Robert Eggers
The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Cool
I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.Collection: Finance
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.
Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.
The Witch' was intended to be a horror movie.
I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.
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.'
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.
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.
The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.
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.
The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.
In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.
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.
To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.
Bergman's my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose.
Parajanov's love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.
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.'
You've got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny.
I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.
Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary film.
I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.
The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.
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.
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.
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.
Witches were really scary to me as a kid.
I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.
My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.
Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.
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.
Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.
I still know the lyrics to pretty much any 'Mary Poppins' song.
Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.
I was totally shocked when Willem Dafoe's manager said that he wanted to have lunch with me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.
Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.
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.
I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.
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.
I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.