Robert Eggers

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You've got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny.”

“I was totally shocked when Willem Dafoe's manager said that he wanted to have lunch with me.”

“I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.”

“For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.”

“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.”

“I'd love to do more theater.”

“Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.”

“For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.”

“I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.”

“People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times - and 'A Christmas Carol.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“As a second-time director you don't want to be working with someone who's a star that wants you to get down and kiss their feet.”

“I would definitely agree that 'The Witch' doesn't leave much of anything to the imagination. There are some ambiguities about 'The Witch,' for sure, but all in all, it's pretty clear what's going on.”

“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.”

“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 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.”