Cinematic Passion Projects & White Whales
January 11, 2025 6:29 AM   Subscribe

"Eggers first announced his intention to remake “Nosferatu” 10 years ago, but his affinity for the landmark 1922 horror goes back much further. Growing up in New Hampshire, Eggers first encountered Orlok as a 9-year-old, on a VHS copy of Murnau’s “Nosferatu” made from a faded 16-millimeter print. He was so compelled by Max Schreck’s performance of the titular vampire, which felt all the more eerily authentic within the degraded version of the film he saw, that in high school, he directed a stage adaptation—later staged professionally—that was both silent and black-and-white, with music playing and actors painted monochrome. (Orlok was played, of course, by Eggers himself.)"

Anna Biller on The Love Witch. Francis Ford Coppola on Metropolis. Spike Lee on Malcolm X.

Do you have a favorite film that was a disaster in the making? A longtime passion project that flopped? A victory snatched from the jaws of film exec mismanagement?
posted by cupcakeninja (33 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
favorite film that was a disaster in the making?

fitzcarraldo
posted by HearHere at 7:12 AM on January 11 [14 favorites]


Apocalypse Now with its wonderful making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness. By all means skip the directors cut of AN... it's tedious and unnecessary.
posted by kokaku at 7:22 AM on January 11 [9 favorites]


One of the biggest unrealized cinematic projects for me is Guillermo del Toro's version of "In the Mountains of Madness."

I mean, fucking hell, I think it would have been incredible. (Friends of ours have a mock-up movie poster of the project from an artist who was working with GdT at the time.)
posted by Kitteh at 7:29 AM on January 11 [13 favorites]


Hearts of Darkness was my first exposure to this particular genre (subgenre?) of documentary, a real eye-opener. I've subsequently enjoyed a number of them, maybe Lost in La Mancha most of all.

Kitteh, 100%. Every time I see anything about whatever his next project is, a tiny part of me hopes against hope...
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:33 AM on January 11 [7 favorites]


It's crazy to me how Eggers' Nosferatu was a passion project based on his love for the 1922 version, and is still so INERT... I know people are loving it but to me it was flat as a pancake. Just weird that he found Max Schreck's Orlock so eerie and then made his Orlock nothing like that. Nothing inhuman, just a giant mustache and Richard Spencer hair.

I don't know, man. Every time I see something about Nosferatu I get annoyed. I love Eggers so much I watched it twice because I couldn't believe how boring it was... now having seen it twice I can barely remember a minute of it.
posted by skullhead at 7:56 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]


this particular genre (subgenre?) of documentary

Since HearHere has mentioned Fitzcarraldo, let's not forget Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, about how Herzog made it.
posted by rory at 7:56 AM on January 11 [9 favorites]


(Not until this interview had I heard that Albin Grau (producer and production designer on Murnau's original) was an occultist--I was always puzzled over why the contract in the earlier part of the movie looks the way it does, full of esoteric symbols rather than, like, blackletter or something--and now I'm eager to read more about how Grau's experience informs how Nosferatu feels.) (also I'm still very excited to see Eggers' movie.)
posted by mittens at 7:56 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]


In re: Fitzcarraldo (of which I am a big fan) along with Blank's 'making of' documentary: while I don't question the relative difficulties that might have been involved in making such a film, I myself always have to wonder about how much of any Herzog project (up to an including the man himself) is a construction and how much is real. Possibly the most honest thing I've watched was 'My Best Fiend' in which Herzog reflects on his long & complex relationship with Klaus Kinski. Among other things he pretty much refutes the Kinski gun story from Blank's documentary.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:51 AM on January 11 [6 favorites]


I've seen the original Nosferatu several times - it must be one of the most overrated films in motion picture history. In the early 1920s, silent films were developing into an artistic medium; compared to other films from the same period its pace and storytelling seem completely senile. I really don't understand the hype. Do you?
posted by Termite at 8:54 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]


In all the discussion of Eggers' Nosferatu, including an interview I heard on BBC Radio 4 recently with supporting actor Willem Dafoe, I haven't heard anyone even mention the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, an excellent imagining of the making of the 1922 version. Which is pretty odd, as that also starred Willem Dafoe, playing Schreck/Orlok himself!

I've never seen the original, but went along to a packed 35mm screening of Eggers' version a week or so ago and thought it was great.
posted by rory at 9:20 AM on January 11 [11 favorites]


Apocalypse Now with its wonderful making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness. By all means skip the directors cut of AN... it's tedious and unnecessary.

I'd agree the theatrical cut is superior, but I do think the extended version is worth seeing once. The French plantation sequence doesn't belong in the film, but is very interesting all the same.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:32 AM on January 11 [7 favorites]


I haven't heard anyone even mention the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire

I saw Eggers' Nosferatu last week and thought it was...fine, but sort of leaden and inert. But if it leads more people to check out Shadow of the Vampire, it will all have been worth it.
posted by MrBadExample at 9:56 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]


I'd agree the theatrical cut is superior, but I do think the extended version is worth seeing once. The French plantation sequence doesn't belong in the film, but is very interesting all the same.

The most recent director’s cut (“Final Cut”) trims 20 minutes back down from the Redux version, e.g. it cuts the second Playmates scene and I think shortens the plantation part but it’s still there. I’m good with that version personally.
posted by atoxyl at 10:02 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]


Jodorowsky's Dune comes to mind. It would have been a train wreck, but really it was about the friends he made on the way.
posted by ishmael at 10:08 AM on January 11 [9 favorites]


I really don't understand the hype.

I think most scholars look at that film from the perspective of the performances and how it influenced the films, particularly horror, that followed. It is the vampire myth shorn of all our contemporary clichés and it is about the atmosphere and the ideas. But any movie is a part of a context, part of the era that is made in and the audience for which it is oriented. So it is always going to be challenge to watch something 100+ years old because we are not from 1922 and how we consume the film and our standards of what is important in film are very different. Sometimes a film works beyond its era sometimes it doesn't.

The French plantation sequence doesn't belong in the film, but is very interesting all the same.

It feels like a totally different film in that sequence but I won't lie I do like it.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:10 AM on January 11 [10 favorites]


compared to other films from the same period its pace and storytelling seem completely senile. I really don't understand the hype. Do you?

there's also (speaking of Werner Herzog) 1979's Nosfteratu The Vampyre which I recall getting taken very seriously at the time. But when I tried watching it (albeit on VHS tape) I just couldn't stick with it. Too much about mood*, I guess. Too slow. Later I was berated by a friend for not giving it a proper chance. Argument ensued and he eventually admitted, "well yeah, I was tripping on LSD when I saw it -- that might've affected my impression of the passing of time."

Subsequently, when discussing serious but unhurried art cinema with said friend, I'd always inquire: "Is acid required?"

* Popul Vuh's soundtrack for Nosferatu The Vampyre is a gem. No moving pictures required. Just close your eyes and luxuriate.
posted by philip-random at 10:21 AM on January 11 [9 favorites]


Growing up, my neighbor John's mom's claim to fame was that she was the "Indian girl" in the Playmates sequences. John being a teenaged boy, he wasn't like, super stoked to have people watch and discuss how hot his mom was years before.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:22 AM on January 11 [8 favorites]


An underrated passion project disaster + revealing documentary combo that I like is the The Demon Lover (AKA Coven / The Devil Master) and its awkwardly hilarious making of documentary Demon Lover Diary. The plot of the documentary is so close that when I saw American Movie I thought they were making a parody of Demon Lover Diary.

There's also the pair The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) and Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:39 AM on January 11 [7 favorites]


The Herzog film was one I hadn't seen until quite recently. Has its ups, has its downs. I now regret having watched it, due to what I subsequently learned about torture of animals during the filming. Not OK.
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:49 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]


Has its ups, has its downs.
A distillation of porn criticism
posted by ginger.beef at 10:59 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]


Niko Pueringer (of Corridor Digital) had always wanted to make a short film about a colorful clown getting married on Mars. But he couldn't, because the sodium vapor process and specialized cameras used for Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks had been lost for decades -- literally, as the specialized beam-splitter prism for the cameras could not be located -- and doing it with greenscreens and chroma keying would be too labor intensive.

Until computer graphics and light engineer Dr. Paul Debevec contacted Niko in 2024, with a way to recreate the process...
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:46 PM on January 11 [10 favorites]


I keep thinking Dave Eggers and wonder what this would look like in an alternate universe.
posted by slogger at 2:13 PM on January 11 [5 favorites]


American Movie comes to mind.
posted by abraxasaxarba at 2:42 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]


I like the films made by outsiders, people who just felt compelled to make movies.

Deathbed: The Bed that Eats
The Godmonster of Indian Flats

for example.

And a big heaping of affection for The Love Witch, Ive shown that one to so many folks.
posted by chromecow at 3:01 PM on January 11 [3 favorites]


And since Apocalypse Now did come up, Lionsgate seems to have more copies available for sale of their marvelously excessive 6 disc, 4K set of that film.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:08 PM on January 11


I loved watching Eggars' version; I felt that it created an amazing nightmare-like cursed atmosphere that the film just bathed in, until it realized 30 minutes from the end that some plot had to happen, at which point it got a bit rushed. Not surprised to learn the film was a life-long dream.

It seems stranger, in retrospect, that Herzog took on a horror film, just as Lynch took Dune a few years later -- neither of those versions captured those directors' strengths.
posted by Theiform at 4:02 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]


I don't know how this slots into the conversation, if at all, but I made a project of reading all of Frank Herbert's Dune books in the first half of last year, and I feel like a lot of stuff in the later books echoed themes and ideas Lynch would use in both versions of Twin Peaks. I know Dune was a work for hire project, but I feel like he took it pretty seriously and probably was ready (at some point) to keep going with it.

As for Jodorowsky's version, from what I can tell many of his ideas were original -- additions to the text -- and went into entirely original, unrelated comics, so it's less a lost vision than simply a relocated one.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:15 PM on January 11 [3 favorites]


Deathbed: The Bed that Eats is a seminal work of great cultural importance.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:55 PM on January 11


I have only seen the original Nosferatu once. At a too young age at an art house cinema.

To me, it lacked action, special effects - speech. But what it did have, to my impressionable mind, was intensity and the sheer intent of the characters that went straight through the screen into my brain. It was almost telepathy.

I do not want re-watch it (or watch the remake for that matter). I want to have that rosy, youthful impression that this silent, black and white movie could transcend the medium.
posted by Rabarberofficer at 9:08 AM on January 12 [3 favorites]


Ashwagandha: I think most scholars look at that film from the perspective of the performances and how it influenced the films, particularly horror, that followed. It is the vampire myth shorn of all our contemporary clichés and it is about the atmosphere and the ideas. But any movie is a part of a context, part of the era that is made in and the audience for which it is oriented. So it is always going to be challenge to watch something 100+ years old because we are not from 1922 and how we consume the film and our standards of what is important in film are very different. Sometimes a film works beyond its era sometimes it doesn't.

It’s very much like early standup comedy. If you grew up liking the Carlins and Pryors and dig into their predecessors like Bruce, Nichols & May, Stahl, etc, you’re going to find yourself asking when the comedy starts.
posted by dr_dank at 9:59 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: you’re going to find yourself asking when the comedy starts.
posted by chromecow at 3:43 PM on January 12 [3 favorites]


I liked the new Nosferatu but didn't love it--I personally am all for a slow burn and have loved long movies like The New World and the director's cut of Midsommar, but Nosferatu just genuinely needed a tighter edit. I'm glad it got made though! Always here for more weirdo movies.

A friend recommended The Vourdalak (kind of a cross between The Love Witch and Nosferatu in a way, in that it's a vampire movie that's also overtly, lovingly retro). I had kind of assumed it was just going to be cheesy fun, but I ended up finding it more disturbing than Nosferatu once it really got going, for what it's worth. Hard recommend. You'll know from the trailer if it's your jam or not.

I do really like the point in the article about Orlok being a more Slavic vampire; upyrs are gross! They're a lot more overtly dead than the ones we're used to seeing, which are more influenced by modern embalming. I'm not sure the design 100% worked, but it came from somewhere. I liked the foregrounding of Ellen as a character too; she's a lot more emotionally dynamic than Mina Harker, being essentially Mina/Lucy combined into one person.

I like the films made by outsiders, people who just felt compelled to make movies.

My favorite example of that is the original 1962 Carnival of Souls, which you can watch in its entirety here. Herk Harvey had some experience in that he made educational films, but he didn't make a feature before or after, and it's so goddamn cool and weird. I'm obsessed with the fact it cost about the same amount to make as Manos: The Hands of Fate. It is a little bit better.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 2:58 PM on January 13 [2 favorites]


I suppose if we're talking about cinematic passion projects we could also include If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), which is almost literally a passion play.

The director Ron Ormond was a former B-movie shlockmeister who'd become born-again, and decided to use his talents to dramatize the preaching of Rev. Estes Pirkle:
A wild vision of what would happen if America were taken over by godless Communists, Footmen used every exploitation shock gimmick ever devised—only, this time, they were being used to save souls. Pivotal scenes featured Christians being indoctrinated, tortured, raped, and slaughtered—usually by Cecil Scaife, who plays a leering Russian “commissar,” complete with jowly sideburns and an indeterminate accent. In one scene, children’s eardrums are punctured with bamboo spears so they cannot hear the word of God. Another scene reveals the Communists’ insidious brainwashing techniques: In an empty lot, elderly churchgoers are forced to sit on folding chairs while loudspeakers drone, “Communism is good...communism is good...Christianity is stupid...Christianity is stupid....” When one poor lad fails to renounce Jesus, his head is lopped off with a machete.

The blood looks as if someone had spilled a vat of red fingernail polish, and Pirkle’s parishoners turn out stilted performances, but Footmen’s blood-spattered scenario and its unrelievedly grim tone apparently sent impressionable viewers screaming for the altar. Ron was making films to literally scare the hell out of people—and he succeeded beyond all expectations.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:55 PM on January 13 [1 favorite]


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