The Nosferatu director has a take on the Charles Dickens Christmas classic.
We’re down with Robert Eggers‘ upcoming medieval werewolf flick, Werwulf, which is due to shoot later this year. That sort of historical horror is right on brand for the carefully coifed auteur. And while we might side-eye any attempt to do a follow up to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (although, to be fair, Netflix’s it’s not hard to see why he’d be drawn to the idea. All else aside, The Witch and The Northman star Anya Taylor-Joy looks like a Brian Froud illustration already. But if we were prognosticating on what other projects might be in the ol’ lighthouse keeper’s future, a new adaptation of the Charles Dickens yuletide classic A Christmas Carol would not have made the short list.
But we would have been wrong. It turns out the Robert Eggers take on living deliciously involves having as many projects in development as possible. And after the box office success of Nosferatu ($181m worldwide against a $50m budget – nice) he’s in a position to get a lot of movies on the boil, including A Christmas Carol for Warner. And he’s apparently writing the character of Ebenezer Scrooge with old mate Willem Dafoe in mind.
Deadline has the full – if light on detail – story. Chris and Eleanor Columbus are producing through their Maiden Voyage shingle, and though you might think the Home Alone guy and the man who gave us the scariest goat in the history of cinema wouldn’t have much in common, the Columbii (Eleanor is Chris’ daughter) helped get The Witch made, going on to produce all of Eggers’ movies except The Northman.
Even if you’ve never read Dickens’ 1843 novella (although it’s under 30,000 words – you’ll smash through it) you’ve almost certainly seen one of the countless screen adaptations that have already sprung from A Christmas Carol. Personally, I love Richard Donner’s Scrooged, with Bill Murray getting dealt life lessons from a panoply of ghosts, including New York Dolls frontman David Johansen as The Ghost of Christmas Past.
I’ve come around on The Muppet Christmas Carol, too, although Robert Zemeckis’ 2009 effort with a mocapped Jim Carrey is best avoided.
You have to wonder what Eggers might bring to the table, though. The guy is known for a surgical – and occasionally visceral – attention to historical detail. Maybe the Robert Eggers Christmas Carol will finally give us a medically accurate depiction of whatever the fuck’s wrong with Tiny Tim. They could examine him in one of those amphitheaters for an audience of medical students, like something out of The Elephant Man. I’m just spitballing, you understand.
But it does seem a weird match of director and material. There’s no doubt Eggers will nail the technical challenges of the project, and it’ll look the business – he has a hell of an eye – but perhaps the technical and aesthetic possibilities are the whole attraction here. Eggers is a filmmaker who likes to show his homework way more than he likes to show himself, after all. That’s one of the reasons I never quite warmed to his Nosferatu redux, a film that’s both shackled by its awe of its predecessors and in love with its own process, resulting in a kind of act of cinematic veneration that comes across as empty ritual – rote gestures with no animating spark.
…which might be a topic for another time. It might tie in to why I think he’s the wrong guy for Labyrinth, too, come to think of it. For now, let’s just say the word probably doesn’t need a historically accurate Dickensian ghost story, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s probably Eggers.
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