted grey rats but could only obtain white ones, which his crew painted grey), the Delft Burgermeister categorically refused and told the apparently insane German that his town had just spent months clearing the canals of their own home-grown rats and had no intention of reinfesting the area with laboratory rats from Hungary. Nonplussed, Herzog moved his rats to a more accommodating city, Schiedam, where he was allowed to shoot, albeit on a smaller scale.
While shooting Nosferatu Herzog already knew, that his eccentric star, Klaus Kinski, was notorious for his wild rants and tantrums. He later explained how he managed to "tame the animal", wild Kinski, with the threat of another 4 hour vampire make-up.
"If Kinski would start a tantrum, it would be four hours of make-up again". And so he was peaceful.
Herzog's personal interest in making a vampire movie, was to develop its genre further. In his opinion "the genre of vampire films requires extreme stylization", and that is what he excessively did in Nosferatu. On the one hand one can feel how this technique of stylization creates a surreal and fascinating, somewhat romantic-frightening atmosphere. On the other hand it causes the film to be "slow" in a cetrtain way, one of its often criticised weaknesses. However, Nosferatu is one of the best of its genre, because the portraying of its protagonist is so unbelievable commiserative. Herzog transforms the vampire-genre into something new and Kinski's presence gives him the key for that.
Disclaimer: These are my opinions and not fact as realised in these here United States, lest I give my friends the idea that everyone thinks like me.
