Quotes from Robert Eggers

African Queen' is pretty darn great.

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.

The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.

I don't want to act like the witch trials all over New England were warranted, but when you live in a culture that believes something is real, it feels very real.

I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.

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

Three years into getting 'The Witch' financed, I was hanging out with my brother and he was like, 'I'm working on this script. It's a ghost story in a lighthouse.' I thought, 'Damn, that's a really good idea, I wish I'd had it.'

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.

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.

So we didn't have any stars for 'The Witch.' A24 felt they needed something special for marketing, and they wanted to have the Satanic Temple endorse the film.

Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'

American audiences, a lot of people couldn't understand a word of 'The Witch.'

Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.

When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.

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.

Witches were really scary to me as a kid.

My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.

I think the thing that is most influential about 'Haxan' is the casting of the witches as just old women and the strength of that.

Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.

The figure of the witch was interesting to me, because of the primal, archetypical witch nightmares I had, even as an adult. But as a kid, it started with Margaret Hamilton in 'The Wizard Of Oz' as this inescapable horror.

My brother and I grew up in a setting in the woods very much like 'The Witch' in southern New Hampshire, and then we would drive up north to Maine to settings like 'The Lighthouse' for vacations.

As a kid, picturing people who grew up in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I walking around in hose and latched shoes in the woods behind my house was an interesting atmospheric thing for me.