Was Wisborg inspired by real German cities?
It’s a collage of places. Lübeck is the one I used the most. In the wide shot of Wisborg, with the help of visual effects, you can see I picked a lot of buildings from that town. The church with the spire, the famous gate, a bunch of the houses—we scanned those from Lübeck. I looked at a lot of those Hanseatic towns during my research and then I scouted some along the Baltic coast in Germany. There are some amazing towns there. The problem for us was that they had been destroyed and rebuilt several times. And the historic parts are cleaned up and used as tourists attractions, which was less useful for this movie.
Is it true that you used real rats during the plague scenes?
We used about 5,000 real rats. We had real rats on the streets [of Wisborg]. What you don’t see, because we were clever about it, is the Plexiglass walls that were keeping the rats in a safe area on the set. Behind them, on the other side of the walls, would be the horses. We erased the edges with visual effects. In the chapel scene, we used a combination of rats and effects. In the foreground, the rats were real. But then I built what we called “rat mats,” which were half meter square molds of a bunch of rats climbing all over each other. Visual effects animated more rats on top of those. So we only had 5,000, but it looks like we had hundreds of thousands.
Did you draw on the original Nosferatu or any previous Dracula films in your design?
I suppose I was always drawing on them because the story is based off those and I was trying to fulfill the needs of the story. But I didn’t take anything directly. There’s a scene in the 1922 where the characters are at the beach and there’s a bunch of crosses to people who had died at sea and I did recreate that, although it’s not an exact recreation. But I wanted it to be similar. We actually built that on a lake in the Czech Republic and brought in a bunch of sand. We were looking at going to the North Sea to do it, but we had to be fiscally responsible.
Was there anywhere you visited in Prague or the Czech Republic that inspired your designs?
There’s a carriage museum in Čechy pod Kosířem that was beautiful. We rented a beautifully-carved Roma wagon there, but the whole place was really inspiring. Another location we used in Prague was the Olšany Cemetery where we built the mausoleum and the grave sites around it, but I also recommend the Old Jewish Cemetery. It’s absolutely breathtaking. Speculum Alchemiae is a museum about alchemy and it’s an amazing little spot. If you look in the apartment we built for Albin Eberhart Von Franz [played by Willem Dafoe], I used a lot of what I learned there.
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