Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Eggers - Page 2

The Witch' was intended to be a horror movie.

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.

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.

I'm trying to communicate with other people about humanity and stuff, man!

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.

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.

The Lighthouse' isn't scary. A few people have said it is, but I don't think it is.

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.

I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.

I'd love to do more theater.

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.

I always wanted to do film. And I still love theater.

Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.

American audiences, a lot of people couldn't understand a word of 'The Witch.'

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I saw a picture of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in a book in my elementary school and I lost my mind.

Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.

If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.

Willem Dafoe is a huge hero of mine.

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.

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.

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.

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 think the thing that is most influential about 'Haxan' is the casting of the witches as just old women and the strength of that.

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.

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.

Haxan' is really cool. There are a lot of things about it that are just great.

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.

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.

Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'

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.

I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.

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.

When I was younger, I used to think it was kind of cool to abuse actors mentally, but I really disagree with that now.