ROBERT EGGERS

I had these fashion history books that I really enjoyed looking at. I liked costumes and used to wear them to school until I got beat up for it.

If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.

American audiences, a lot of people couldn't understand a word of 'The Witch.'

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.

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.

I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.

I don't like twists. I don't get much out of them. If you know two cars are about to run into each other, you don't walk away and say, 'Oh, I know what's going to happen.' You watch.

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.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.

To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.

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.

Haxan' is really cool. There are a lot of things about it that are just great.

The Witch' was intended to be a horror movie.

The 'Friday the 13th' Jason movies were way too scary 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.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.

Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.

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.

In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.

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.

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.

If you're a part of this urban intelligentsia, you're not around animals all the time the way people were in the past. So animals become a part of the folklore.