Robert Eggers
Jeremy Brock: Hi, Jeremy Brock. Welcome to the 2019
Screenwriters Lecture Series, number four of five, the
great Robert Eggers. Incredibly excited. Thanks as
always to BAFTA’s Learning and Events team, to Lucy
Gard and the JJ Charitable Trust for funding and to
the Curzon for hosting us.
 
I just wanted to say that you are the loveliest audience
any screenwriter could hope to have. I love that you
remain so resolutely optimistic in the face of that po-
faced, unsmiling, film buff-y kind of cinephile bullshit.
I love that you remain so resolutely impressed by the
centrality of the screenplay. It is about the script, folks.
Actors learn the lines, they go on set, and they act
them. You can throw all the bells and whistles you like
at it, but there is a controlling intelligence at work, and
that controlling intelligence is the controlling
intelligence that looks at the structure, that looks at
the shape of the whole piece, and I am delighted
tonight to be hosting the great Robert Eggers, writer
director of The Witch and The Lighthouse. God knows
what he has for breakfast, but he has got the most
incredible vision, which is extraordinary and
sometimes alarming. But his attention to detail in his
writing, in his filmmaking is the thing that I find most
scintillating. And it is an enormous honour for us to
be hosting someone who I think is one of the great
storytellers in the world of film today.
 
We’ll do the usual thing of showing a montage of all
our lecturers’’ work, then Robert will lecture, and he
will then be in conversation with the irreplaceable and
wonderful Mariayah Khaderbai, Head of Programmes
at BAFTA, and then we’ll open it up as we always to
the floor. So we’ll have the montage, thank you.
 
[Applause]
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Robert Eggers: OK, thanks. Jeremy was like far too
kind. I’ve made two feature films and some short films
nobody’s seen, so it’s still strange to me that anyone
cares what I might have to say. Yeah. But anyway
thanks very much and thank you to BAFTA, it’s truly
an honour to be here. I’ve never lectured before and
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perhaps it’s the word lecture but it makes me anxious.
I feel comfortable public speaking, the only training I
have is as an actor and my theatre background makes
me happy to be in front of an audience; I do feel more
comfortable here than at a cocktail party. Luckily
there’s cocktails and I have one here just in case. So
you know but I’m really looking forward to the
conversation later because a Q&A is where I feel I
thrive a little more. I almost thought about just asking
myself a series of questions up here to make myself
feel more comfortable but I will spare you that
strangeness.
 
So I want to say, as you all know, the most important
thing we can all do as people who are trying to make
creative work is to be yourself and embrace what is
uniquely you and your own voice. So obviously I’m
just talking about my approach and it’s unique to the
kind of strange interests that I have and I just hope
that there’s some tools that you can put in your
toolbox that can work with how you are you. I also
want to say that as many of the other incredibly
accomplished filmmakers it’s an honour to be among
in this series, I’m a writer and director, so the way that
I write my screenplays would be inappropriate if I
weren’t directing them. As an actor who recently
turned down a role in one of my movies said, the
screenplay was overwrought, and there is a kind of
indulgence in the details of my screenplays that would
be entirely foolish if I were writing for another
director; there’s a level of specificity in the blocking,
you know, if Willem Dafoe wears his reading glasses
like this, if Robert Pattinson scratches his ear like this,
it may very well be in the screenplay. There’s never in
my screenplay ‘Rome burns,’ or ‘they fight,’ you know,
‘Arthur draws Excalibur, he thrusts towards the giant,’
you know. The whole thing. So there.
OK, so that out of the way, I’ll start at the beginning,
again this feels so odd, but what’s the inspiration?
Where do the ideas come from to write something? It
depends on the script, as I’m sure you’d all agree. I had
an incredibly intense nightmare many years ago that
led to the idea of a story. I walked around Brooklyn
for five hours and had the structure of a screenplay
that took me six years to write that was terrible. But
you know I just kind of had it. Most often, I have an
atmosphere, which I’ll talk about a lot later, and some

images that get me going. Sometimes it’s something
pragmatic. And very often it’s a combination of a few
of these things. I made a short film called Brothers
that was a proof of concept to try to get The Witch
financed. It had been many years since I’d made a
short film and my most recent work was a very
stylised piece based on Edgar Allen Poe, which
featured a pupped as the lead character, and
performances that were truly weird. And my producer
said, you know, ‘if you want anyone to finance The
Witch, you probably ought to make a new short, and it
probably should feature naturalistic performances by
children and scary woods.’ And so that was a task and
thus I was able to find a story that met with that
pragmatic task.
 
With The Witch, I had written many feature
screenplays no one wanted to finance, and I felt that as
an American director at the time if I wanted to get a
film financed it seemed like it needed to be in an
identifiable genre. All of my sort of weirder films no
one cared for. So I thought it probably had to take
place in New England because that’s where I’m from
and given that I’d probably have no budget I’d have to
shoot it in the proverbial my parents’ back yard, and
witches are the archetypal New England spook and
I’ve been interested in them, so that makes sense. So
there’s the pragmatic end, but then I truly as a kid—
and this sounds a little precious—but I really did
imagine the fact that there were puritans walking
around who grew up in the reign of Queen Elizabeth
who were stomping around in the woods behind my
house and that was—and living an almost medieval
existence. And you pair that in the belief in a real
witch and that was an atmosphere that really excited
me. With The Lighthouse, similarly my brother said he
was working on a ghost story in a lighthouse and that
phrase ‘a ghost story in a lighthouse’ conjured up the
images of the movie, the visual atmosphere, the crusty,
dusty, musty, rusty black and white square aspect ratio,
and then I needed to find a story that accompanied
that.
 
So anyway, all of these things really finally have to do
with what I’m really interested in and what is sort of
uniquely me, I think, maybe. Which is my interest in
ghost stories, fairy tales, folktales, mythology, religion,
sometimes the occult. That’s what really gets me
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excited; I’d rather write a novel or paint a painting that
has to do with that stuff than to just make a movie.
And all that really has to do with the past, which
weirdly may somehow be my biggest passion. I think
that there’s complicated things about organised
religion, but there’s also complicated things about an
entirely secularised society. We lose the sublime and
the sacred, sometimes, and so I find that what really
excites me is to kind of understand where we’re
coming from and where we’re going from where we
came from, and to try to go back in the past to think
about ideas that are bigger than ourselves. The genre
that tends to explore that today is science fiction,
which makes sense when like number is God in the
intelligentsia that we’re all probably a part of, but I like
to stay in the past.
 
And what’s very important to me when I begin writing
a piece is not to have a message, to not have any
intention beyond staying true to the world in which
I’m trying to write in. But thank heavens, like, as much
as I try to seal myself up like an anchor and lock
myself in my alchemical cell, the world—my world is
not vacuum sealed, so I am affected by the zeitgeist
whether I want to be or not, and that’s important
because otherwise The Witch can’t just appeal to
people who are alive in the 1630s, and The Lighthouse
can’t just appeal to people who are alive in the 1890s
because there’s not enough graveyard screenings for
that to be profitable. So you know, with The Witch, I’m
happy that most people, though not everyone for sure,
sees the film as a feminist film. If I were to be objective
and stand back I think I would agree with that stance,
but that was not my intention, I just wanted to make a
witch movie as I kind of said. But that’s what
happened. With The Lighthouse, which I don’t know if
people have seen, I was just trying to make a ghost
story in a lighthouse, which It’s finally not, but it
became—you know when I was writing this story, this
hyper-masculine story about two men, with my
brother—I was thinking why are we writing this right
now? This is the worst time to be writing this story,
and then once we had the first draft we realised ‘oh I
guess we’re talking about toxic masculinity and like
everything that’s messed up about it.’ So that’s cool.
 
But even still, when you’re getting into this other
world, you can’t be judgmental of the characters and

the time period, you can’t rewrite history to conform
to the zeitgeist, but you do have a responsibility to
understand what’s going on today and not be
foolhardy. The thing that I’m working on currently has
slavery and violence against women and it takes place
in the Viking age so that’s going to happen, but how
do I tell those stories without rewriting history,
responsibly? Those are the questions I have to ask
myself and I can’t provide easy answers.
 
So continuing to stay quite large, a few things that I
think about and struggle with are trying to find a
harmonious balance of certain opposites in my
writing. The largest things would be Dionysian vs.
Apollonian. I’ll start with Apollonian, the structure,
what patriarchal Western culture would call ‘male
ideals,’ then the Dionysian, female, mysterious stuff.
Like how do you create a balance of something that is
rigorous and structured and clear, but also has enigma
and mystery and atmosphere? Moving further with
these opposites, the mythic vs. the naturalistic. Again
I’m drawn to archetypal storytelling, I’m drawn to
archetypal characters. How do you make them
believable? It’s difficult. In doing this kind of
archetypal storytelling, even if it’s based on a fairy tale
or a myth, I still try to bring in my personal
experiences, the things that are me. When my brothers
first read The Witch screenplay, they said that even
though this is the seventeenth century it sounds like
our family arguing, you know. That’s very important.
Someone not just conveying plot but also having little
asides that are about life, these kind of things can of
course ground it and another thing that really helps
me, which is not surprising, is knowing the space.
When I write it’s very helpful for me to have a kind of
dollhouse and dolls and their clothing and know
what’s in each room in order for me to really imagine
what’s going on. Also because I’m telling stories that
are taking place in the past and aren’t my personal
experience, by creating this dollhouse in my head and
with mood boards and such I’m able to see it clearly
enough in my head to own it. Because if I can’t
experience what I write as my own memories, it can’t
be truthful. That’s sort of a precious statement but
that’s how I try to look at it, taking every moment on
as if this is a moment from my personal past in order
to tell it.
 
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Another one of these opposites for me is atmosphere
vs. story. As Jeremy sort of hinted at in the beginning
of this thing, all you need to make a film that’s
incredibly engaging is an excellent script with a great
story and serviceable performances; they don’t even
have to be good, just serviceable. You don’t need good
cinematography, you don’t need good art direction,
you don’t need good costumes, you don’t need good
sound design—you have to have professional sound so
it’s not distracting—but it’s really about the script. For
me, both my two feature films have very simple stories:
The Witch has a very clear, simple story, The
Lighthouse is almost void of story; it’s almost the same
scene over and over and over and over and over again
with changing power dynamics. So in my films you
need atmosphere for the world to survive, for the film
to survive. And the atmosphere is an accumulation of
details and these details come from my research, they
come from the weather, they come from the light, they
come from the format that we shoot on; they come
from all of these things. And atmosphere in some
ways is a visual obstacle, and I mean that in a positive
way. Emmanuel Lubezki, AKA Chivo, obviously I
couldn’t admire him more, but he’s very excited about
shooting—this isn’t writing, sorry—but he’s very
excited about shooting Alexa 65 and he has a quote
kind of saying that in the history of cinema we’ve been
looking at the world through dirty windows and
finally now we can see the world clearly with Alexa 65
and the technology. I like the dirty windows; I like
having to peer in through something. That excites me.
So we’ll get further into like when I start really talking
about period research we’ll get further into
atmosphere and details and the research process, but
I’d like to play the first clip—all the clips are a little
long, so sorry. It’s from The Witch.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
It’s hard for me to watch The Witch because it doesn’t
always quite live up to my expectations. We had to
shoot it digitally for financial reasons and I’m glad that
we did but the irony is that I’m using that as an
example of atmosphere but I find it to be quite naked.
Dick Pope was talking about Mike Leigh’s Peterloo,
which I thought was a fine looking digital film, and

Dick Pope like myself finds it blasphemous to add film
grain if you’re shooting with the Alexa, but he added a
bit more digital noise and I wish that we had had that
idea with The Witch. But in any case, that is an
example of the kind of atmosphere that I’m trying to
create and all of the goat bleats and the dirty stockings
and the rushes on the floor and all that stuff is very
carefully—and the creaking ladder rungs—is all very
carefully described in the screenplay. Again, that kind
of detail in the screenplay might be laborious but I feel
like in my movies that are sometimes like thin on plot,
if you can’t get that atmosphere from the text we don’t
have any understanding of what I’m trying to do here.
I very often describe the odours in my screenplays as
well in order that we can better convey that feeling
when we watch it.
The other thing that’s important potentially about this
clip is it’s kind of showing the audience my dollhouse.
It’s not always important for the audience to know
geography, but in this clip and in the next clip we—the
geography of their cottage was important and so early
on in the film we’re establishing the atmosphere and
the mood, and then we’re showing the lay of the land,
so to speak, and the same thing will happen with the
next clip from The Lighthouse. You know, going back
to pragmatism, and maybe we’ll talk about producer
and studio notes at some point during the Q&A
because that’s another interesting topic, but the film is
supposed to start not—I don’t know if everyone’s seen
The Witch or not—but basically the film was supposed
to start not much further back from that, and my
producers and financiers wanted me to start earlier,
like with them leaving the village or the plantation that
they came from, which I thought was ridiculous and I
didn’t want to be doing like Little House on the
Prairie. So I wrote a scene sort of that I thought would
be too expensive that we couldn’t shoot and then
everyone loved it and then we had to find a way to fit
it into the budget and I kept trying to cut it out of the
movie, but actually they were right. We did need it. So
sometimes studio notes are good. OK let’s watch the
next clip.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
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He continues, he goes upstairs and he sees more but
you know, we’ve got to get on with the night as far as,
you know, the dollhouse goes. So that—it was about
four minutes and that was four pages of writing, which
could easily have been a page: Boat comes, sees an
island, get off the boat, they walk across the thing,
stand there, he goes in, he walks around, whatever. But
again, it’s this overwrought writing of every detail for
four pages, but it also gives a better understanding of
exactly what we’re shooting, how long things are going
to take, and it helps—I feel like it helps my
collaborators understand what we’re doing. Even that
long close-up of the two of them standing with the eye
line towards camera was a very hefty paragraph about
what we were supposed to convey from their faces in
that moment.
So let’s get into something that’s actually interesting.
Researching the period is my whole thing. There’s
nothing better about being period accurate, but it’s
something that really excites me and if there is
anything like, you know, I said my interest in ghost
stories and fairy tales is perhaps unique about me, but
if there is anything unique about my films it’s perhaps
my obsession with being accurate. Of course, you
know, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Peter Brooks’ King
Lear are fantastic examples of films that aren’t period
accurate in any shape or form but take you into
incredibly rich, transportive, believable worlds—I
guess Dracula’s kind of stylised but it’s great. And for
me, you know, I like to—I like when I don’t
understand these people, I like it when I’m researching
Puritans and I think how could this kind of English
Calvinism be helpful for anyone? And then be reading
and reading and reading and struggling, these are
alien thoughts, these are alien people, and finally
reading John Winthrop’s letters to his wife back home
in England and that they were praying at the same
time, they didn’t know about time zones but you
know, they thought they were praying at the same
time, and things like that you see all of a sudden OK
they’re human like me. Finally you can unlock this
door where you realise like ‘oh my goodness, if I was
alive then I would’ve thought exactly like them.’ Of
course I would’ve. And not only that, like I can see
how that kind of thinking still resonates in culture
today.

That for me is the most exciting moment, and that
requires a lot of reading, and then in the creation of
the physical world, which also begins in the script
phase, I’m also looking at tonnes of visual imagery to
understand all this stuff, because again atmosphere is
an accumulation of details and if I were to be creating
a fictional world, perhaps if I were like J.R.R. Tolkein
and if I were that kind of genius and had that kind of
time on my hands, I could create something that
specific, but generally it’s not going to be as specific as
the real thing. So if I’m just taking research and saying
‘this is exactly what it is, team let’s recreate it to the
best of our ability,’ we have a huge amount of detail,
more detail than we would have if we had conjured it
up ourselves. At least that’s my thinking and yeah, so
you read secondary sources, you read primary sources,
you read children’s books on it to get another base
overview after you’ve already gone deep you watch
crappy YouTube videos, you just go into museums and
consult with historians; you do whatever needs to be
done to find out as much as you possibly can. With
The Lighthouse, for example, it’s all built on research.
My brother set a ghost story in a lighthouse, that was
inspiring imagery; then on day two of researching I
read about the Smalls lighthouse tragedy—two guys,
both named Thomas, one older one younger, get
marooned on their lighthouse station because of a
storm, the old one dies, the young one goes mad.
That’s my story. That’s the base of my story. Then the
Instruction to Lighthouse Keepers, the manual
becomes a huge key. All the tasks that they’re doing
and the rules that they’re not supposed to break, that
becomes inspiration for all kinds of scenes, and then
the photographs of nineteenth century lighthouse
stations tell you a whole lot, not just about my
dollhouse but more. You see the boathouse with
runners and a lifeboat in it. Well I guess at some point
Rob Pattinson’s going to try to escape and pull that
lifeboat out. All that stuff is incredibly helpful, and
then we continue to amplify our knowledge in these
different areas—I’m saying ‘we’ because I wrote this
with my brother, and in considering Melville which
you would if you were writing a nineteenth century
New England maritime story, you start getting into
classical mythology. When you start getting into
classical mythology you start thinking about symbolist
painting from the period and so Sascha Schneider and
John Delville who are doing mythic paintings in a
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homoerotic style become perfect candidates as
imagery that’s going to work itself into the script.
 
In writing period dialogue it’s the same kind of rigour.
With The Witch I felt that—I don’t know if I agree
with this conceit today, but I felt that because the
Puritans were so, to use the word again, rigorous in
their beliefs, so devout, I felt that I needed to use their
own words to be respectful to them. I don’t know if I
agree with that now and I think it might have been
disrespectful to use their own words, but that’s what I
did. Luckily because it’s early modern English that’s
the period of Milton and Shakespeare and Spencer, so
there’s many books and thesauruses with the
vocabulary and the rules, which was incredibly
helpful. But I also read tonnes and tonnes and tonnes
of primary source material and made my own
thesaurus that wasn’t a one to one, but sort of like a
vibe. So things you might say when you’re chastising
your children, things you might say when you think
someone is a witch, things you might say to your goat,
and so you kind of are pulling from all these different
things. Some of the dialogue early on became a bit of a
collage that then I need to hone into the separate
voices for different characters and make it much more
specific and mine, but things that the children say
when they are possessed are things that children
supposedly said when they were possessed and that
was, at the time I wrote this, important to me.
 
But very often in my research something would
inspire a scene. So John Winthrop, the first governor
of Massachusetts who I mentioned earlier, he had a
very personal religious diary that was a real treasure
trove for me, and he wrote that he dreamed, quote,
‘that I was with Christ upon the Earth, and that very
instant with him in many tears for the assurance of the
pardon of my sins, etcetera. I was so ravished with his
love towards me, far exceeding the kindest husband,
that being awakened had made so deep an impression
in my heart as I was forced to unmeasurable weeping
for a great while, and had a more lively feeling of love
than ever before.’ So in this next clip I take that, it
inspired a scene with the mother and The Witch, and
she uses half of that and she uses it to a different end.
The other dialogue in the scene with her and her
husband is very much a fight that I might have with
my wife or a fight that my parents might have had,

only in early modern English and I apologise if Kate
Dickie’s Scottish-tinged Yorkshire accent is a bit tricky
to understand, but at least I’m in the UK and not the
States. Let’s do it!
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
I do like the performances, Alexa or not. But yeah, so
there’s an example of that. In The Lighthouse my
brother and I did not, or very, very rarely used in tact
sentences. We were studying all kinds of things to
create two different forgotten New England dialects
from the end of the nineteenth century. I mentioned
Melville, Stevenson is not from New England but
certainly with some of the maritime stuff we felt he
could come in handy, and Coleridge too; all the usual
culprits, but then of course we turned to lighthouse
keepers’ journals and diaries and that was very fruitful
for Robert Pattinson’s character as a former
lumberjack, I found a treasure trove of interviews with
former lumberjacks from that period, but who became
the most helpful was a writer called Sarah Orne Jewett,
and she was writing in the state of Maine in our
period and she was very concerned or interested in
dialect herself. So she would be interviewing sailors
and sea captains and farmers and then writing her
main stories in phonetic dialect. So that was the key.
Dafoe has a couple sentences, like when he’s wistfully
thinking about the past, that come from Jewett, but
other than that my brother and I were working with
all this source material and various slang dictionaries,
nineteenth century slang dictionaries separated into
region and nautical dictionaries and lexicons, to really
create something or our best version to recreate
something, and my wife found a dissertation by a
woman named Evelyn Star Cutler, and her dissertation
was on dialect in Jewett, and thank you Evelyn because
she provided rules and I had those rules when I was
writing The Witch, but who if not Evelyn would have
provided rules for how two working class people in
the north east of America would have spoken? So she
was able to break it down and talk about what words
are omitted and where there’s verdict displacement and
so on and so forth, so we could make sure these twelve
things were always consistent with Rob’s character and
these then with Willem’s, or whatever.
6
 
It was very important when we got to her, but from
the beginning we were writing in dialect before we
totally were fluent in it because we were getting our
minds to think differently as you would if you were
writing in another language. So this next clip, it begins
with quite naturalistic dialogue, or our attempt at it
based on our research, but then Dafoe goes into a kind
of rant that I think is a bit theatrical; I think the
influences of Sam Shepherd and Pinter and dare I say
out loud Beckett show themselves to be clear, because
even the rantiest ranter might not go on for this long.
But it was fun.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Yeah, so I don’t know if that’s mythic, but it’s not
naturalistic either. Yeah, you know one thing that I just
didn’t mention with the research, looking over my
notes here, is just that you’re always learning more,
and I’m writing in tandem. So I can research some
stuff, write some stuff, research some stuff, write some
stuff, the whole time, and you’re constantly revising as
you find more clarity on what the world is. The Viking
script, there was a tremendous amount of research that
I did, my co-writer there is Icelandic and really knows
a lot about Vikings, but we have consulted with three
of the greatest Viking historians recently and we
missed some stuff, and that means—it’s tricky because
there are some things where you can say ‘oh we’ll fix
this, we’ll fix this,’ but then it’s like we’ve made this
sandcastle and we’ve made this glorious tower we’re
proud of and we have to smash it now? It’s horrifying,
but sometimes you have to suck it up and smash it and
rebuild it better.
 
So in conclusion, that was a bit scattered, but
hopefully during the Q&A we can find a way to tie
this all up in a bow. Or maybe I’m exposing myself as
someone who’s more interested in atmosphere than
story through this lecture. OK.
 
[Applause]
 
Mariayah Khaderbai: That was kind of incredible,
thank you.

 
RE: I’m glad you thought so!
 
MK: I’m not going to even try to pretend to play
intelligence gymnastics with you, so I’m maybe going
to start and strip it all the way back and start from
layman’s terms in terms of process.
 
RE: Sure.
 
MK: In everyday terms, kind of just routine, waking
up in the morning. When the idea is in place, when it’s
in place is it already mapped out in your head before
you put pen to paper?
 
RE: Yeah, I think again it sort of depends if I’m
writing alone, I can be quite free. I have my little notes
about my three or five act structure depending on the
piece, that I can kind of go back to and tweak but I am
sort of finding it as I go and allowing myself that. If
I’m writing for a studio, I’ve never written something
for hire but I have been commissioned to write my
own piece, and therefore do need to have a treatment
for the studio to be sure that they like what they’re
paying me to write, but with things on spec I will just
kind of let it happen. When I’m writing with another
writer, it’s essential that we outline things very clearly
before we put pen to paper, but again things evolve
and we have the whole sandcastle metaphor, whatever.
 
MK: So writing with another writer, writing with your
brother on The Lighthouse, picking up on the idea of
dialect and naturalism and even in the last scene we’ve
just taken a look at, there’s a poetry to it and a rhythm
to it and a beat to it, how do you a) create that in a
way that’s communication between two people and
conversation? But then write that with another person.
 
RE: I don’t know, you just do. Sorry. My brother and I
know each other pretty well, we’re brothers, so that
helps. And I think in both writing with my brother
and the Icelandic novelist and poet who’s a much
better writer than I am, I’m finally sort of in charge
and that does sort of help clarify things, though both
of them are incredibly talented and I respect them so
much so if they’re really telling me like I’ve made a
mistake, I listen.
7
But you just kind of toss things back and forth, and
with my brother we’re pretty well aligned on what this
was and I think sometimes when working with Sjón I
tend to gild the lily and he tends to say ‘you can take it
back a bit’ with the Nordic sensibility.
 
MK: With The Lighthouse, you did kind of undersell it
in the way you said every scene is kind of a similar
conversation between two people with a different
power play, and it’s so not that. It’s so kind of mental
gymnastics again between the two of them and ever so
carefully, cleverly leads to this incredible finale. So the
time of kind of pacing that and then writing with your
brother those scenes together, how did you kind of
piece together the story and arc and narrative to get to
something that essentially is two people in one
situation.
 
RE: So I had that basic plot I mentioned from Smalls
lighthouse in Wales. Then very quickly I was like OK
there needs to be a mermaid in the movie and she
needs to be washed up on shore at the midpoint and
there’s a mystery in the light and there’s a foghorn and
all these bits and bobs, and I wrote some stuff. Years
passed and my brother and I got together to really
write this thing. I gave Max the eleven pages that I had
written, all my notes I rewrote in a way that could be
decipherable to another human being, and then I gave
him a list of movies to watch and books to read and a
month later we reconvened and started talking about
how to make sense of this. And we talked and talked
and talked and talked and then Max wrote an outline
and it wasn’t great, and Max wrote another outline—I
was also writing two other things at the time—so that’s
the other thing, I really am enjoying collaborating with
other writers but I’ve found that because the movie
business is so tricky, if I don’t have more than one
thing going at a time I’m painting myself into a corner.
So anyway, back to this. Then Max wrote a third
outline and act one and two were strong, act three was
not working we just couldn’t find it, but I said we’re in
good enough shape. So Max wrote act one, I revised it,
then he wrote act two, I revised it, then I was so
excited that I wrote act three and we actually had like
a movie. And from there we just passed it back and
forth, back and forth.
 

Once we had found that first version, we realised we
had kind of retold some myths by mistake, or not by
mistake but whatever, by the muses that we were
conjuring. So we said OK let’s amplify our knowledge
on Prometheus and Proteus and Triton and Neptune
and see how we can further infuse our next draft with
the knowledge of all that stuff. And that led to some
fairly heavy-handed imagery in the movie but
sometimes you just have to go with it.
 
MK: You kind of mentioned as well when you were
talking, the idea that you’re researching, researching,
researching, and then that you’re perhaps in kind of
the seventeenth century or the nineteenth century and
to you it perhaps might not be resonating today, but
then obviously it has resonated with audiences today
and thematically with The Witch kind of being a
portrayal of the dark feminine, and with The
Lighthouse looking at toxic masculinity, did you
realise that when you were writing?
 
RE: No. When you’re done writing you can see it, but
not, no I don’t during.
 
MK: How important is it for you to have something
that is obviously so embedded in a specific time and
place but then can have sort of… You said that it’s not
about a message, but…
 
RE: I’m after this kind of archetypal story. I can’t know
if it’s going to work forever, but the best stories stick
around. There’s a reason people talk about Oedipus,
there’s a reason people talk about Hamlet, there’s a
reason—I’m not going to keep going. Marie-Louise
von Franz, who was a prominent Jungian, said that
Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales are going to die
because they aren’t essentially human the way many of
the Grimm fairy tales are, and that Hans Christian
Anderson was a demented Victorian and his stories
are too wrapped up in his Victorian repressions and
whatever. And she’s right. The Little Mermaid is kind
of sticking around thanks to Disney, but the Hans
Christian Anderson fairy tales are not being told at the
same frequency as they once were. Is The Lighthouse a
Grimm fairy tale? No. But I guess the idea though is
that you’re trying to have something that resonates in
any time and I think that by trying to have it be all
about the time it’s set in rather than having to make
8
any concessions for a contemporary audience, I feel
like I have a stronger chance of it being timeless.
Because obviously as much as I try to get into the
mind-set of the people from that period it’s obviously
impossible, so it’s only going to be a mirror of the
mind-set of today, but using the lens of the past to
reflect back on ourselves. That’s a little… but I think
you know what I’m saying.
 
MK: There’s still space for interpretation because you
can’t ever know.
 
RE: Yeah, you can’t ever know.
 
MK: I’m going to skip a little bit forward in terms of
the visual look and how that relates to the writing in
terms of looking of the notion of four by three… Do
you have all of those things in your head and in place
when you begin the writing process? And how does
that affect the writing? Obviously the claustrophobia
of The Lighthouse and how can that impact on the
way you write?
 
RE: Yeah, I mean the aspect ratio got a little smaller
over the years, but I always wanted it to be boxy and I
always wanted it to be thirty-five millimetres. That’s
something I saw when I pictured the atmosphere, and
of course as you move forward in the writing and
development and prep you learn more, things change
and your preconceived notions are not always correct,
but you make choices that are closer to your original
intentions, even if they weren’t your preconceived
notions about how to articulate your intention. And
yeah, sometimes I see how it’s shot, and sometimes in
certain sequences I write ‘extremely wide shot,’
‘lighthouse in the middle of the sea, yadda, yadda,
yadda,’ ‘close shot, the hull carves through the waves.’
Sometimes I’ll do that, which again, as a writer-
director I can get away with, because it’s a terrible
thing to do otherwise. Sometimes I see that and don’t
write it because it’s distracting to the flow of the scene;
sometimes I just see a scene, a story, and I know we’re
going to have to find it later. Sometimes I see a scene
that’s a complicated action sequence or stunt or visual
effect or practical effect, and I think ‘ok how can I
write this in an achievable way?’ and sometimes I
think ‘if you’re thinking about writing it in an
achievable way, you’re not going to write it, so just

write it and you’ll figure it out,’ and you have to be
blind to the realities of shooting to tell the best story.
 
MK: Then circling back to the idea of studio
commissions or studio notes or producer notes, how
does that then have an impact on the writing in that
way, and do you leave things out?
 
RE: I’m not duplicitous because the most important
thing is that everyone’s on the same page. I try to, now,
after some experience, say every horrible thing that a
studio wouldn’t want to hear about what I’m doing
straight away. And if they’re scared at that point, good.
If they’re still willing to listen after I’ve said all the
crazy stuff then we’re good to go because I’m not going
to like shock them too much as we move forward. I
think I used to be very defensive when I was younger
and now I’m not in the room. I get my notes, go
home, go ‘they’re trying to ruin my movie,’ then sleep
on it and realise actually these are smart. I think a lot
of times, and this is I’m sure common knowledge to
you, the thought behind the note is right but the note
itself is not good. If you have multiple people saying
something is wrong with a scene, maybe they have
different ideas about how to fix it, then there’s
probably something wrong with that scene even if
their solutions are poor. It’s worth thinking about that
stuff. The Witch, the first draft of the script that was
presentable, there was no central protagonist. We
followed each of the family members carefully for a
period of time and then the film ended with
Thomasin. And my producing partners were kind of
like, ‘look we think it’s cool but it probably cannot be
financed. It might be the best version of the movie that
you’re doing but we think it may never get financed if
you do it like this. If you have a central protagonist, I
think we can finance this movie.’ And I was very upset
about it at the time, incredibly defensive, but I thought
ok I can make it about Thomasin and deal with that.
One of the things I don’t love about The Witch,
though, is that there are these kind of—you can feel
that the original version wasn’t only her, and there’s
good things about that as far as the world building is
concerned, but there’s bad things about that as far as
having the best narrative you could have.
 
9
MK: Then when you at that point go into filming with
a script that you’re eighty, ninety per cent happy with
—
 
RE: I was happy with the script at the time. Now I
have my things, but I had many years because no one
wanted to finance it for so long. Like I had many years
to get it in pretty good shape. I like the script better
than the film.
 
MK: I’m going to ask a very superficial question about
writing in animals. You had the goat in The Witch and
then seagulls feature very heavily in The Lighthouse.
Did you think when you were writing it how you were
going to orchestrate birds—
 
RE: Now I’m very, very, very cautious about writing
animals. Not that I don’t do it, but I do a lot of
research about can these animals be trained? Are they
legal to shoot with in the countries I’m most likely to
be shooting in? Who trains them? What can they do?
All this stuff before I do that. 
 
So I didn’t do that with The Witch, the goat was a
nightmare and you can’t train a goat and don’t write a
goat in your movie is my biggest tip of the night,
unless they’re just supposed to stand around and eat
stuff they’re not supposed to eat. And so then—I
wanted Pattinson’s character killing a seabird to be like
the catalyst that would bring the storm, and that
inspired my brother to write all these fucking scenes
with seagulls.
 
[Laughter]
 
He was telling me about it and I was like there’s no
way I’m going to do that, no. And then he was like ‘I
urge you to read these scenes, I think they’re good,’
and they were great. So we had to have a seagull. But
the great news is seagulls are incredibly intelligent and
there’s three very well trained seagulls in the UK, so
write seagulls, write away.
 
MK: I’m going to open it out to the audience now. We
have roving mics, so if you put your hand up… I can
see someone right at the front here, and if we can get
one over here as well? Thank you.

Q: How much—how seriously do you take theme and
does it influence any stage of your writing process, one
central concept that influences and constricts the
plotting and the characters?
 
RE: Yeah, a central theme doesn’t affect anything for
me. I think I may—I guess things kind of sort of
happen organically and then I might find a central
theme. If there’s a central theme that presents itself
very clearly, I may then go through and tease that out.
Again The Witch and The Lighthouse are sort of art-
house films and they’re not…. The Witch to me is very
clear narratively, though it doesn’t explain everything I
feel like it implies a lot of things that are clear. To me,
that’s my experience, if you find it ambiguous that’s
fine too. The Lighthouse is meant to be incredibly
obscure; those are films where sort of like hitting the
central theme is not the style of it. In scripts that I’ve
written that haven’t been made that were intended for
a larger audience, they have a theme that is more clear.
While The Lighthouse and The Witch don’t confirm to
traditional Western Hollywood dramaturgy, that’s not
a bad—that kind of dramaturgy’s also great. As much
as I like Beckett I like Charles Dickens, come on, you
know. I actually find that it’s harder to write something
that is a good normal beginning, middle and end clear
story for everyone without it being spoon-fed and
stupid. I find that to be the greater challenge. The
Witch where it’s sort of subtle is its own kind of
challenge; The Lighthouse, my brother and I did a
tremendous amount of work to make something off
kilter. We have the answers to all of the questions, we
wrote versions of the script that were much more clear
and then we went back to create roadblocks and
confusions, so I do feel like it is well constructed, but
you can do something like that a little bit willy nilly
and not know what you’re doing in a way that can still
be kind of successful, in a way that with a very
traditional narrative it’s harder to do. My brother is
better at that A, B, C, D, and Sjón who’s writing The
Northman with me, his novels are at times super out
there but he’s incredibly good at that structure in a
way that I am not so that’s another great thing about
me working with another writer.
 
Q: Hi there. You’ve spoken a lot about myth, fairy
tales, and Jungian archetypes. I’m wondering what you
10
believe it is about this ancient wisdom, subconscious
wisdom that the world needs today? Why’s it relevant?
 
RE: I just think it is what it is to be human. Like, to be
really goof troupe about it, there are some ancient
creation myths that are closer to current astrophysics,
do you know what I mean? So I think that so-called
primitive societies or early ontologies, there is
something just understood that is just uh, essential. I
don’t know, I think maybe that’s too simplistic of an
answer, but there you go.
 
Q: Thank you. Huge question!
 
MK: Let’s go to the lady there.
 
RE: Again, if it’s archetypal it should always be
relevant, right? You know what I mean? It should
always be relevant. That’s the point of an idea of an
archetype. But certain archetypes reconstellate
themselves and appear at certain periods of time. The
Witch isn’t the only witch movies that happened in
this period; everyone has fucking crystals you can buy
at Urban Outfitters. Witchouse music was very
popular right before The Witch and then right after
and around The Witch there was all this hipster witch
fashion and stuff. The witch archetype was needed
then and into now for whatever reason. I’m not a
social anthropologist so I don’t quite know why, but
that was important for that archetype to re-emerge at
that time.
 
Q: I had a question about how do you get to the
feeling of completion when you’re writing a script?
That’s something I find I really struggle with, is getting
to the end and then going I’m finished now, because I
always feel like I can go back and do something else.
How do you kind of achieve that feeling of—?
 
RE: Yes, it’s a great question and you can’t. I can’t. But
there’s deadlines. I have to turn shit in and have to
start shooting. A deadline, that’s the only thing. And if
it’s a spec script I have to just say you’re done. This is
the day you said you’d be done so you have to be done.
Otherwise you’re going back and putting walkie-
talkies back into ET you know?
 

MK: OK let’s come to the lady just at the front there
and then can we get a mic to this gentleman here?
 
Q: How many scripts would you say you’d written
before The Witch was financed?
 
RE: Two adapted feature screenplays, two original
screenplays, three short films that were made and two
short films that were not made. And I also adapted—I
did a lot of theatre, so I adapted a lot of plays over the
years before then.
MK: And you said you’re writing sometimes multiple
things at the same time. On average how many
screenplays would you at this point be working on?
 
RE: I can’t do more than three things at the same time,
because I’m prepping the next thing, hope it happens,
until I’m on set saying action I don’t like believe that
it’s happening. Seven nine thirteen, knock, knock,
knock, that’s how you say ‘touch wood’ in Iceland.
Right now aside from Lighthouse press I’m just
working on what I’m working on. When I get into
post is when I can start getting into maybe writing a
little bit again.
 
MK: We’ve got a question just here.
 
Q: Thank you. Being very prescriptive with your
direction in your scripts, does that change on set? In
other words, when you start working with the actors,
and also as a writer-director do you write your
direction notes for shooting, in other words camera
angles and all that? Do you write that in your script as
well?
 
RE: Sometimes I write the camera angles but rarely. It’s
just if I truly feel like that’s the best way to convey like,
the imagery and the moments. Even I feel like
sometimes that’s distracting, but sometimes I feel like
actually it’s the best way to convey the moment. Does
it change? Not a lot. Always things change if things
aren’t working; if things aren’t working, they change.
But if things are working they don’t change, and I like
to kind of—there’s so many decisions to make as a
director and it’s nice to have decided and to move on.
I like the rigour of being decisive, I like saying this is
the shot—I mean, I was speaking about this earlier
11
today, there’s this idea that spontaneity is best and you
prepare, you prepare, you prepare so that you can be
spontaneous in the moment. That is great and I’m not
saying it’s worse than what I’m about to say, but I’m
also saying that it’s not necessarily best. There can be
incredible satisfaction and magic and beauty and
something transcendent about actually preparing,
preparing, preparing and then carrying out the act
that you have prepared to do. Kurosawa later in his
career, like with Ran for example, would rehearse all
day and then do one take, that’s it.
Q: I suppose my thought was does it affect some of the
cast? Would they prefer to have some input into
maybe how they would portray that role, even though
you’ve sort of stipulated a certain way of doing it, and
are you open to that?
 
RE: Obviously it’s collaborative and I’m not entirely
dictatorial, although the director’s job is to be a king
and everyone else’s job is to be the director’s subject—
no, of course it’s collaborative but I think it depends.
It’s interesting, with Ralph Ineson who played the
father in The Witch, early on in the movie we knew
that story-wise two weeks had passed I believe when
Ralph’s about to take his son into the woods after the
baby dies, and Ralph was like I feel like I can’t be
morose, I have to be upbeat because I’m trying to like,
not have my son tailspin into all this shittiness and
depression. So I think I need to be playing it upbeat
instead of morose as it’s written in the script. And I
said Ralph you’re absolutely right, we’ve got to do it
like that. But he was wrong, because the audience who
had just seen a baby get squished up into a pulp by a
witch, they didn’t know until a few scenes later that
two weeks had passed, so when Ralph was like jauntily
doing all this and that it seemed horrific. So we had to
ADR his performance into this morose thing. I’m not
saying that to say that I’m right all the time, but
sometimes there are instincts that you have for a
reason.
 
With The Lighthouse, Dafoe’s character is so very
clear, and Dafoe basically delivered a 2000 per cent
version of exactly what I had imagined. But many of
my preconceived notions about Rob’s character were
wrong, and Rob I would say a third of the time
delivered something very different than my
 12
preconceived notion, but it was closer to my intention identity for me to care, and put the time into it. But it’s
and was definitely preferable. However, because of the funny, I actually—there’s an IP, a famous novel that I
rigorous camera language that I’m using, he had to won’t say what it is, but people were talking about me
work within a certain box, and within that box he was directing it and I didn’t want to and one day I was like
allowed whatever freedoms he could invent, do you ‘I’m just going to write a spec script that I’m going to
know what I‘m saying? sell and I’m not going to care about it and I’m going to
  write it in two weeks and it’ll be great and whatever.’
MK: Can there ever be freedom of language? Just And after three days I was like ‘oh no I just have to
because it’s so specific in dialect and classicism, so direct it,’ and I got all into my whole world and the
perhaps freedom in tone and movement and reaction whole thing and whatever. It wasn’t very good anyway
and action, but is there freedom in language ever? so I stopped after a couple of acts but you know, I
  think it would be hard for me to do. Sorry I don’t have
RE: The way I’m currently working there’s absolutely a better answer.
no freedom in language. And it’s funny because this  
has come up in the past, and a lot of the time with The MK: I want to thank you so much for giving a
Lighthouse people think stuff was improvised which is phenomenal lecture, for creating two wonderful pieces
a great compliment to Rob and Dafoe in making it of cinema; I know that we’re all really excited to see
seem off the cuff even though it was all very planned. what you do next. Thank you Robert Eggers.
And I’ve said sort of snarkily like how on earth could RE: Thanks.
you possibly improvise this stuff? But you know, I was  
watching a documentary about Mike Leigh making [Applause]
Mr Turner, and if you’re working with Mike Leigh you  
can improvise that shit, you know, because he’s work
shopping and work shopping and work shopping with
the actors, perhaps you know, and they’re creating the
dialogue together and so then Timothy Spall can speak
in an obscure nineteenth century dialect like
impromptu—it’s incredible. Maybe some day, but right
now stick to the script.
 
MK: I think we literally have time for one more
question. This gentleman here.
 
Q: How do you approach writing a script where you
didn’t have artistic—where you knew you weren’t
going to have artistic control over the final product?
So writing a script for another director, or writing a
franchise, studio-driven franchise film?
 
RE: That’s a tough question. I mean, I think I’d
certainly be more spare than I am. I mean the short,
snide answer is I wouldn’t, but you never know, I
might get hungry and need to pay some bills. But I
think—writing in a way in which… I haven’t done this
before so I don’t know, I think whatever it means to
write in a way in which I’ve created a canvas for
someone else to take to a new level and be themselves
with. I think it does need to have my DNA and my