Robert Eggers | BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series

thank you gentlemen Robert Eggers okay thanks I've made two feature films and some short films nobody's seen and so it's still strange to me that anyone cares what I might have to say is yeah but anyway thank you very much and thanks to BAFTA it's it's truly an honor to to be here I've never lectured before and perhaps it's just the word lecture but I it makes me anxious I feel comfortable public speaking the only training I have is as an actor and my theater background makes me happy to be in front of an audience I feel 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 III 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 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 and I and it's and it's unique just the kind of strange interests that I have and I 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 that III it's an honor to be among in this series I'm a writer and director so the way that I write my screenplays is would be inappropriate if I weren't directing them as an actor who recently turned down a role in one of my movies said that the screenplay was overwrought and and there is a kind of indulgence in the details of my screenplays that would be entirely foolish if I was 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 xcalibur he thrusts towards the Giant to parries and you know the whole thing so so there okay so that out of the way I'll start at the beginning yeah again this feels so odd but you know what what what what's what's the inspiration where where do the ideas come from to write something it depends on the on the script as I'm sure you would all agree IIIi had an incredibly intense nightmare many years ago that led to the idea of a story I walked around Brooklyn for five hours and 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 and sometimes it's something pragmatic I did and and 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 I had been many years since I'd made a short film and my most recent work was a very stylized piece based on Edgar Allan Poe which featured a puppet as a lead character and performances that were truly weird and my producer said you know if you wanted anyone to finance to which you probably ought to make a new short and it should feature naturalistic performances by children and scary woods and so that was a task you know and and so and and thus I was able to find a story that met with that pragmatic task with with the which I I had written many feature screenplays that no one wanted to finance and I felt that as an American director at the time if I wanted to get a film finance 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 well probably have to take place in New England because that's where I'm from and given that I'll probably have no budget I'll have to shoot it and like the proverbial my parents backyard and witches are the archetypal New England spook and I've been interested them 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 you know chomping around the woods behind my house and and that was and living an almost medieval existence and you pair that with the belief in a real witch and that was an atmosphere that really excited me you know with with with the lighthouse similarly my brother said he was working on a ghost story in a lighthouse and that a ghost story in a lighthouse conjured up the images of the movie the the visual atmosphere the crusty musty dusty rusty black and white square aspect ratio and 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 in in ghost stories fairy tales folk tales mythology religion sometimes the occult that's what really gets me excited I would rather write a novel or paint a painting that has to do with that stuff than to just make a movie and and and all that really has to do with the past which weirdly may somehow be my my biggest passion I think that there's complicated things about organized religion but there's also complicated things about like in an entirely secularized society we lose the the sublime and and the sacred sometimes and so I find that what what really excites me is to kind of understand where we're coming from and where we're going from where we where we came from and and and to try to go back into 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 you know number is is God and in the like you know intelligentsia that we're probably a part of but I I like to stay in in the past and what's very important to me when I begin writing a piece is to not have a message to not have any intention beyond staying true to the world in which I'm trying - - right in so but but but thank heavens like as much as I try to seal myself up like an anchorite or and lock myself in my alchemical cell you know the world is not my world is not vacuum sealed so I am affected by the zeitgeist whether I want to be or or not and if and that's important because otherwise you know 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 that 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 and and and but but but but that's what happened with with the lighthouse which I don't know if people have seen you know I was just trying to make a ghost story in the 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 this is 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 realized like oh I guess we're talking about toxic max masculinity and like everything that's like messed up about it so so that's that's cool and you know but but but but but but even still when you're getting into this this other world you know you can't be judgmental of the characters and the time period you can't rewrite history to to to conform to the zeitgeist but you do have a responsibility to understand what's going on today and not be foolhardy the the thing that I'm working on currently has slavery and violence against women and and it's takes place in the Viking Age so that's going to happen but how do I tell those stories without rewriting history responsibly I don't you know 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 is trying to find a harmonious balance of certain opposites in my writing the the largest things would be like I you know Dionysian versus Apollonian the sort of there or or I'll start with Apollonian which is you know the the the structure the what what patriarchy or patriarchal Western culture would call like male ideals and then the diet the Dionysian female mysterious the stuff like how do you create a balance of something that is like rigorous and and structured and and and clear but also has enigma and mystery and atmosphere moving further it with with these opposites the mythic versus the naturalistic I'm again I'm drawn to archetypal storytelling I'm drawn to archetypal characters how do you make them believable it's it's it's it's it's difficult in in 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 you know my personal experiences the things that aren't me when my brothers first read the witch screenplay they said you know even though this is the 17th century it sounds like our family arguing you know Manette's and that's that's very important you know someone not just conveying plot but but but also having little asides that are about life like these kinds of things can of course ground it and and another thing that really helps me which is not surprising is is knowing the space like when I when I write it's very helpful for me to kind of have a dollhouse and dolls and their clothing and know what's in each room and in order for me to like really imagine what's what's going on and also because I'm telling stories that take place in the past and aren't my personal experience by creating this dollhouse in my head and with mood boards and such like I'm able to see it clearly enough to own it because if I can't experience what I write as my own memories I I can't be truthful again that's sort of a precious statement but but that's how I try to look at it it's taking every moment on as if this is a moment from my personal past and in order to tell it another one of these opposites for me is atmosphere versus story 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 they just have to be 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 that script but for me both my two feature films have very simple stories the witches 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 in my in my films like you need atmosphere for the world to survive for the film to survive and the atmosphere you know is an accumulation of details and these details come from my research they come from from the weather they come from the light they come from you know the format that we shoot on they come they come from all of these things and and and and and an atmosphere like in some ways is a is a visual obstacle this and I mean that in a positive way Emmanuel Lubezki aka Chivo obviously I couldn't admire him more and but he's very excited about shooting this isn't writing sorry but he's very excited about shooting Alexis 65 and and he has a quote kind of saying that we that in the history of cinema we've been looking at the world through dirty windows and finally now like we can see the world clearly with Alexis 65 and like technology I like the dirty windows you know like I like having to peer in through something that excites me so we'll we'll get further into like when I really start talking about period research we'll get further and into atmosphere and details and and and the research process but I'd like to play the first clip all the clips are a little long so sorry [Music] killeth God give you good Mora oh let's do it bad save mother there's no Easter eyes on the dry day it's hard for me to watch the witch because it just didn't 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 it does you know like the irony is I'm using that as an example of atmosphere yeah I find it to be quite naked dick Pope was talking about Mike Lee's Peterloo which I thought was a fine-looking digital film and dick Pope like myself would 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 you know an example of the kind of atmosphere that I'm trying to create and all of the goat bleats and the 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 like that kind of detail in the screenplay might be laborious but I feel like in my movies that are sometimes like thin on plot like if you can't like get that atmosphere from the text like we don't have any understanding of what I'm of what I'm trying to do here I very often describe the odors in my screenplays as well in order so 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 I think that it's not always important for the audience to know but in this clip and in the next clip we we are we you know that kind of the geography of of their cottage was important and so early on in the film were establishing the atmosphere and the mood and then and then we were showing the layout of a little delay of the land so to speak and the same thing will happen with the next clip from from from the lighthouse but you know going back to like pragmatism and maybe we'll talk about producer and studio notes at some point in the QA cuz that's another interesting topic but you know with the film was supposed to start not I don't know if everyone's like seeing the witch or not but basically the film was supposed to start not much further back from that and my my producers and financier is wanted me to start earlier like in 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 and and I 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 like fit it into the budget and you know and I kept trying to cut it out of the movie but actually they were right we didn't we didn't need it so sometimes studio notes are good okay let's watch the next clip [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] he continued he goes upstairs and he sees more but you know we got to get on with tonight as far as you know the dollhouse goes so that it was about four minutes and that was four pages of writing which is I mean it could easily have been a page like boat comes season Island get off the boat they walk across the thing they stand there he goes in he walks around whatever you know but it but but again it's this overwrought writing of every detail for four pages but it also gives you know a better understanding of exactly what we're shooting how long things are gonna take and and it helps I feel like it helps my collaborators under understand like 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 in that moment so let's get into something that's actually interesting so you know researching the period is my whole thing and you know 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 that my interest in ghost stories and fairy tales whatever perhaps is unique about me but if there's anything unique about my films it's perhaps like my obsession with being accurate of course you know Bram Stoker's Dracula and Peter Brooks King Lear are fantastic examples of films aren't period-accurate in any way shape or form but take you into incredibly rich transport of believable worlds I guess Dracula's kind of stylized but it's great and for me you know I'd like to I like it when I don't understand these people I like it when I'm researching Puritans and I think how and could this kind of English Calvinism be hope for anyone and then be reading and reading and reading struggling like this these are these are alien thoughts these are alien people and finally you know reading John Wooden thrips letters to his wife back home in England and that they were like 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 and and and things like that all of a sudden you see okay they're human like me and finally you can unlock this door where you realize like oh my goodness like if I was alive then I would have thought exactly like them of course I would have and not only that like I can see how they're that kind of thinking still resonates in culture today that for me is the most exciting moment so when so and that requires a lot of reading and and and then you you know in in the creation of the physical world which also begins in this in the script phase you know I'm also looking at like tons of visual imagery to understand all this stuff because again the atmosphere is an accumulation of details and if I were to be creating a fictional world perhaps if I was like junior our Tolkien and was that kind of genius at that kind of time in my hands I could create something that's specific but generally it's not going to be as specific as the real thing so if I'm just taking research and not 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 than we could have if we had conjured it up ourselves at least that's my thinking and so you know you read secondary sources you read primary sources you read children's books on it to get like another base overview after you've already gone deep you watched crappy YouTube videos you just you go into museums you consult with historians you do whatever needs to be done to find out as much as you possibly can and you know with the lighthouse for example it's all built on research so my brother's had a ghost story in a lighthouse that was inspired imagery then on day 2 of researching I read about smalls lighthouse tragedy two guys both named Thomas one older one younger they get marooned in their lighthouse station because of a storm and the old one dies the young one goes mad that's my story that's the the dead that's the base of my story and then you know the the lighthouse keepers and the instruction to lighthouse keepers the manual that becomes a huge key this 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 19th 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 broad patents gonna try to escape and pull that lifeboat out you know and so all that stuff is incredibly helpful and then we you know 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're writing a new a New England 19th century maritime story you start getting into classical mythology we start getting into classical mythology you started thinking about symbolist painting from the period and and so Sasha Schneider and John Daleville who are doing like mythic paintings in a 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 rigor with the which I I felt that I don't know if I agree with his conceit today but I felt that because the Puritans were so these word again rigorous in their beliefs so so devout that I felt I needed to use their own words to be respectful to them I don't know if that I agree with that now and I think it might have been disrespectful to use their own words but that's what I did and like luckily because as early modern English that's the period of Milton and Shakespeare and Spenser so there's many books about and and thesauruses with the vocabulary and the rules which was incredibly helpful but I also read tons and tons and tons and tons 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 you're done is at which things you might say to your goat would and and and so you kind of are pulling from from all these different things and some of the dialogue early on became a bit of a collage that then I need to like hone into the separate voices for different characters and and make it much more specific and mine but there were things that the children said when they are possessed are things that I 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 like I something would inspire a scene so John Winthrop the first governor of Massachusetts who I mentioned earlier he has a very personal religious diary that was a real treasure trove for me and he wrote that he dreamed quote that he was that I was with Christ upon the earth and that very instant with them in many tears for the assurance of the pardon of my sins etc I was so ravished with his love towards me far exceeding the affection of the kindest husband that being awakened it 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 to 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 and 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 apologize if Kate Dicky's Scottish tinge to Archer accent is a bit tricky to understand but at least them in the UK and not the states let's do it just remember John cancel that first winter he was tormented of Indian magic she's not the same this is unnatural providence I know not that look at my son will what think you think what think I have no thoughts this is not what what witchcraft which no sister no I thought through as a child are you doing we're back to the plantation in Amman find a good family for Thomasin looks like Caleb to the doctors he'll tell if this be some natural ill enough yeah we cannot return his baggage I'll scour the field that must be some fruit yeah untouched by this rot I was a staff and what comes out there for him presently we all bear it to the village we know horse well the little corn and the gull should try to find rice well well back with Caleb and sell them return with your [ __ ] for the twins in summer said he cannot weigh them here but Thomas in ins they forget that Rockwell wants what does that want Catherine tell me and I will give it though I want to be home thou shalt be home by candle times Amana in England oh well I also have a confession to make I never meant to be assured to me I have big Alma's jobs why even know it since Samson my heart's turned to stone I hate dream ones does when I was of Thomasson Jews then I was with Christ upon earth ah I was so very near him and in many tears for the assurance of the pardon of me sins and I was so ravaged with his love towards me and since some you'll disappear I have such a sad weakness of faith I cannot shake it I cannot see cries help is me I pray and I pray but I cannot I fear I cannot ever feel that same nature of love again oh sure Avada in heaven I'll be afield if you can spout a while do believe it dawn I promise it up I do like the performances Alexa or not but but yeah so there's an example of that in in the lighthouse by brother and I did not very very rarely used in intact sentences we we were studying all kinds of things to create two different Forgotten New England dialects from the end of the 19th century I mentioned Melville Stevenson is not from New England but certainly with some of the maritime stuff he felt he could come in handy and Coleridge to all the usual culprits but then of course we turn 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 named Sarah Orne Jewett and she was writing in the state of Maine in in in our period and she was very concerned concerned or interested in dialect herself and 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 and 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 dictionary separated into region and and and nautical dictionaries and lexicons to really create something or our best version to recreate something and my wife a dissertation by a woman named Evelyn star Cutler who and her dissertation was on dialect in Jewett and thank you Evelyn because she she she she provided rules and we had those I had those rules when I was writing the witch but but who if not for Evelyn would have provided rules for how to work in class people in in the menorah theast of America would have spoken so she was able to break it down and talk about what words are omitted and where there's Rohtak displacement and so on and so forth so we could make sure that these twelve things were always consistent with Rob's character and these ten with Willems or whatever and it was very important you know when we got to her but but from the beginning we were writing and dialect before we totally were fluent in it because we were trying to get our minds to think differently it was if you would write in a in another language so 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 it is a bit theatrical like I'd like I I think that you know the the the the influences of Sam Sheppard and Pinter and like dare I'd say out loud Beckett should show themselves to be clear because even the rant iasts ranter might not go on for this long but it was fun what do you call that sir I'm up and swept twice over a lion dog I swept the kids burg rhymed in the dabbled unwiped unwashed in this stage it's some kind of prayer out of molesting me come now I already said how dare you contradict me a dog now look here I ain't never intended to be no housewife nor slave and taking this job it ain't right these Lord says is more ramshackle and any shanty boys camp I ever seen the queen of England's all fancy housekeeper could even done no better than what I done cuz I tell you I scrubbed this here place twice old thing I say you did not another sort and I say you swab it again and you swab it proper like this time and you'll be swabbing it ten times more after that and if I entice you to pull up in a part every floorboard and clobbered of this here house and scour I'm down with your bare bleeding knuckles you'll do it and if I told you to you go to every single nail from every mold and nail all and suck off every speck of rust till all their nails sparkle like a sperm whale's pecker and then carpenter the whole light station back together from scrap and then do it all over again your doors and by God and by golly you do it smiling lad cuz you like it you like it cuz I says you will I'll predict me again and I'll dock your wages you hear me lad are you sir soif dog swamp yeah so I don't know if that's mythic but it's not naturalistic either yeah you you know one thing that I just didn't mention with the with the research looking over my notes here is just is the other thing is you're always learning more and I'm and you're always and I'm riding in tandem so I can research some stuff write some stuff research and stuff write some stuff the whole time and you're constantly revising as you find more clarity on what the world is the the Viking script was there was a tremendous amount of research that I did my my co-writer there is Icelandic and like really knows a lot about Vikings but we have consulted with three of the greatest Viking historians recently and we missed some stuff you know and and that means that it's it's but it's tricky because there are some things that you can say okay like we'll fix this we'll fix this but then it's like you know we've made this sandcastle we have this glorious tower that we're really proud of and we have to smash it now it's horrifying but sometimes you just have to like suck it up and smash it and rebuild it better so in conclusion that was a bit scattered but hopefully during the QA 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 the slash okay hi hi that was kind of incredible thank you oh I'm glad I'm not even gonna try and pretend to play intelligent intelligence gymnastics with you so I'm gonna maybe start and strip it all the way back and start from layman's terms in terms of process sure in everyday terms yep 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 yeah I think it's sort I think again again it sort of depends if I'm writing alone I be quite free I have up my little notes about my 3x structure or my 5x 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 I'm allowing myself that if I'm writing for a studio like if it you know I've never written something like for hire but I have been paid commissioned to write my own piece and so therefore I do need to have a treatment for the studio to be sure that they actually like what they're paying me to write but you know with with with things on spec I will just kind of let it happen when I'm writing with another writer it's a it's essential that we outline things very clearly before we put pen to paper but again things evolve and leave the whole sandcastle metaphor whatever so I'm writing with another writer that writing with your brother on the right house picking up on the idea of dialect and naturalism in use even the last scene we've just taken a look at there's a poetry to it and rhythm to in a beat to it yeah and how do you a create that in a way that's communication between two people and talking to it conversation but then write that with another person you I don't know you just do iiiiii sorry I think I mean my brother and I know each other pretty well we're brothers so that helps and I think you know in the in both writing with my brother and with the Icelandic poet and novelist young who's a much better writer than I am it's like I mean I I'm finally sort of like in charge you know and that does help clarify things though both of them are incredibly talented I respect them so much so if they're really telling me like I've made a mistake I you know I listen but I think it's you just kind of toss things back and forth and I you know with with my might with my brother we are we're pretty well aligned on what this what this was and I think sometimes when we're working with with zone I tend to like gild the lily and he tends to say can take it back a bit with that Nordic Sensibility um and with the lighthouse he did kind of undersell it in the way that you said that it was just maybe every scene is a similar conversation between two people a different pathway and it's so not that it's so kind of mental gymnastics a game between the two of them and ever so carefully and cleverly leads to this incredible finale so the time of kind of placing that and writing with your brother again though seems to go how did you kind of piece together a story an arc and a narrative to get something that you know essentially is two people in one situation so I had that that basic plot I mentioned from smalls white house in Wales then you know very quickly I was like okay there needs to be mermaid in the movie 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 there's like all these bits and bobs and I wrote some stuff and then years passed and my brother and I would like got together to really write this thing so I gave max the sort of 11 pages that I had written all my notes I rewrote them in a way that could be decipherable to another human being and then I give him a list of movies to watch and books to read and a month later week veined 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 wasn't great and max wrote another outline because I was also writing two other things at the time so that's the other thing is like I like 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 the same time I'm painting myself into a corner so so so anyway back to this so then max wrote a third outline and act 1 and 2 were strong act 3 was not working we just couldn't find it and but I said you know we're in good enough shape so max break Act one so he wrote Act one I revised it then he wrote Act two I revised it and 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 but once we had had once we had found that that first version like we liked we realized that we had kind of retold some some myths by mistake another mistake but just by whatever by the muses and that we were conjuring and and so we said okay well let's let's amplify our knowledge on prometheus and Proteus and Triton and Neptune and then see how we can further infuse the next draft with our 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 yeah yeah yeah you've kind of mentioned as well when you were talking about the idea that you have been researching researching researching and then that you're perhaps in kind of the 17th century or the 19th century and to you might not be resonating today but then obviously it has resonated with audiences today and thematically with the witch and kind of being reporter in the dark feminine and with the lighthouse looking at toxic masculine masculinity did you do you realize that when you're writing that this yeah no I was trying to say like like no when you're done when you're done writing like you can you can see it but but not in I know I don't see it well how important is it for you to have kind of something that obviously isn't so embedded in a specific time and space but then can have some sort I thought you said it's not about message but well it's just like so I mean I'm after this kind of archetypal story I can't know if it's gonna work for forever but the best stories stick around there's a reason why people talk about Oedipus there's a reason why people talk about Hamlet there's a reason I'm not gonna keep going but you know marie-louise von Franz who was a prominent union said that like Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales are going to die because they aren't like essentially human the way many of the Grimm fairy tales are and that like Hans Christian Andersen was like a demented Victorian and his his stories are too wrapped up in his Victorian repressions and whatever and she's right like The Little Mermaid is kind of sticking around thanks to Disney but the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales are not being told at the same frequency as they once were is the lighthouse a grim fairy tale no but but I guess the idea though is that you're trying to have something that that resonates in any time and I think by by being by trying to have it be all about the time period in which it's set in instead of making any kind of 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 and into the mindset of the people of that period it is slightly impossible so so it finally is only going to be a mirror of the mindset of today but and but you know you using that the lens of the past to reflect back on ourselves I mean that's a little but I think you know what I'm saying this dual spaces interpretation because obviously can't you ever know yeah you know um I'm gonna skip in a little bit for in terms of kind of the visual look and how that relates back to the writing in terms of looking at kind 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 how does that affect kind of the right and obviously the claustrophobia of the lighthouse and how is that having an impact on the way you write yeah I mean the the aspect ratio it got a little smaller over the years but but I would always wanted it to be boxy and I always wanted to be black in like thirty five-millimeter that's something when I that I saw when I pictured the atmosphere and of course like as you move forward both in the writing and then in development and then in prep you learn more things change you know and your preconceived notions are not always correct but but but you find 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 so sometimes I see how it's shot and and sometimes in certain sequences I write extremely wide shot lighthouse tender like in the middle of the sea yadda yadda yadda like close shot the hull carves through waves like papa 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 and sometimes I see that and I 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 that we're gonna have to find it later sometimes I see a scene with that's a complicated action sequence or stunt or visual effect practical effect and I think okay how can I write this in an achievable way and sometimes I think if you think about writing it an achievable little 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 so then coming back circling back to the idea of studio Commission's or studio notes or producer notes how does that then have an impact I'm kind of writing in that way and do you leave things out I'm not I'm not I'm not duplicitous because the the most important thing is that everyone is on the same page because if we can't if we don't like I try to now after some experience say every horrible thing that a studio wouldn't want to hear about what I'm doing like straight away and if they're scared at that point like good you know but if they're but if they're but if they're still willing to listen after I've said like all the crazy stuff then then then we're good to go because I'm not gonna like shock them too much as we as we move forward I think you know I used to be very defensive when I was younger and now I'm not in the room but without I get my notes I go home I see they're trying to ruin my movie and I sleep on it and then I realized actually these are smart I think I think that you know like a lot of times and this is i'm sure common knowledge to you but a lot of times the thoughts behind the note is right but the note itself is not good I think you know if you have multiple people saying Singh is wrong with the scene maybe we have different ideas about how to fix it so there might be something there's probably something wrong about that scene you know even if their solutions are poor and and and so it's worth thinking about that stuff and and and you know and I mean the which the first draft of the which that was presentable there is no central protagonist it was we would fought we followed each of the family members carefully for a period of time and then the film ended with Thomason and my producing partners were kind of like look it's cool we think it's cool it probably cannot be financed it might be the best version of this movie what you're doing but 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 again like at that time like incredibly defensive but I thought okay I can make it about Thomasin and I can deal with that you know one of the things I don't love about the witch though as I think there are these kinds of you can feel that the original version wasn't only her you know and there's good things about that as far as like the world-building is concerned but there's bad things about that as far as like having the best narrative you could have then when you at that point go into filming with kind of script that maybe you're 80 90 percent happy with I was happy to be script at the time you know now I have my things but it was I mean I had many years because no one to finance it for so long like I had many years to like get it in pretty good shape I liked the script better than the film I'm gonna ask a very superficial question about writing in animals so you had the goat in the woods which I believe was kind of hunt troublesome and then seagulls feature very heavily in the lighthouse did you think when you're writing that how I'm gonna orchestrate yeah so now 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 like can these animals be trained are they legal to shoot within the countries I'm most likely to be shooting and like 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 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 like stand around and eat stuff they're not supposed to eat and so then my Brooke like I wanted Pattison's character killing a sea bird to be like the the catalyst that would bring the storm but my my and that inspired my brother to write all these [ __ ] scenes of seagulls and he was telling me about it and I was like there's no way I'm going to do that no you know and then he was like I urge you to read these scenes I think they're good and they were great so I so we had to have a seagull but the great news is like seagulls are are incredibly intelligent and there's three very well trained seagulls in the UK so you know right right seagulls right right way I want to thank you so much for giving a phenomenal lecture for creating two wonderful pieces of cinema I know that we're all really excited to see what you do now thank you Robert Edgar [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: BAFTA Guru

Views: 191,944

Keywords: BAFTA, BAFTA Guru, British Academy Of Film And Television Arts (Award Presenting Organization), creative, career, film making, TV, gaming, actor, advice, movie, movie making, the lighthouse trailer, the lighthouse explained, the lighthouse scene, the lighthouse review, the lighthouse hark, the lighthouse soundtrack, the lighthouse song, the lighthouse clip, the lighthouse ending explained, the lighthouse analysis, robert eggers, robert eggers interview, robert eggers the lighthouse

Id: XrqkfWFCCIs

Length: 64min 30sec (3870 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020