A biography for Robert Eggershasn’t been written yet.
“I was interested in dark subject matter for sure, including folklore, fairy tales, mythology, archetypal stories of people going into the bowels of the forest.”
“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.”
“The intention behind 'The Witch' was to be very restrained. I think that story, while it sometimes annoys me, needed to take itself incredibly seriously.”
“Honestly, I'm a snobby person.”
“In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.”
“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.”
“After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.”
“I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.”
“I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.”
“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.”
“I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.”
“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.”
“Bergman's my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose.”
“Willem Dafoe is a huge hero of mine.”
“The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.”
“Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'”
“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.”
“To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.”
“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.”
“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.”