Top 40 Robert Eggers Quotes

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.

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.

I still know the lyrics to pretty much any ‘Mary Poppins’ song.

Honestly, I’m a snobby person.

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

The Witch’ was intended to be a horror movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

African Queen’ is pretty darn great.

Parajanov’s love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.’

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

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.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

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.

The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.

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.