Quotes from Robert Eggers

This makes me sound like some new age, crystal-worshipping weirdo, but the woods behind my house really felt haunted by the past when I was a kid.

I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.

I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.

For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.

Parajanov's love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.

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 had these fashion history books that I really enjoyed looking at. I liked costumes and used to wear them to school until I got beat up for it.

What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.

The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.

I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.

Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.

Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.

Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

I'm a big fan of silent cinema and I think that before I got into the canon of European arthouse cinema, the first interesting films I liked as a kid were German expressionist silent films.

I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.

You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.

Being a wannabe auteur and my favorite filmmakers being part of the dead canon of European, Japanese art-house masters, I want to say that I don't want to care about genre and how it's limiting and all of that stuff.

The 'Friday the 13th' Jason movies were way too scary for me.

Every actor demands different things. Every human being you come in contact with in your life, you have to deal with in slightly different ways.