We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.
— Robert Eggers
I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.
African Queen' is pretty darn great.
To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.
I definitely hope to create, to tell some stories on larger canvases, which does mean making something that is narratively more broad. But that's not a bad thing.
My brother and I grew up in a setting in the woods very much like 'The Witch' in southern New Hampshire, and then we would drive up north to Maine to settings like 'The Lighthouse' for vacations.
I don't want to act like the witch trials all over New England were warranted, but when you live in a culture that believes something is real, it feels very real.
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.
When 'The Lighthouse,' bizarrely, became the film that people wanted to greenlight, it was really clear that those were the only two people to play the roles. And I knew that they would want to do it.
Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.
Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.
My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.
Witches were really scary to me as a kid.
After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.
I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.
I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.
Parajanov's love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.
I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.
I had these fashion history books that I really enjoyed looking at. I liked costumes and used to wear them to school until I got beat up for it.
The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.
For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.
Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.
I think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.
This makes me sound like some new age, crystal-worshipping weirdo, but the woods behind my house really felt haunted by the past when I was a kid.
Three years into getting 'The Witch' financed, I was hanging out with my brother and he was like, 'I'm working on this script. It's a ghost story in a lighthouse.' I thought, 'Damn, that's a really good idea, I wish I'd had it.'
I was totally shocked when Willem Dafoe's manager said that he wanted to have lunch with me.
Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga' was huge for me. Seeing how all the creatures were made, looking inside Jabba The Hut, all of the maquettes lined up, building the world... 'This is a job?!' I was always avidly watching special features and behind the scenes stuff.
I remember seeing re-releases of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' and 'Bambi' in the theater very young. They had huge impacts on me, particularly the dark aspects.
I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.
I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.
I don't like twists. I don't get much out of them. If you know two cars are about to run into each other, you don't walk away and say, 'Oh, I know what's going to happen.' You watch.
The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.
You've got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny.
Bergman's my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose.
Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you're just turning the camera on what's happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.
I grew up doing a lot of theater - acting and making sets and costumes.
I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.
I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.
For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.
I would definitely agree that 'The Witch' doesn't leave much of anything to the imagination. There are some ambiguities about 'The Witch,' for sure, but all in all, it's pretty clear what's going on.
What I love about research is when I'm having a bad day and I can't write, I'll just research some more, I'll learn some more and I'll have better command of the world of the film.
As a kid, picturing people who grew up in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I walking around in hose and latched shoes in the woods behind my house was an interesting atmospheric thing for me.
In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.
I still know the lyrics to pretty much any 'Mary Poppins' song.
Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.
Witches were part of my imaginary childhood playground, so I wanted to make an archetypal fairytale about the mythic idea of what New England was to me as a kid.
The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.
Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary film.
Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He's responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from 'Nosferatu' to 'Faust' to 'Sunset.'
