THE WITCH: CRAFT AND FILM LANGUAGE OF ROBERT EGGERS

The director discusses the challenges of directing a first-time feature, his creative process, and The Witch's richness.

The Witch is a beautiful-mysterious horror film about a family, a “Puritan’s nightmare” set in New England. It stars Anya Taylor Joy in her debut role as the daughter, Thomasin. We caught up with director, Robert Eggers while he was in Prague in pre-production for his next feature, Nosferatu. We discuss the challenges of a first-time feature, his creative process, and the richness of The Witch. 

Did you initially set out to make a genre film? 

Yeah, after I had made this short film, The Tell-Tale Heart, which is my first short film, that’s not like a complete embarrassment. There were some small indie production companies that were interested in the idea of potentially developing a feature with me. And I wrote several screenplays that were some kind of strange, dark fairy tales, but also genre-less and very arthouse. Then I realized that if I wanted to get a film financed, I had to make something that was clearly in a genre. So, I kind of challenged myself - how do I make a genre film where I'm still maintaining who I am? I said probably this movie's going to be so tiny that I'm going to have to shoot in my parent's backyard, you know, the proverbial my parent's backyard. And so I figured, okay, I’m in New England. Which are the archetypal New England spooks? And there hasn't really been a New England horror story with witches, really, this is a great opportunity. And it's also something that I've been interested in since I was a kid. So, yes, I very much set out to make a genre film, which was something that at the time being a super cinema snob, felt a little bit like a dirty word. But now, of course, it's weird because, seven, eight years after The Witch came out, the genre is like a word that I’m wedded to at this point.

It's funny because I didn't even remember it as a full-on horror film. When I was thinking about it, I kept thinking about Thomasin and her character arc. It was interesting re-watching it again and seeing, oh yeah, it’s clearly a horror film. But there was all the family drama and it’s so theatrical.

But I think the family drama is what hopefully makes it more horrific and not just surface horror, one hopes, you know, one tries. 

Yeah, definitely. It’s scary with these tragedies and not knowing who to blame when they are all alone on that plantation. Every family member has their inner demons and conflicts both within themselves and with one another. Especially in the scene with Caleb and that whole build-up. It's like, who is on trial here?

Yeah. 

The language and the dialogue are very specific, which I personally enjoy because I love English literature and all that (old English), but did you have any concern that that specific dialect might be hard for people to understand? Or that there would be any issue? Especially the father’s accent.

I knew it was an issue, but it was also something that was important to me and I didn't really care. It took five years to get well, and four years to find financing. And we could have found financing much quicker had I calmed down on the language. There were some people who were interested in doing a cheaper version with simplified language, and that was just something that I didn't want to do. I also remember that the guy who was looking to sell the movie at Sundance watched it and was worried that we were going to have to have subtitles and I think some, particularly a lot of American audiences, do have a hard time understanding it. But I think that hopefully the sound of it, there's this Puritan language which, you know forget about Shakespeare. I think people know early modern English from the bible. So the sound of what they're saying sounds very biblical and heavy and then they can get the gist, and it also makes it so the audience is a little behind and you really have to lean in to get everything, which I think hopefully puts you on edge a little more. Audiences in the U.K. generally don't have such a hard time with it, even though that's not how people speak today. But like you said, with Ralph, his accent is thick for an American ear.

Well, I'm so glad that you didn't change it because that is one of the wonderful things about the film - the dialogue and the specificity of the Puritan dialect. Speaking of the dialogue and the writing - what's your writing process like? A lot of our readers are aspiring filmmakers so it'd be interesting to hear your process; Joan Didion would have an ice-cold Coca-Cola first thing in the morning when she started writing and Bergman wrote 3 hours a day in the morning and then he would have lunch (on Bergman Island) and then watch a film after. Do you have any writing routines or rituals that keep you grounded? 

Yeah, The Witch was a very different thing, but I try to write in the morning as early as I can muster with plenty of coffee. Ideally, I would write in the morning and stop after lunch. But I think a lot of times I'm in a situation now with co-writers where we've been preparing what we're going to do and then we have to bang a bunch of stuff out that we've been planning on doing. And so we get a week where you're writing for 10 hours a day, which is pretty intense. But certainly, with The Witch, it would be generally, if I was working in a period where I didn't have art department work or set carpentry work or whatever, it would be waking up early in the morning, writing until lunch, and then going into research mode in the afternoons. 

So when does the research stop? I don't know, for you, or even for people like me, who love this type of thing. Are you researching during production and throughout production, too, or does that kind of stop once the script is locked? 

With The Witch it kind of stopped just because I had been working on it for so long. And frankly, the world is very contained. So I knew every object that this family had in their house, based on wills and inventories and blah, blah, blah. So The Witch was really contained. The Northman we didn't stop ever, even in post-production, I was double checking with the rune specialists that like the intertitles that are “runes” were correct. And so with that, we never stopped. 

Interesting, so you probably had a whole team for that on The Northman? 

Yeah. I was working with (the best), I'm so humbled, privileged, and lucky. It was just awesome. But I had my pick of the finest Viking historians and archeologists working on the film, which was just so inspiring. And it made it work.

That’s so awesome. So with the co-writing process, you were saying, now you're starting to co-write. What has that been like for you? Because you're used to just diving in on your own?

Yeah, I wrote The Lighthouse with my brother and I think that was maybe a good first person to work with because we know each other so well. And then lately, as you know, after The Northman, I've been continuing to collaborate with Sjón on scripts that hopefully will one day get to see the light of day. 

It's so fun because you're constantly feeding off of the other person's creativity. And it's not competitive. It's just you keep topping up the scene and it’s a really, really enjoyable process. 

I just finished a podcast with Sjón right before I got on this. And he was saying how a film is a collaborative process and so it's great to start the screenplay as a collaborative process. And I think he's right. So I started doing it just as a means of survival. When we were working together I could only do kind of one thing at a time as far as trying to do my own stuff and trying to tell my own story. And now, just to survive in the industry, I have to have so many things going on because I think one movie's going to happen and it doesn't happen. And so I have to have something else that I could do instead.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that. That's great insight and advice for creatives, not just filmmakers. You never know from one week to the next which project is going to get green-lit. 

Totally.

Sjón - who is that?

Sjón is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He's the man.

Cool! Film can be a referential art in a way. What do you look at for inspiration or do you ever try to shield yourself at some point in the process? I guess it still ties into the research aspect. 

I think in The Witch I had some kind of idea about certain times when I didn't want to watch films. But I'm not like that at all. I'm just constantly watching as many films as I can, and I'm usually hunting for something specific. I don't watch as many new films as I'd like to. I used to be a lot better at it. But I'm so fortunate to be working a lot, so. I usually have a kind of syllabus that I'm following and then during COVID, it made everything very difficult. When I was living in New York, even if I was doing a lot of stuff I could just go to Film Forum, go to IFC center, go to Regal or whatever, and just see something and I can't do that now. It's quite frustrating. And then I was living in New Hampshire earlier this year…

…not as many theaters.

But yeah I'm always watching stuff and watching things for different reasons. During production, I'm not watching movies for inspiration at that point. At that point I know what I'm doing, we've planned it. If there is a serious problem somehow watching a little sequence from something might help, and that’s something we might do on the weekend, but that's pretty rare. But on The Northman, I watched every Terminator movie, even all the really, really bad ones. I watched like RoboCop and I watched all of Seinfeld, it was just stuff to kind of chill out a little bit.

So the production design - you started as a production designer and every film you've made is essentially a period piece. Could you talk a little bit about your collaboration with your production designer? And also the costumes were so beautiful in The Witch and the color palette and everything. Were you looking at any paintings for The Witch? Well, now I'm getting into the cinematography, but every detail seemed so authentic. How true was it to the period? 

It was as true as we could endeavor to be. I think even with The Northman, there is a point at which the budget can’t do exactly everything that you ever want. And so you have to make some compromises. There’s all this talk that I built the boats out of this light, exact wood. And that's just not true. But, with The Witch, there were certain things that we couldn't use like hand-woven cloth for the costumes because we could not afford it.​

We did use hand-woven cloth on many of the costumes in The Northman. Not all of them, but like anything that gets close to the camera because we could afford to do it. So on The Witch, we were trying to find things that looked like they could be hand-woven. Linda got samples from this guy, Stuart Peachey, who runs a 17th Century Farm on the Cornish border. And we looked at his samples to try to find something close to that. Stuart also is an expert on the clothes of the common people in the Elizabethan and Stewart eras. And he's written a zillion tiny books, that stacks up to many phone blogs when you put it all together and that was our kind of Bible. And with The Witch I did my own drawings of everything as well as supplying lookbooks and research. But Craig and Linda always take it much, much further. Linda suggested different kinds of trousers for some characters that I never would have thought of. And it was a great idea and as much as I know what I want, and I'm very specific, the best thing is when your collaborator pushes you further than you can go without them. That's what's fun about collaboration.  

Totally. I won't spend too much time on this, but there is this beautiful pale pink corset thing that Thomasin wears about a third into the film. What was that from? Is that a specific garment for anything? Or is that an invention from the costume designer?

No, no, no. There's there's no inventions allowed. This is the best understanding from our own research and Stuart's research on what would be called a “body” rather than a corset because Stuart discovered that there is actually a law that people of the social status of this family wouldn't be allowed to wear boning. So it isn't like an actual corset but like a functional garment that just keeps your skirt up and whatever else.

Okay. So it functions more like a belt. 

It’s like a belt and a bra. A single belt and bra.    

Thick belt bra combo [laughing]. So the casting was amazing in The Witch all across the board. Do you work with a casting director? Everyone had such interesting faces, all so different, but you believed they were a family. 

Ralph was someone that I wanted. And then he came aboard, which was great. And then I worked with Kharmel Cochrane, who's a great British casting director, who I've worked with on all my movies. And she was aware of Anya Taylor Joy. It was the first tape that I saw and we still looked at like hundreds of young women. It was a lot of work to find the kids. Kharmel and I took a trip to the north of England to find kids and, Kate Dickie was, we had actually someone else cast in that role and she bailed and it was actually our Canadian service producer, Daniel Beckerman, who suggested Kate and I was not, ashamed to say, aware of her work. And I saw Red Road and totally blown away. And she graciously read and was, you know, fantastic. And I hope to work with Kate many more times. 

She was incredible, so intense. What is The Witch about to you? What is the greatest sin in The Witch? Because it's part folktale and it's part biblical. Each character is battling with something inside, there's the pride of the father and the lack of faith in the mother…do you have any thoughts about that?

I don't have a message in mind when I'm making a film. I'm trying to, I was just trying to make the best movie about witches that I could almost a thesis of witches. And something that I had said a lot back in the day was I was trying to make a Puritan nightmare, upload a Puritan nightmare into a contemporary audience brain and so it's about digging into their belief system and the way I see it if you believe something, even something, then it does exist. So if you believe in a witch, witches exist and obviously, witches arrive, so to speak, in times of despair, your child dies and there's no answer. It must be a witch. And then she feeds off your own internal demons, as you put it, and just, festers. So Yeah I think with a story everyone contributes to it. I suppose if William hadn't been so prideful to leave the plantation, maybe nothing would have happened [laughs], but obviously, it's a story of the downfall of a family. ​

They say directors often make the same film over and over again. Do you know what that is for you? Are there certain themes that you're always exploring or revisiting or you don't really think about them? 

I know that I'm into fairy tales and folktales and mythology and religion and the occult. I know that there is a symbol that there is clearly a primal narrative that I'm repeating. Certainly in the first two films, a little bit less so in The Northman because it is based on and was in the Nordic, origins of Hamlet. In the films I have made and in the film I'm currently making, you see a lot of the same stuff and even in the three films that have come out everyone's naked and crazy at the end, and then two of them naked and dead at the end and they all end with fire after crossing a threshold. Of course, I'm not like: tick this is where this part happens, I'm just writing something I think is unique, I think is original. I think I haven't done it before. And then I realize that I have.

It's funny I did start to see some parallels in The Witch and The Northman. Are you religious or spiritual at all?

No comment [laughs].

So what are you working on next? What's next for you?

Hopefully, I'm finally making Nosferatu which I've been trying to do for seven years and has fallen apart twice. So that's what I'm here for. So, fingers crossed, knock on wood and all that good stuff.

Yes, fingers crossed. Will you be working with Anya Taylor-Joy again?

No, she's not on this one. But it's the same H.O.D.s (heads of department) that I always work with, which is great. And it's very nice.

Oh, I had one question about Caleb. Who is Caleb channeling? Was he channeling a woman? 

Yes, he is. He's saying a bunch of stuff that children allegedly said when they were possessed that was from a recording that I found. And so he's picturing being tormented by [pauses],

Hey, what's up, dude [interrupted by his son]? “Hi, daddy” [says his son off screen], 

[continues] So he is picturing being tormented by big black dogs and maybe ravens. I don't know. And pictures of the witch crawling on him and all this kind of stuff. But, yeah it's all stuff that kids allegedly said when they were possessed by witches. 

Thought it might have been a specific text from something that it sounded like he was reciting.

At the very end is a sort of perversion of song of songs. Which was that in itself was like a version of something that I found in John Winthrop, who was the first governor of Massachusetts. His religion, his diaries, a sort of weird-like song. From his diaries.

Interesting. Well, I think we’ve covered a lot. We love The Witch, it’s a film that really stays with you. Your films are all so beautiful. I really want to ask you about The Lighthouse and have so many other questions, but I better stop here. Thank you so much, Robert. 

My pleasure. Good luck with it and I can’t wait to see it when it’s done. 

Good luck over there with your prep.

Okay, right on. ▮