John Malkovich credited as playing...
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
- F.W. Murnau: Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; and our music will linger and finally overwhelm, because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.
- F.W. Murnau: Why him, you monster? Why not the... script girl?
- Max Schreck: Oh. The script girl. I'll eat her later.
- F.W. Murnau: Don't think I can't harm you.
- Max Schreck: Tell me how you would harm me when even I don't know how I could harm myself.
- F.W. Murnau: Go ahead! Eat the writer! That will leave you explaining how your character gets to Bremen!
- F.W. Murnau: I will not allow you to destroy my picture!
- Max Schreck: This is hardly your picture any longer.
- F.W. Murnau: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Max Schreck, who will be portraying our vampire, Count Orlock. As you no doubt have heard, Max's methods are somewhat... unconventional, but... I am sure you will come to respect his artistry in this matter.
- F.W. Murnau: Time will no longer be a dark spot on our lungs. They will no longer say 'you had to have been there', because the fact is, Albin, we were.
- F.W. Murnau: Death of centuries! Moonchaser! Blasphemer! Monkey! Vase of prehistory. Finally to Earth, and finally born.
- F.W. Murnau: Albin, collect the wooden stake and return it to its rightful place; it is necessary for the final frame, to remind us of the inadequacies of our plans, our contingencies, every missed train and failed picnic, every lie to a child.
- F.W. Murnau: Why would you possibly want to be in a play when you could be in a film?
- Greta Schroeder: An audience gives me life. This... thing only takes it from me.