Top 50 Robert Eggers Quotes

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

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 went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.

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.

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.

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.

The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.

The Shining’ is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The Witch’ was intended to be a horror movie.

African Queen’ is pretty darn great.

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.

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

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.

Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary 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.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it’s not obscure, and that’s just fine.

My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.

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 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.

People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times – and ‘A Christmas Carol.’

The Witch’ was very well planned, but ‘The Lighthouse’ was so much more so.

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.

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

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

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.

I’d love to do more theater.

I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

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 ‘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 ‘Friday the 13th’ Jason movies were way too scary for me.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.’

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.