Every actor demands different things. Every human being you come in contact with in your life, you have to deal with in slightly different ways.
— Robert Eggers
American audiences, a lot of people couldn't understand a word of 'The Witch.'
The Lighthouse' couldn't have been made without this kind of freedom that is allowed to some filmmakers to be able to play around with genre. Jennifer Kent's 'Nightingale' is more horrific than any horror movie - but also, I don't think you could make that movie without this kind of freedom.
I think the thing that is most influential about 'Haxan' is the casting of the witches as just old women and the strength of that.
If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.
The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.
Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.
Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.
Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'
I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.
Willem Dafoe is a huge hero of mine.
The figure of the witch was interesting to me, because of the primal, archetypical witch nightmares I had, even as an adult. But as a kid, it started with Margaret Hamilton in 'The Wizard Of Oz' as this inescapable horror.
Certainly as a director you want to be working with people who are on the same page as you and that you can trust and get along with.
Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.
I was interested in dark subject matter for sure, including folklore, fairy tales, mythology, archetypal stories of people going into the bowels of the forest.
I'm trying to communicate with other people about humanity and stuff, man!
When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.
I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.
People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times - and 'A Christmas Carol.'
I think where genre is limiting is that in the marketplace, you have to put things in a box to create expectations to make a profit, and that's where you run into trouble.
Haxan' is really cool. There are a lot of things about it that are just great.
When I was younger, I used to think it was kind of cool to abuse actors mentally, but I really disagree with that now.
Certainly in Catholic countries, the peasantry have always found ways to integrate pagan things in a way that makes it a little bit easier just to be a human being.
If you could custom build new cinemas for every release of every movie, I think filmmakers would work in a lot of different aspect ratios.
Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.
Honestly, I'm a snobby person.
So we didn't have any stars for 'The Witch.' A24 felt they needed something special for marketing, and they wanted to have the Satanic Temple endorse the film.
What's so interesting to me about history is - what's interesting to anyone - is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we're the same.
Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.
The intention behind 'The Witch' was to be very restrained. I think that story, while it sometimes annoys me, needed to take itself incredibly seriously.
I saw a picture of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in a book in my elementary school and I lost my mind.
The 'Friday the 13th' Jason movies were way too scary for me.
I always wanted to do film. And I still love theater.
For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.
If you're a part of this urban intelligentsia, you're not around animals all the time the way people were in the past. So animals become a part of the folklore.
Being a wannabe auteur and my favorite filmmakers being part of the dead canon of European, Japanese art-house masters, I want to say that I don't want to care about genre and how it's limiting and all of that stuff.
The Lighthouse' isn't scary. A few people have said it is, but I don't think it is.
I'm a big fan of silent cinema and I think that before I got into the canon of European arthouse cinema, the first interesting films I liked as a kid were German expressionist silent films.
What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.
Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.
You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.
It's pretty easy to learn about lighthouses because there's a lot of lighthouse enthusiasts. Really, there's lots of books about it, and it's fairly easy to find lighthouse keepers' journals and logbooks.
I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.
Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult - these are the things I'm most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I'm very passionate about cinema.
I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.
As a second-time director you don't want to be working with someone who's a star that wants you to get down and kiss their feet.
The Witch' was intended to be a horror movie.
Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.
In earlier cultures with pagan belief systems, light and dark were celebrated equally, people were around death a lot. In contemporary Western culture, we don't have that, and horror is a place you can be immersed in it.
I'd love to do more theater.
