Interview with the man behind THE WITCH.
Robert Eggers’ nightmarish folk horror chiller THE WITCH opens wide this Friday.
Telling the tale of a 17th centuray farming family’s descent into madness and superstition, while a long-haired hag circles them like prey, THE WITCH is one of the most sophisticated horror films in years.
SHOCK spoke to Eggers about his acclaimed, jet-black drama.
SHOCK: While immersing myself in THE WITCH, I felt that this director had a real elemental sense of what he was recording for the film. I felt I was in the woods 400 years ago. When I’m seeing a rabbit, Im seeing a rabbit. Nothing seemed digital in the film.
EGGERS: Honestly, believe it or not, the hare, the raven, the dog, the horse, the chickens, were great. Maybe the chickens were a little bit painful, okay but whatever. You get a big butterfly net and you’re good to go, but the goat was a nightmare. You can’t train a goat, but how ever horrible that was, I am so glad we don’t have CG animals in the film.
SHOCK: He looked so natural just the way he jumped.
EGGERS: That’s because it’s a real goat.
SHOCK: Did you find one animal wrangler to handle all of the animals or did you have a goat wrangler?
EGGERS: Yeah, it did end up being we had one guy, who’s kind of like running the show, but frankly it was different people were good with different things and had the different trainers doing it.
SHOCK: Different wranglers for each animal. You wrote all of these animals into the script, yet were you aware of how difficult it might be to work with them?
EGGERS: I worked as a designer on other people’s films and I worked in fashion in France, and I had directed some short films. One of them with children and animals, so I had an idea of what I was getting myself into. I find that there’s two versions of working with animals. There’s this utterly controlled environment where you have to have animals as a unit, making sure everything is super precise and have the patience and the foresight to really hit the nail on the head and be efficient. Then there’s the going with the flow and basically with the hare and the raven, it was this efficiency route, but with everything else it was “Were going to have to make some adjustments here.”
SHOCK: My sense as a spectator of the film is I really felt that you were just connecting with the animals and connecting with the woods.
EGGERS: Well, the thing is you prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, I cant say that enough times, with meticulous detail so that in the moment you can take advantage of what is a little bit spontaneous. The cinematic language of the film, the blueprint was so precise and it was pretty much caught on camera, partially because of the budget and partially because of the time, but that’s also the type of filmmaking that I like. I think that if I had more money, we probably would have had just more takes and a few more shots. Though it’s not about coverage. That’s not how I think.
You were talking about the elemental stuff. My approach and also Jarin Blaschke, the DP, who basically did all my short films and I worked with him as a designer on a lot of other people’s stuff. Both of us feel like it’s look. In order to actually transport an audience, it’s not enough for the lighting to be good or the shot to be cool or interesting or the design to be cool or interesting, I have to be articulating every single image as if this was my memory. This has to be my memory of my childhood when I was a puritan and what my father smelled like in the corn field that day with the mist on the corn. Thus, the obsession with getting all the period details right to make it seem like I lived it. It needs to be that personal for it to work.
SHOCK: Had you seen Piers Haggard’s film BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW?
EGGERS: I had not seen that film until, maybe in the edit, maybe just before we all moved up to Canada and I was like, “Oh wow, this is fucking great.” He even does the language somewhat. It’s a really cool film. It’s funny, I liked Hammer stuff as a kid very much. I know that’s not Hammer, but it’s part of the same general whatever. I was, as a kid, more attracted to the more traditional monsters and I missed a lot of the folk horror stuff. It’s been fun even now, after making this movie, going back and checking that kind of stuff out.
SHOCK: Im hearing you’re going to do a Middle Ages movie which makes a lot of sense. You’ll be able to take a similar approach of immersion possibly for this film. With a larger budget you might even be able to build your own castle.
EGGERS: Well, I don’t want to get into those kind of details, but I will say that partially, so much of the research materials for THE WITCH came from the library because I didn’t have any money, but I will say that on the bookcase there’s about a shelf and a half of witch books that were all dedicated to making this film and I have a bookcase dedicated to the books that are going into this next one.
SHOCK: When you were working with your actors in this film, did you and your team live in the environment first before you began making the film?
EGGERS: Yeah. None of the actors are like method-method. Even Kate Dickie, who’s so fucking emotionally connected, none of them are method, but we did have to have a week of rehearsals which first consisted of how do you know ghosts, how to use a billhook, how do you stew corn, how do you do all this stuff, let’s get a feel of the farmhouse, let’s understand all of this and that. Then it was rehearsing more like you would rehearse a play with blocking, but it was also about having these strong family dynamics and we have to have a family with some love so that we can see them collapse. You’ve got to care about these people and so they have to care about each other for that to come through.
SHOCK: Was Barry Lyndon in your lexicon of filmmaking for this film?
EGGERS: Sure, its great, but I was not thinking about Barry Lyndon because, obviously, Kubrick was the first person to shoot with natural light in the way that is just so easy and common to do now. I like Barry Lyndon, but I think that THE WITCH just needed to be natural light to serve the story. The mise en scene of Barry Lyndon is so deliberately painterly and my intention is to be more accidentally painterly. I think there, in the beginning, there’s a farm montage that is a little bit more posed, but other than that, its just not what I was going for. If you put someone in 17th-century clothing with natural light next to a window, it’s going to look like a Vermeer. If you put them in a darker room, with only a single-source candle, it’s going to look like a George de la Tour. You know what I’m saying? That’s just how light works.
