Best of 2024: Neil Burger (Inheritance) on Nosferatu

The acclaimed director, whose new movie Inheritance is out today, on Robert Eggers' remake of the horror classic.

Nosferatu, the 1922 silent movie by F.W. Murnau, is what made me want to be a filmmaker. I saw it on television when I was a teenager, and I didn’t quite know what I was watching. I found it so unnerving and strange and weird and fascinating and I became obsessed with it. The hand-cranked camera, the flickering images, that grainy black and white, and those strange people. It has always been one of my favorite movies, and was the film that got me interested in German Expressionist cinema. Later on, I saw Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu, too.

I really love Robert Eggers’ movies The Witch and The Lighthouse, so I was very excited when I heard he was going to make his own version of Nosferatu. He talked about how audacious it was to remake that movie, but I thought that if anybody was the right person to remake it, it was him. He just has the perfect sensibility, so I was really interested to see what he did with this movie. Whenever I sit down to watch a film, I’m just praying that I’m going to be blown away. It’s a tall order, obviously, and there are very few films that even try to do that, let alone accomplish it. Robert Eggers seems like he is interested in the same thing, so I was hoping he would make something as strange and compelling as Murnau’s original- he delivered.

Eggers’ Nosferatu is a fascinating and successful reimagining of the story- it’s really good. Like the original, it’s not aiming to be scary or frightening, but rather haunting and unnerving. It has a creeping existential dread to it that, to me, is strange and horrifying, it rattles your sense of what’s real and what isn’t. It functions as both a dream and a nightmare. It’s told visually and it transports you. What I’m looking for in cinema is a kind of waking dream, so to me, it fulfilled its promise. I was knocked out by it.

A few years back, I made a movie with Lily-Rose Depp and she’s such an unusual presence, striking and surreal in her own way. All of Nosferatu worked in its totality, as the best movies should. I thought everything was extremely well done and I was particularly struck by the disjunctive editing, the mix of what feels real and what feels like a hallucination.

I love seeing movies that make me excited about cinema. I remember the first time I saw Eraserhead, which was in a movie theater with a friend of mine in New York. Afterward we just sat on a bench in the street for such a long time. We’d had the wind knocked out of us. Experiencing great cinema like that can be an ordeal or it can be a revelation, but it’s always interesting to me and gets me thinking. Sometimes I want to see how the filmmaker did it, and sometimes I don’t want to know and just want to live with the experience.

For me, ultimately what is cinematic is an experience that transports you. To be cinematic doesn’t mean you have to have sweeping vistas, like Lawrence of Arabia, it just means a film has to be well observed. One of my favorite filmmakers is Mike Leigh and I consider Mike Leigh’s movies incredibly cinematic, even though they’re not expansive, especially his early ones, like Bleak Moments. That film is so well observed, as is his latest movie, Hard Truths. He just has such a keen eye on the human experience and the human condition, the gestures and little foibles and idiosyncrasies people have. I was good friends Mike’s longtime cinematographer, with Dick Pope, who shot The Illusionist for me, so I’ve become friendly with Mike, who I saw a few weeks ago in New York. Dick died only a few months ago, which was just tragic.

My new movie, Inheritance, leans more traditionally cinematic, as it actually does have a sweeping scope to it. The movie goes around the world – from New York to Cairo to Delhi to Seoul and then back to New York – and we, as filmmakers, took the same trip as the main character, Maya. It has a kind of “stolen” aesthetic to it, as we shot with a very small crew, and in real situations where people didn’t know we were shooting. It felt thematically right, as Maya (played by Phoebe Dynevor), is a little bit of a kleptomaniac; as she’s stealing things, the movie’s stealing things, too. It’s an immersive experience, and cinematic in its own particular way. On one hand, it’s very intimate, fully in Maya’s shoes, but it’s taking place on a global stage, amongst big crowds in Delhi and in Cairo, with life flowing around us. Thinking about Nosferatu, Hard Truths and Inheritance, it’s a great feeling to know how different these films can be while all feeling so at home as pieces of cinema.

Neil Burger is the director, writer and producer of the new thriller Inheritance, starring Phoebe Dynevor, which is now in theaters through IFC Films. His recent feature directing credits include Lionsgate’s The Marsh King’s Daughter starring Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn; and The Upside, starring Bryan Cranston, Kevin Hart and Nicole Kidman, which grossed over $100 million in North America and was Burger’s third number one opening in a row. He also directed Divergent, starring Shailene Woodley and Kate Winslet; Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro; and the critically acclaimed The Illusionist starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. His directorial feature debut, Interview With the Assassin was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards. Burger directed and executive produced the pilot and the final episode of Billions, the Showtime series starring Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti that ran for seven seasons. He also directed the first season finale of Showtime’s The Agency starring Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere, and Jeffrey Wright. (Photo by Chris Chapman.)