Count Orlok's Coat (with Linda Muir)

From leg-of-mutton sleeves to fur overcoats, the costumes in Robert Eggers's Nosferatu are extraordinarily detailed and, thanks to the research of Oscar-nominated costume designer Linda Muir, incredibly historically accurate. Dana speaks with Muir about her work, and the process of creating costumes for German gentleman, wealthy ladies, and a 300-year-old decomposing corpse. Support Noble Blood: —Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Noble Blood merch https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestory/and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story' https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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• 0:35Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised.

• 0:45Dana Schwartz?

  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 Eggers' 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

• 1:26Dana Schwartz?

  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 Eggers' vision of Germany and Transylvania. Linda, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much. The costumes truly were one of the first things I noticed about this film. They're incredibly detail-oriented and incredibly period-accurate. Could you talk a little bit about just how you started the process?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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 Leathrop, the production designer,

• 2:42Speaker 03

  his DP, Jaren, 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 go through Robert's images because, you know, they're not necessarily dead on in terms of the period, but 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.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  You know, the Viking era that we did for the Northman 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.

• 3:51Dana Schwartz?

  Fashion plates, I imagine?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  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, Mirnaud's Nosferatu, you know, set in Germany at eighteen thirty-eight. 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, that was the journal that I was looking

• 4:35Speaker 03

  for. And eventually, due to one of my assistant costume designers, Anna Monroe, 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 eighteen thirty-five to eighteen thirty-nine. And I wanted, obviously, leading up to, and then I wanted after, so that I wouldn't go, if anything was massively different in thirty-nine, I didn't want to go there. So that was really exciting, because then, particularly for the gentleman, you know,

• 5:13Speaker 03

  I mean, like, the women I could piece together, and the women were more from portraits, actually. I got more inspiration from, from portraits, paintings than I did from the fashion plates. Though, you know, there, there was a whimsy in the fashion plates that I, I, you know, was trying to capture. And certainly, the feeling of, you know, is it ever too much?

• 5:38Dana Schwartz?

  It's a very interesting time for fashion, a bit of a transitional period, if I imagine, because eighteen thirty-eight is, is, if I'm correct, incredibly early Victorian, and we have these sort of leg-of-mutton sleeves that are transitioning away.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  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 and the women's bodice sleeve is changing. And the pieces, 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 all. And then I understand why.

• 6:31Dana Schwartz?

  What would you say is characteristic of that period?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  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 her Ellen's story, and then use Anna's excess really to also tell the story by contrast.

• 7:13Dana Schwartz?

  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.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:28Dana Schwartz?

  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?

• 7:40Speaker 03

  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 lace 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. Uh, the wearer tightened it on themselves, herself. And so it still laces up the back. It it has a closed front, so the busk, it 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.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  And 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. Severs has the now we know and have known for quite a long time misguided notion that tightening the corset can calm the uterus.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  And so i- in the film, when we see this in Ellen, she's she's convulsing, she's communing with Orlok. She is not in the room, you know, with the men that are there. She is away in her mind. So her body is convulsing. And so the notion is that Dr. Severs will tighten the corset. And Harding, Frederick Harding, who is her guardian, so to speak, friend of 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. Then we would not have seen any of Lily Rose's extraordinary portraying of this state.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  And so the the fact that the corset had ties in the front meant that they could start flipper over and continue tightening with her face to the camera, which was, you know, a real boon, obviously, because we want to see that.

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• 11:31Dana Schwartz?

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• 13:54Dana Schwartz?

  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?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Robert has had this in his head for a very long time. He initially saw the images of Max Schreck in Mirnaus Nosferatu when he was a boy, you know, nine, nine 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, 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 abroad 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.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  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, in as much as possible with these characters rooted in, in real time. And so, he wanted to know, okay, so Count Orlok, you know, what would a Hungarian count of roughly, you know, 300 years prior to our storyline, you know, what would he look like? And the first thing I think that Robert really cottoned on to was the notion that he had to have a moustache, you know, just, you know, there's no way around this, you know, he has to have a moustache.

• 15:45Dana Schwartz?

  And what a moustache he has.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And what a moustache 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, of images of, of this. And so, again, I start to, because we have to make these pieces and we have, and I have to know what they look like, and I, I have to get a sense of... What fabrics I'm trying to find and what buttons and what, you know, embellishments. And 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.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  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 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 Met. These were not necessarily so, you know, I'm looking at 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.

• 17:17Dana Schwartz?

  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.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Figuring out the garments that would make up an outfit for a Hungarian count of great wealth, entitlement and personality from around fifteen sixty, fifteen eighty to, you know, roughly sixteen twentyish. 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 that they don't seem to be always, especially for the nobility,

• 18:13Speaker 03

  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 and then weighing them with fish weights to give them, you know, a bit of heft.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:19Dana Schwartz?

  It gives it a sense of menace, too. It does make it look like sort of a cape.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  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 in fittings, it would just slide off his shoulders. And so for practicality and for the image of it, we in a costume department devised a harness that he wore underneath the doorman, which is the tunic that he wears under the overcoat. And there were slices hidden in the shoulders and and they had quick release mechanisms that we could snap and then, 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.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  And he could really recede into the bulk of it when he wanted to not be visible. He could, you know, expand his chest and have not just the galloons that are visible on the overcoat, but also all of the incredible gold lace overlay that is is present in the doorman as well and all that could be visible. So it gave Bill confidence that he could act with the costume. Not have it be cumbersome. So then the he had silk trousers of tight fit. And they went into one of my favorite pieces, which were the boots. And in reality, they would have been leather mules

• 20:47Speaker 03

  with about a four inch steel heel that is kind of horseshoe shaped, really freaky. And a leather sock that slid into the mule. For our safety and for convenience purposes, you know, I designed it so that it was all one. And Bill Skarsgård 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 Kulpak hat, K O L P A K. And that is a crazy weird design. It's 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?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  And then they it had the embellishment of hawk feathers and and the and be jeweled at the front with the pearls and and jewels. So all of that was intended to allow Robert, our director writer, to obscure when when Thomas Hutter first comes to the castle. It's such a weird world. He's he's as soon as he comes into the Carpathian Mountains, he encounters, you know, 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, you know? By the time he gets to the castle, he's his horse is gone and is met by this unbelievable carriage.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  You know, every event leading up to the castle is flummoxed to more and more and more. And and so he's comes in and 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 three hundred years old and Robert has chosen to really go with the 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.

• 22:56Dana Schwartz?

  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.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  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, Orlok obscuring all of that rot until he gets that signature. And also, it's kind of an ode or an homage, a nod, whatever,

• 23:48Speaker 03

  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, you know, stand by this notion for myself, that, you know, it could be more terrifying if what you're

• 24:32Speaker 03

  looking at is potentially real, you know, then it really does close that gap between the fantastical and real.

• 24:41Dana Schwartz?

  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?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:22Dana Schwartz?

  Willem Dafoe wore such an extraordinary, if I remember correctly, sort of floral coat in one scene.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yes, you don't see it a lot in his attic room because it's lit, you know, very, very sparsely with candles and, and oil lamps and things like that, but he had beautiful little curled toed slippers and, and, you know, very oriental gentleman's kind of evening wear. But you know, the other thing you, 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, uh, his, his page is called Transylvania dot heritage, I believe. And he's messaged me just to say, finally, finally, respect given to the folk costuming of Romania.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  And I can't time, I'm gonna 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, of people who still create this costuming, but what we were looking for was pre-fotography. So we were relying on illustrations and written accounts and then having that translated. And then also in the monastery, the Great Schema Abbass, 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

• 26:56Speaker 03

  reality. But, you know, the Great Schema Abbass, her Annaleve was so researched, so we, 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's the, 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, and the applique work was all researched as well.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:51Dana Schwartz?

  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 knee 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.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 28:19Dana Schwartz?

  Have a wonderful day.

• 28:29Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer, Reema Ilkayali, and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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• 29:40Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.