{"id":1806,"date":"2016-02-21T07:55:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-21T05:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.horus.cz\/WProclamatio\/?p=1806"},"modified":"2016-02-21T07:55:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-21T05:55:45","slug":"how-the-witchs-director-made-his-film-so-terrifying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.horus.cz\/WProclamatio\/how-the-witchs-director-made-his-film-so-terrifying\/","title":{"rendered":"How The Witch\u2019s Director Made His Film So Terrifying"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"the-witch\"<\/a>WIRED<\/a><\/h1>\n

When you first <\/span>see Robert Eggers he cuts a very contemporary figure\u2014in the way that a minimalist workman\u2019s aesthetic is contemporary these days. His thick brown hair is cut with a light fade, and he sports the requisite well-kept full beard. He wears a black\u00a0denim shirt with black denim jeans. He looks like he could be a graphic designer at a hip San Francisco firm, or a carpenter making furniture out of found wood in his Brooklyn \u201cspace\u201d. He looks like he wears leather accessories and works with his hands.<\/p>\n

And that last part is true. Robert Eggers is used to doing a lot of work with his hands, but not in the hopes of selling you furniture or software. He uses his hands to build imaginary worlds on stage and screen that will engross and sometimes even scare the life out of you, which is exactly the effect of his debut feature-length film, The Witch<\/em>, a brain-bleeding psychological horror piece centered around a Puritan family living in Massachusetts about 60 years before witch panic engulfed New England.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always sort of wanted to be in another world,\u201d says Eggers, who wrote and directed The Witch<\/em>. \u201cI used to ask for costumes instead of toys for Christmas.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eggers\u2019 star began its rapid ascent last January at the Sundance Film Festival, where The Witch<\/em> premiered to great acclaim. It was so well received, in fact, that Eggers won Best Director honors in the festival\u2019s U.S. Dramatic competition, joining a coterie of recent winners that includes\u00a0Cary Joji Fukunaga, Ava Duvernay and Jill Soloway.<\/p>\n

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\u201cTo understand why the witch archetype was important and interesting and powerful… we had to go back in time to the early modern period when the witch was a reality. And the only way I was going to do that, I decided, was by having it be insanely accurate.\u201d Robert Eggers<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Midnight section is where horror movies normally play at Sundance, but what Eggers had put together was something different, a character drama that unfolded like a nightmare\u2014the kind so real it keeps you shaking long after you wake. The meticulously constructed set, brought to life after five years of researching, writing and development, is soaked in cold, gray fear. The recreation of farm life in 1630s Massachusetts is so complete it pulls you into the pocket universe that exists inside the characters\u2019 minds. As you experience their fear, you experience your own. The barrier between you and the people on film disappears, and their terror consumes you. And that<\/em> is how you make a scary movie!<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, if I really want to transport an audience, I can\u2019t just say \u2018This is a cool shot,\u2019\u201d says Eggers, \u201cEverything in the frame really needs to be like I\u2019m articulating my memory of this moment. Like, this was my childhood as a Puritan,<\/b>\u00a0and I remember that day my dad took me into the cornfield and what he smelled like. And if you\u2019re going to be articulating a memory, the dust and the stitches on the clothing, they have to be right.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before he was writing and directing his way to indie film glory, Eggers was paying the bills as a production designer, prop stylist and carpenter. He worked on TV shows, short films and \u201cexperimental theater\u201d projects while designing sets and costumes for his own ventures whenever he could make time. And the visual palette of The Witch\u2014<\/em>along with Eggers\u2019 fascination with folklore and fairy tales\u2014is evident in his early shorts, Hansel and Gretel<\/em> and The Tell Tale Heart<\/em>. The latter is based on the story by Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe, which is appropriate for a man who describes himself as a \u201cRomantic, with a capital R.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite a predilection for cravats and what he calls a \u201cfetishistic\u201d approach to designing The Witch<\/em>, Eggers is far from precious in conversation. He explains that shooting in northern Ontario\u2014a place where, he dryly notes, \u201chand-riven clapboards aren\u2019t part of the vernacular of the architectural tradition\u201d\u2014meant having to fly in a thatcher from Virginia and a carpenter from Massachusetts to accurately recreate the first-period design elements. Then, with a delightful self-awareness, he adds, \u201cI mean, cry me a river, right?\u201d (He revisits this phrase several times.)<\/p>\n

When discussing his dogged pursuit of\u00a0authenticity and what figures inspire him most, Eggers touches on the Dutch Golden Age of art, Flemish painters, \u201cshocks of corn\u201d (when you see those teepee-shaped cones of corn in a field), the Italian director Luchino Visconti, the legality of boned corsets in 1630 (a mildly controversial topic), Stanley Kubrick, Danish filmmaker Carl\u00a0Theodore Dreyer, Spanish painter Francisco Goya, \u201cHammer Horror\u201d films, Elizabethan witch pamphlets and more.<\/p>\n

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Slide: <\/span>1 \/ of <\/span> 6 .<\/span><\/div>\n

Caption: <\/span> Anya Taylor-Joy plays Thomasin, then oldest daughter of a doomed Puritan family.<\/span>
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Slide: <\/span>2 \/ of <\/span> 6 .<\/span><\/div>\n

Caption: <\/span> William (Ralph Ineson) leads his family in prayer before supper.<\/span>
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Slide: <\/span>3 \/ of <\/span> 6 .<\/span><\/div>\n

Caption: <\/span> The homestead as seen through the haunted wood.<\/span>
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Slide: <\/span>4 \/ of <\/span> 6 .<\/span><\/div>\n

Caption: <\/span> Kate Dickie taking a break from playing one scary mom (Lysa Arryn in Game of Thrones<\/em>) to play another scary mom (Katherine).<\/span>
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Slide: <\/span>5 \/ of <\/span> 6 .<\/span><\/div>\n

Caption: <\/span> Something wicked this way comes toward Thomasin and her family.<\/span>
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Slide: <\/span>6 \/ of <\/span> 6 .<\/span><\/div>\n

Caption: <\/span> Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), the family’s eldest son, is taken ill under mysterious circumstances.<\/span>
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I also ask him about Ingmar Bergman, who Eggers frequently cites as a big aspirational influence on his work. Bergman is a cinema legend so it\u2019s easy to just say, \u201cHe really inspires me,\u201d because he sort of inspires every serious Film Person at one point or another. So I ask him to clarify what he admires, specifically, about\u00a0the Swedish master of stage and screen. \u201cHis technique is unseen,\u201d explains Eggers. \u201cEvery single frame is filled with so much empathy for the characters in his films that it\u2019s really incredible. You can watch a scene and realize only later, \u2018Holy shit! That was one shot that seamlessly moved with three different characters\u2019 subjective experiences of this scene and I had no idea!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Eggers is quick to disclaim that he in no way has \u201cabsorbed any of Bergman,\u201d adding that \u201cThe Witch<\/em> is very \u2018Look at a director make his first feature!\u2019 And I hope that I can eventually grow out of that.\u201d And yet,\u00a0Eggers\u2019 Witch<\/em> certainly wages the holy war at its center on the \u201csoul\u2019s battlefield,\u201d the milieu in which Woody Allan once described<\/a> Bergman exceling beyond any other filmmaker.\u00a0In the words of Allan<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cWhen the area of concern in cinema shifted from the external world to the internal, Bergman developed a grammar, a vocabulary to express these inner conflicts brilliantly.\u201d And director Michael Winterbottom said that at the heart of Bergman\u2019s films: \u201cIt is a very simple approach to filmmaking, an idea that if you record things honestly enough and in enough detail, even in situations that seem un-dramatic, there will be the ability to move people and show what is going on behind the surfaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, while he may not be<\/em> the late great Bergman, Eggers certainly used emotional honesty and strict attention to detail to pull the skin off his characters and examine the raw flesh underneath. And despite the high-brow vision board that clearly exists in his mind, Eggers never comes off as pretentious. His encyclopedic of knowledge is entirely functional. His early career, steeped in practical creative skills, informed his actually pragmatic approach to filming a period piece.<\/p>\n

The Witch<\/em> isn\u2019t a phablet decked out with a giant Totoro case and a Flo\u2019Rida ringtone. It\u2019s an iPhone set to vibrate. It looks simple, even underwhelming, compared to its more ornate counterparts (Crimson Peak<\/em>, anyone?); but every single element is designed to serve a purpose so specific that each one collectively disappears when stitched together.<\/p>\n

The end result is so real it becomes fact, freeing audience members to suspend disbelief and fully explore their fear.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much has been made of the authenticity of this, and of course that\u2019s important to me, but authenticity for the sake of authenticity doesn\u2019t really matter,\u201d says Eggers. \u201cTo understand why the witch archetype was important and interesting and powerful\u2014and how was I going to make that scary and alive again\u2014we had to go back in time to the early modern period when the witch was a reality. And the only way I was going to do that, I decided, was by having it be insanely accurate.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The end result is so real it becomes fact, freeing audience members\u00a0to suspend disbelief and fully explore their fear. This kind of painstakingly invisible design has produced some of the best horror cinema of all time, movies where the source of your terror is rarely seen but ever-present. Think Alien<\/em>, Jaws<\/em>, Psycho<\/em> and Picnic At Hanging Rock<\/em>. And Eggers belongs to a class of filmmakers resurrecting that aesthetic of intricate minimalism, relishing in the delights of hidden evil with movies like Let The Right One In<\/em>, The Conjuring<\/em>, It Follows<\/em>, and The Babadook<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Alex Holmes worked as production designer on the Australian hit The Babadook<\/em> <\/a>from 2014, a sort of fairytale come-to-life\/haunted house thriller that twisted audiences in knots as a mother and her son descend into paranoia. Much like The Witch<\/em>, Babadook<\/em> kept sightings of its titular villain extremely limited;\u00a0the environment had to contribute to the mental decay of the characters, in the absence of a visible monster. You had to feel as though the Babadook was constantly over your shoulder, even if you never saw it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed to present such a stylized, psychological, almost dreamlike space,\u201d says Holmes. \u201cA space that felt inherently frightening but was still somehow grounded in enough \u2018reality\u2019 to keep our audience engaged on a real level.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n