Robert began tracking down as many pictures of New England circa the 1890s, as well as looking at everything from “the great lighthouse cinema coming out of France in the 1930s by the two Jeans” (Grémillon and Epstein) to Symbolist paintings. The two Eggers started trading drafts back and forth, reworking acts and revamping as they went along. 'Good Time': How Two Brothers Scuzzed Up Robert Pattinson and Made a Gritty Classic It was a notion that both excited him and scared him to death. He was being touted as one of the hot new horror filmmakers. The bearded, thirtysomething director now had industry clout.

Made for a modest budget and with no marquee-name actors, The Witch quickly became one of the most buzzed-about movies at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and a bona fide hit for the distribution company A24. “At which point my life changed drastically,” he says wryly. Then, suddenly, he also found financing for his long-gestating project about the puritans. The ending is pretty similar to The Telltale Heart - it’s a realistic tale with a folkloric bent.”Įggers had discovered the foundation for what he wanted to do. The older man dies and his coworker thinks he’ll be blamed for it. It takes place in Wales, early part of the 19th century, one older man and one younger. “You can find it on the internet there’s an opera about it. “It’s one of the most famous lighthouse stories there is,” Robert says. He came across what is now commonly referred to as “the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy,” in which two lighthouse keepers, both named Thomas, find themselves marooned at their outpost when a major storm hits. Given the go-ahead by his brother, Robert began to research as much about lighthouses, seafaring types and maritime mythology as he could. Or, if we’re being perfectly accurate - and the director is a bit of a stickler when it comes to accuracy - a true- ish story. It was a true story, Eggers says, that was the key. It will definitely change how you view both actors and confirm that the filmmaker behind The Witch is indeed a major, singular talent.Įvery Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second Term (Answer: It isn’t pretty.) After a successful run on the festival circuit and a limited release in New York and Los Angeles, it opens nationally on October 25th and threatens to put a collective dent in audiences’ frontal lobes. Instead, the Eggers deliver a delirious, surreal tale of madness, masculinity, identity, binge-drinking and what happens when you anger the gods of the sea by messing with seabirds. A two-hander about a veteran lighthouse keeper named Thomas ( Willem Dafoe) and his younger apprentice, Ephraim ( Robert Pattinson), it bears no resemblance to the Poe story other than the shared title. Several years, numerous collaborative drafts, endless days of research, one critically acclaimed hit and one extremely physically draining location shoot later, The Lighthouse hits theaters and proves that yes, if you wish hard enough, nightmares can indeed come true. His head, Robert says, was already filled with visions of “cable-knit sweaters, salt cod, clay pipes, hand-rolled cigarettes…for months, I’d thought of mermaids and foghorns and Fresnel lenses and mysteries.” Maybe shot in a narrow, vintage aspect ratio to boot. Something “musty, dusty, atmospheric.” It would have to be in black and white, of course. He had been mulling over what he might have done had the concept initially occurred to him. Well, let me take a crack at it, Robert suggested. When the two Eggers met up a few months after that conversation, Robert asked how the script - now called Burnt Island - was coming along. Specifically, his brother was trying to adapt “The Lighthouse,” a famously unfinished short story by Edgar Allan Poe that, Max sheepishly admits, “I was delusional enough to think that I could finish for him.” He steals a glance at Robert and the two laugh. I was angry that I had not thought of it first.”

“I was like, ‘That’s a great idea’ - and I was extremely envious. It was a ghost story set in a lighthouse. And then his sibling, an actor, told him about this screenplay he was working on. So he met up with his younger brother, Max, for dinner, in an effort to cheer himself up. But at the time, Eggers was getting increasingly frustrated and depressed over his inability to get this project going. “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,” he says, “even if it did involve a witch.” Looking back now, the director can joke about it he knows how this story ends and that his luck is about to change. The young filmmaker from New Hampshire had been trying to get his debut feature, a period piece called The Witch about a family banished into the woods of 17th century New England, made for close to three years and he wasn’t getting anywhere.

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