The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.
What I love about research is when I'm having a bad day and I can't write, I'll just research some more, I'll learn some more and I'll have better command of the world of the film.
Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.
I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.
To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.
I grew up doing a lot of theater - acting and making sets and costumes.
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.
Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult - these are the things I'm most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I'm very passionate about cinema.
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.
Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.
When 'The Lighthouse,' bizarrely, became the film that people wanted to greenlight, it was really clear that those were the only two people to play the roles. And I knew that they would want to do it.
Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.
Honestly, I'm a snobby person.
We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.
African Queen' is pretty darn great.
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.
The Witch' was intended to be a horror movie.
American audiences, a lot of people couldn't understand a word of 'The Witch.'
Certainly in Catholic countries, the peasantry have always found ways to integrate pagan things in a way that makes it a little bit easier just to be a human being.
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.
