I was totally shocked when Willem Dafoe's manager said that he wanted to have lunch with me.
Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga' was huge for me. Seeing how all the creatures were made, looking inside Jabba The Hut, all of the maquettes lined up, building the world... 'This is a job?!' I was always avidly watching special features and behind the scenes stuff.
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.
The 'Friday the 13th' Jason movies were way too scary for me.
Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He's responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from 'Nosferatu' to 'Faust' to 'Sunset.'
The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.
I remember seeing re-releases of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' and 'Bambi' in the theater very young. They had huge impacts on me, particularly the dark aspects.
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.
In earlier cultures with pagan belief systems, light and dark were celebrated equally, people were around death a lot. In contemporary Western culture, we don't have that, and horror is a place you can be immersed in it.
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.
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 think where genre is limiting is that in the marketplace, you have to put things in a box to create expectations to make a profit, and that's where you run into trouble.
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.
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.'
Bergman's my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose.
Parajanov's love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.
I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.
The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.
I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.
After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.
