I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.
Witches were really scary to me as a kid.
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.
I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.
My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.
Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.
In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.
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 think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.
For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.
For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.
I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.
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.
Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you're just turning the camera on what's happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.
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.
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.
I'd love to do more theater.
I always wanted to do film. And I still love theater.
I'm trying to communicate with other people about humanity and stuff, man!
