Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.
Certainly as a director you want to be working with people who are on the same page as you and that you can trust and get along with.
As a second-time director you don't want to be working with someone who's a star that wants you to get down and kiss their feet.
Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.
I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.
What's so interesting to me about history is - what's interesting to anyone - is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we're the same.
Willem Dafoe is a huge hero of mine.
I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.
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.
Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'
It's pretty easy to learn about lighthouses because there's a lot of lighthouse enthusiasts. Really, there's lots of books about it, and it's fairly easy to find lighthouse keepers' journals and logbooks.
Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.
If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.
Haxan' is really cool. There are a lot of things about it that are just great.
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.
The Lighthouse' isn't scary. A few people have said it is, but I don't think it is.
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.
People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times - and 'A Christmas Carol.'
I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.
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.
