Robert Eggers: ​‘The voic­es of the dead talk a lot loud­er to my imagination’

You know the old say­ing about work­ing with ani­mals and chil­dren? Turns out there’s some truth to it. Just ask pro­duc­tion design­er-turned-writer/di­rec­tor Robert Eggers, whose Sun­dance-win­ning peri­od dra­ma The Witch con­tains enough crea­tures and kids to fill a gen­er­ous­ly sized small­hold­ing. Pitched as ​‘A New Eng­land Folk­tale’, Eggers’ impres­sive debut fea­ture authen­ti­cal­ly trans­ports us to 17^th-cen­tu­ry east-coast Amer­i­ca where a fam­i­ly of Puri­tan peas­ants are vis­it­ed by strange and evil forces.

LWLies: How did the process of mak­ing this film com­pare with your expectations?

Eggers: Well, I had worked with kids before, I’d worked with ani­mals, so I kind of knew what I was get­ting myself in for. But it was so much worse than I’d expect­ed. So much more dif­fi­cult. I remem­ber our first meet­ing with the ani­mal train­er, where we went through the script and all the stuff we need­ed the ani­mals to do, basi­cal­ly they said that what we were ask­ing for wasn’t prac­ti­cal, that none of it could hap­pen, and my stom­ach just dropped.

Did you prove them wrong in the end?

There were def­i­nite­ly some things that we had to adjust, but I’m very pleased with how all the stuff we did with the ani­mals worked out. The goat was a total night­mare though. On the last day of the shoot, I had no idea whether we’d actu­al­ly got the goat’s per­for­mance or not. The hare and the raven were okay, but man, the goat…

So how do you direct a goat?

You don’t.

Did you at any point cry dur­ing the mak­ing of this film?

Oh yeah. I tried to stay calm and focused on set, but I def­i­nite­ly cried mak­ing my cof­fee in the morn­ing more than once. But you can’t let too much get to you because it’s so crazy. You just have to deal with stuff and take things on the chin, like: ​‘Oh look, the set just burned down. Alright, well, I guess I’ll just go over here and have a cigarette…’

Do you have any­thing lined up for your next project?

I can’t talk about it much right now, but I’m going to be mak­ing a medieval knight film. It’s an epic, but it’s sim­i­lar to The Witch in that while the fan­tas­ti­cal mytho­log­i­cal beliefs of the time are real, the world smells like shit.

What inter­ests you about genre and period?

I’m into the past and I’m into dark­ness and the dead and things, and I guess a lot of those things fall into hor­ror or fan­ta­sy. Actu­al­ly I think that as we become more sec­u­larised and sci­ence becomes God, it’s sci­ence-fic­tion films that are the ones ask­ing the real­ly inter­est­ing ques­tions about what it means to be a human being. But for what­ev­er rea­son the voic­es of the dead talk a lot loud­er to my imag­i­na­tion, so right now I’m inter­est­ed in look­ing back.

Reli­gion and the occult are obvi­ous­ly a big part of the cul­tur­al her­itage of New Eng­land, where you grew up.

Yeah I mean, I kind of feel uncom­fort­able talk­ing about this stuff because I spend most of my time when I’m not work­ing look­ing at reli­gion and mythol­o­gy and the occult… I have this weird slight­ly con­flict­ed rela­tion­ship with those things.

A lot of that stuff seems to have come back into fash­ion, like study­ing the occult and being inter­est­ed in the past…

It’s true, and I think part of the rea­son why peo­ple are relat­ing to this movie is that it’s like an arti­sanal hip­ster fuck­ing hor­ror movie or whatever.

Is that such a bad thing?

No, it’s cool! What’s not cool is the snob­bery, but I mean, look at me, I look like a hip­ster… But the fetishi­sa­tion of old-fash­ioned ana­logue tech­nolo­gies that we’re see­ing today, it’s real­ly noth­ing new. What’s great is that we’re now try­ing to remem­ber what actu­al­ly worked in the past, and if we can then realise that there’s a lot of great knowl­edge there, we might actu­al­ly get somewhere.