Interview: ‘The Witch’ Writer/ Director Robert Eggers Talks About Feminism and Horror

John Allegretti ’18 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Since Sundance 2015, the buzz for Robert Eggers’ The Witch has been slowly building up. The Witch is the creepy New England tale of a 17th century family torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic and possession. Now that the film is finally out in theaters, the reviews continue to impress (Check out Emertainment’s review here)  and audiences have been equally receptive. Emertainment Monthly got the chance to participate in a conference call with Eggers, who wrote and direct the haunting film.

Emertainment Monthly: You have past experience in production and costume design, so how did you approach those fields in The Witch?

Robert Eggers: The whole goal was to recreate things as authentically as possible. I did a lot of work on my own but also with museums and historians and some people in the living history community to try and understand how this would have been done. Everything on the farm is made from the correct materials it should have been made from. The clothing is all hand-stitched and the other part of this is trying to keep the color consistent. Puritans didn’t just wear drab colors, but for this film that needed to be the case to keep it consistent. Also I was looking with Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir, the costume production designers, to make stuff that really did seem archetypal. William, the father, wears this wide-brimmed hat that is a very traditional Puritan Pilgrim hat. That wasn’t the only kind of hat that was worn back then but it was very crucial to make him like what our idea of a Pilgrim was.

What did you want to do with the first scene of The Witch and how did you go about executing it?

RE: People needed to know what a 17th century witch was capable of right away. People think of an evil witch and they think of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West and we needed to know what the stakes were right away. It was all about restraint. That was one of the goriest moments but I wasn’t gonna show a knife entering a baby, there’s no point in that. So better to leave it to the audience’s imagination.

What is your outlook on contemporary horror and the jump scare?

RE: Films like The Babadook, Let the Right One In, and It Follows are strong because the filmmakers are doing stuff that’s personal to them instead of just creating a product. There are a few jump scares in my film. They don’t work for everyone but I don’t think jump scares are bad. When you have something that’s a product only and it’s about “how can I make someone throw their popcorn all over their girlfriend” verses telling a story where that scare is earned. These are the differences and dissident kind of thinking, but I don’t think horror is in a worse place now than it’s ever been. We like to think that everything in the past is good like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Shining. We don’t remember the tons and tons of crap that saturated the market and everyone hated at the time. We remember the things that work (laughs).

In a year when the average shot length in most movies is probably about 5 seconds there were a lot of 10 or 20 second shots in The Witch. Was this a reaction to contemporary horror movies?

RE: It wasn’t. I don’t watch a lot of contemporary horror; I don’t know the rules well enough to react to them. But I like slow, boring movies like Bergman and Dreyer and Tarkovsky. By having these shots be long we’re sustaining a kind of tension.

I noticed that the film had a grey color scheme and a claustrophobic feel throughout. Was there a reason for that?

RE: Yeah. I was trying to create a very grim atmosphere, something very oppressive and gloomy. I didn’t want any sunlight anywhere and the film’s about despair so we can’t have nice sun-shiny days. If you look at the un-color graded footage it’s pretty close to that. We definitely were draining out some of the color but the costumes and the sets and the locations don’t have a hell of a lot of color in them to begin with.

Why did you shoot the movie in the now uncommon aspect ratio of 1:66? What was the purpose behind shooting that way?

RE: It’s very funny that you ask me this question because the director of photography didn’t like how I explained this in some other interview (laughs). The reason why is because that frame is taller. The trees are taller and more imposing and that also creates a more intense atmosphere in the house and is more claustrophobic. And also because the Alexa—the camera we’re using—the native aspect ratio is 4:3 so you can shoot in scope. But we were actually using spherical lenses and using more of the sensor than we would have if this were 1.85:1 so we actually have increased resolution.

How were you able to create this Puritan nightmare of a movie?

RE: I just read a lot of books. I think what it comes down to is that if you’re gonna make a film that’s actually transportive everything in it has to be so personal. It’s not enough for me to set up a shot with the DP and say “that looks cool”. Every image in the film needs to be an articulation of my memory. It has to be so personal that it’s as if this is my memory of my Puritan childhood and what my father smelled like in the cornfield that day and having a familiarity with every little bit of dust in the floorboards of the house like they’re my own. That’s a little precious sounding but that’s my approach. Maybe that helps (laughs).

What was the most shocking piece of research you came across before starting pre-production?

RE: There’s some shocking details about witchery. They mainly happened to do with genitals so that’s why they didn’t make it into the film, but all other kinds of shocking things did. I think just really understanding that the real world and the fairy-tale world were the same thing in the early modern period. If they called you a witch they really believed you were a fairy-tale ogre capable of doing the things that the witch in my film does. That’s the lifeblood of my film and the most interesting thing is understanding the mindset of the 17th century Calvinists.

Were there any real-life women suspected of being witches that you’re interested in?

RE: The story of Elizabeth Knapp was something that I was very taken with and was very instrumental in creating this film’s story.

How did you create that religious fanaticism within the family?

RE: Just reading the primary source material. Reading people’s diaries, reading people’s journals. There’s a prayer manual by a man named Louis Bayley who was an English Puritan. There was a book called The Practice of Piety by Charles Hambrick-Stowe which was also really very helpful. This guy, I believe he’s a Pastor, was able to take Calvinist predestination and explain it in a way that seemed hopeful to me which was very helpful, because I’m not trying to condemn these people for being Puritans. It’s not that simple. I actually like these guys and it’s tragic to see them making these mistakes when they’re trying to do the right thing.

People are saying that The Witch is definitely an art house film but it’s very approachable to mainstream audiences. What do you think about that?

RE: I think it’s great. There’s definitely some people who totally hate the hell out of this movie, which is also great. But there are a lot of people and a broader audience who are connecting to it and that’s really exciting. It’s extremely gratifying to get emails from teenagers where this is the first art house horror they’ve seen and it’s something special to them. I didn’t get to see a lot of films like this when I was a teenager and I’m super excited to be able to show this to people.

Could you speak about your working relationship with A24? Two of the best genre movies to come out last year were both distributed by A24. Is there a push amongst their executives to bring these smart, genre-bending movies to people? Will you be working with them again?

RE: A24 is great. They were my first choice going into Sundance of who I would’ve wanted to distribute the film and I was extremely excited when it worked out. They’re really smart, they’re really creative, particularly Graham, who does the marketing. So it’s been nice, really nice and they’ve obviously done an incredible job, I couldn’t be more grateful to their expertise. I wrote a lot of scripts that were super weird and too outside of any genre and no one wanted to make them. A24 is finding these films that straddle both worlds so it’s exciting, I can’t wait to see what they do.

Going off on the scripts that you said were strange or too bizarre for mainstream audiences, can you tell us about those ideas and do you think with the success of The Witch we’ll see those scripts come to the surface?

RE: They’re all sort of weird, dark, fairy-tales and pseudo horror. Will any of them make it to the screen? I dunno, maybe. Honestly, I don’t think they’re that great in hindsight anyways (laughs). I think it was because I was still getting better as a writer (laughs) so we’ll see. But maybe one day.

How are people’s reactions to The Witch settling with you?

RE: I had to believe in the film in order to get it made. It took a very long time to get the film financed and I needed to constantly believe that the film would find an audience, but I expected only four screens if we were lucky. So to be opening wide and expanding and to have these kinds of extremely positive reactions from critics? Not in a million years. Not in a million years.

How did you feel about winning the Best Director award at Sundance?

RE: Again, never in a million years. It was really shocking. I thought we might win for cinematography and when we didn’t get called for that I was like “cool, I can sit tight” and it was pretty wild.

There was the news that the Satanic Temple came out and endorsed the movie. Do you have any general thoughts on that?

RE: It’s nice to have fans (laughs).

Throughout the whole film you’re wondering if Black Phillip really is evil and capable of something. What was your inspiration for him? Did you know right away that you wanted him to be more than a goat?

RE: If you Google Image search “witch woodcut” or “witch engraving” you’ll find goats galore and goats are very much part of the European witch mythology. He developed over the writing period. Actually in England it was uncool to be a goat farmer, you were considered very backward. But in New England during the beginning of the Great Migration the Pilgrims all brought goats with them because goats will eat anything and are very efficient for clearing new land.

Looking at the past work you’ve done you’ve made short films about Hansel and Gretel and the Tell-Tale Heart. Have you always been inspired by folklore and fairy tales and did you want to make that your brand of film?

RE: I guess. I probably wouldn’t choose the word “brand”. I don’t mean to be disrespectful about it but it is the stuff that speaks to me, it always has. Fairy-tales, folktales, religion, mythology, the occult. That’s what I spend all of my time reading about when I’m not doing my work but it ends up being my work anyway. I’m probably more interested in that stuff than film itself.

There’s a lot of Kubrick in the movie. Was that something you always in the back of your head while making the movie?

RE: Kubrick’s great. This film is very much like The Shining. That’s the Kubrick movie I’m embarrassed to say it quoted. The temp score was also very Kubrickian. It wasn’t my intention to quote any film but because I’m a first time feature filmmaker and I’m trying to find my voice some of my influences are perhaps too clear.

Across the board the acting is very good. How do you work with and interact with actors and do you have to do things differently for experienced actors like Ralph Ineson and Katie Dickie as opposed to Anya Taylor-Joy?

RE: I’m proud of all the performances. Acting is the only thing I have any training in. I went to an acting conservatory back in the day and every actor needs something a little different. Every one of these actors was capable of doing a naturalistic performance but they all needed something different. Ralph is pretty technical and very proud that he’s not a method actor and he’s very aware of the camera and how to position his body. Kate Dickey is experienced but she’s all about emotion and if I get too involved in camera marks and technical things it’s hard for her to do her best work. Anya, because this was her first film, doesn’t have her own technique yet. So it was just me throwing things out at Anya to get what I needed at the time. And with the kids, similar in some ways to Anya, except for the fact that they were too young to be going into any kind of dark places emotionally and psychologically, so they needed to be protected from the story. They didn’t know what the story was, they had a different idea of what it was and with them it becomes much more detached. It’s much more like dance choreography or puppeteering them to get that kind of stuff.

Was it a difficult process to write and direct the film?

RE: No, being a writer-director isn’t the craziest combination. It took a long time to write the script but it was fun and gratifying and certainly on set there were some scenes where I was wondering “why did I ever write that? That’s gonna be a pain” but I went into writing it knowing that I wanted to direct it so it was helpful. One of the biggest obstacles for a writer-director is to try to get your ideas on the page in a way that everyone understands.

In the movie you focused a lot on the family and animals. Why did you target the animals and the children in the movie?

RE: Well besides the children and animals there’s nothing else there (laughs). So it was important to focus on them.

What are your thoughts on the evil witch and the The Witch being called a feminist film?

RE: The evil witch in the early modern period was men’s fears, desires and ambivalences about female power and sadly, she was also women’s own fears about motherhood in this extremely male dominated society. That’s pretty clear when you start reading all this primary source material. I didn’t intend to write a piece about female empowerment but I realized in that writing a witch story they’re one in the same thing. So these themes about feminism sort of rise to the top.

When you were writing Thomasin’s character and directing her in the film did you think about how witches are hyper-sexualized in film and how they’re either old terrifying looking women or younger innocent looking girls?

RE: I asked a lot of men and women if were they interested in witches as children and if so, why? You see the witch manifest herself in different ways. The witch of the early modern period embodied dark femininity that was created in a male-dominated society. In the film all this stuff gets played out but hopefully my intention is for it to be an exploration of family dynamics.

Do you think there’s an importance to pushing the boundaries of the genre forward to show the casual viewer that something like a horror movie can be used as a vehicle to explore these deep complex themes as opposed to spilling your popcorn on your girlfriend?

RE: I have no clue what’s gonna happen, man. I love all this conversation. It’s very cool and interesting that this film has made people talk about stuff (laughs). I’m not a huge Lovecraft fan but one of the things I love about Lovecraft is that he understands the horror of the sublime. And I’m not an expert in this but some of the most famous Japanese plays are horror stories. Medieval Japanese Noh players understood that horror is an important way to understand what’s going on with you and me. Darkness is half of the world, so it’s important to check it out.

Emertainment Monthly: Can you give us any details on your remake of Nosferatu?

RE: I’ve been working on a medieval knight film for about a year. Nosferatu—if I do it—is probably going to be in the future. That’s all I can say.

This interview has been condensed from its original form. The Witch is now playing in theaters everywhere.