Location Scouting With Robert Eggers, Who Knows a Great Bone Church in Prague

Welcome to Location Scout, where GQ asks our favorite actors and directors for insider travel recommendations in places where they shot their last project.

Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, is known for his obsessive attention to detail when crafting his historical horrors. It’s precisely that discerning mindset that made us want to hit him up for travel recommendations—in this case, for Prague.

The director spent nine months there for his latest movie, Nosferatu, an opulently freaky Dracula film starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, and Lily Rose Depp, out on December 25. Though Nosferatu is set in the fictional German town of Wisborg and in rural Transylvania, it was largely filmed in Prague’s Barrandov Studios.

Eggers moved his family from London to the residential Vinohrady neighborhood, where they quickly got comfortable. He recalls being on the phone with Skarsgård, who had just seen his Dracula makeup and was getting nervous. “We were walking through Wenceslas Square and my son could tell that Bill was worried about something,” Eggers recalls. “And he said, ‘Tell Bill Prague is a magical city.’”

Here, Robert Eggers tips us off to his favorite spots in Prague, including restaurants, bars, and the bone church he describes as “a must-see for all goths.”

There’s tons of coffee shops and restaurants, but Kro is particularly good. They have a coffee shop that has coffee and pastries and stuff, and then a little restaurant that is hipsterified traditional Czech food. But that place was so delicious.

It sounds horrifying, but the standout dish is the pork knuckles. Their roast chicken is so good. There’s a lot of places where you could get roast chicken, including the farmers market. It cost nothing to have this amazing roast chicken. And I still constantly have a hankering for roast chicken because of my time in Prague.

There's a lot of meat and a lot of beer in Prague. If you're a vegetarian, you can definitely do Prague, but when you're in the Czech Republic outside of Prague, it becomes a little more difficult to be a vegetarian. There were plenty of vegetarian and vegan crew members. Pilsner Urquell is all over the place, but the locals will say, “This place has good beer. That place has not so good beer. This place has excellent beer.” It's always Pilsner Urqell, but it’s about how cold it is and how carbonated it is and how they pour it. So anyway, this is one of the prime Pilsner Urquell spots. And then they have a butcher counter where you can point to a steak or ask for a burger. But then you can also then go to an area with cooked food with a big tray and ask for how much beef neck and how many sausages, and they weigh it.

It was hard to go to Kantýna and not find [producer] Chris Columbus or one of the male actors who were all trying to be super skinny. They would skip the Pilsner Urquell and just have a steak and a pickle.

Lokál is more traditional Czech food. You can definitely get stuff that, for a Western palate, is a little bit weirder, but it's also very, very good and very lively and has very chill atmosphere.

It’s awesome because it has great food and great beer, but then you're at the top of the castle and you can look over all of Prague. That’s where I would take people when they first got there because it is pretty breathtaking to see it.

The view from the Prague Castle.

Eska has a market downstairs and then they have a relaxed Michelin-star restaurant upstairs. The menu is always changing, but I’ve never had a bad meal there.

The Alchemy Museum teaches you some history of alchemy and you see lots of old beakers and alchemical instruments. For someone with my particular interests, it's quite nice.

Prachov Rocks is a place that I recommend for a day trip outside of Prague to go on a hike. I didn't want to shoot there because it looks so Czech and it’s used very iconically in Jan Švankmajer’s Faust, and there's nothing like that in Transylvania. The mountains that looked more Transylvanian were near the Polish border, and by the time we were ready to shoot in February, they were too snowy to access. I said, Well, the Prachov Rocks do look amazing. They do look fairy-tale and we can get to them, so let's just do it. But it is an amazing place to hike. And you can see that vista in the film. But there's just so much of it and you go through all these crazy tunnels and stuff. It's really cool.

So this ossuary, also featured in a Jan Švankmajer film called The Ossuary, but it's basically a bone church. It's a church that's decorated with thousands of bones. You’ve seen things like this, maybe if you've gone to crypts in Italy, but it’s one of the most beautiful ossuaries I’ve ever been to.