Scriptnotes Recap: Episode 674, The One vvith Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers shouldn’t do interviews.
Don’t get me wrong, he was a delightful and generous guest. But after a decade of putting out exquisitely-crafted and painstakingly-researched films, I started to create this image in my mind of a tortured intellectual who speaks with a deep brogue, writes with a fountain pen and distributes his scripts via printing press. It was a shock, then, to realize he’s actually a soft-spoken and very personable man from Massachusetts who just likes to ride his bike and read good books.
It totally destroys the sense of mystery around him. And he’s not the first auteur filmmaker this disparity has happened to. Have you ever heard Stanley Kubrick speak? You don’t expect him to sound like a deli clerk. Like Eggers, Kubrick made movies that plucked on the audience’s subconscious in such an effective and uncanny way that we strangely expect these filmmakers to be more than just people. We expect the gravitas of a sorcerer, not someone who could be, well, anyone.
And Eggers himself is happy to dispel this myth, like when he told us:
He learned how to make good movies by making bad shorts
Robert Eggers: I made a short film of Hansel and Gretel. It’s absolutely terrible. It got into one film festival and on the bus ride home from the Boston Underground Film Festival, I thought, “I really have to make something that is not terrible.”
Then I started working on this short that became an adaptation of the Tell-Tale Heart.
I’d been saving up my money waiting tables, and then asked friends and family if they would help chip in. We did lots of fundraising events.
We found an abandoned house, which, shockingly, in my hometown. It had been sitting there rotting. Only the kitchen had electricity, and the walls still were horsehair and plaster. It was just like a good old-fashioned haunted house.
I sent Ed Langlois the script and asked if he wanted to work on it. He said it was very nicely written, but it was just fucking Masterpiece Theater, and he wasn’t really interested in it. He said there was nothing exciting about it.
I had wanted this dying painter who was in his 90s to play the old man, and then I realized that in this horrible location in February, he was probably going to die.
It would be stupid to have someone in a bunch of prosthetic makeup. It would be better, I thought to myself, on the Chinatown bus, if it was a fucking doll. Then I thought, “Maybe that’s actually really cool if it’s a puppet and there’s something death-like about it the whole time.” I shared that idea with Ed and then he said, “Now that’s cool. Now I want in.” Then, my friend, Chelsea Carter, who I worked at the same restaurant with, she was working at the Jim Henson Creature Shop in New York. I did the sculpt of the face, and she built the puppet.
Ed Langlois came in to help with the costumes and the production design, and we were in there in the freezing fucking cold decorating this abandoned house. We drove up to Maine to get some fabric that was fire and water-damaged, that we could get a super-heavy discount, but get massive bolts of it.
This also, aside from being a calling card as a director, helped me break into doing art department, wardrobe and film and television, non-union commercials, and stuff like that. It helped me make a living. Sometimes I would be a set carpenter or I was sewing curtains. In between all these things, I was writing and wrote a bunch of screenplays that were all dark and fairy tale adjacent, but not in an identifiable genre and thus not commercial enough to finance. The Witch was me trying to be more commercial, but being true to myself.
He could have kept an air of mystery around his process, but instead went into great detail on his thought process for several of his key creative decisions and practices:
Designing a vampire we’ve never seen before
Robert: As much as I love Max Schreck’s iconic makeup design, and so does planet Earth, what is that thing? It certainly isn’t actually a vampire, anyway, as folklore would have it. I wanted the vampire to be scary.
I turned back to folklore and the early Balkan and Slavic folklore. These folk vampires were ambulating corpses that looked more like a cinematic zombie. That seemed very exciting to me. Then the question is, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? Then I go from there. He still has Max Schreck’s fingernails. He still has a bit of Max Schreck’s profile and hunch to take a nod back to the original, and because he is in this putrid state, he is a bit of a monster the way Max Schreck’s vampire is a monster.
John: I think we’re used to modern vampires being romantic figures in the classically sexual sense. We’re used to the Byronic vampire who’s charming. And this is a more old-school, actually terrifying monstrosity of a character. While there’s still a sexual element to him, he’s this ancient old guy. He’s not Robert Pattinson, he’s a timeless demonic force.
Robert: Yes. A big, angry erection with a mustache.
How he photographs night
Robert: With all of the films, the lighting is a very sculpted version of what light is supposed to be actually doing. All of the light sources, if it’s candlelit, it’s coming from candles. If it’s lamplight, it’s coming from a lamp, if it’s moonlight coming from a window. You can better believe that there’s no movie lights, no Kino Flos no nothing, just lights coming from the window with the tremendous amount of bounces and frames and shit all over the place.
But something odd that we did on The Northman and honed on this – but it seems to confuse a lot of audience members, so maybe it is not the best choice – is basically, we don’t photograph any of the color red. It’s virtually a black-and-white image that you’re seeing, which is how mammals’ eyes work at night.
We know the color of our sneakers and the color of a tree, so we imagine seeing it, even though it’s not there. So we decided to not have it. I think it is very beautiful, but sometimes– I don’t know how many times people come up to me after screenings and ask me, “What does it mean when it’s black and white?” I’m like, “It means that it’s moonlight.”
Using period details
John: Robert, your script has a lot of period details, and I never felt they were shoved in, but did you have any sense of, I need to put this in there or I need to back off?
Robert: Once you establish a location or the persona of a character and it’s very clear, unless there’s a major change or a major new addition, you don’t need to harp on it so much. As you get further into the script, you can also dial back. Again, if there’s been a big energetic scene, and then the movie takes a pause and then there’s a funeral where the pacing’s going to be slower, then you can add some details about the funeral shit because the pacing’s going to be slower.
Generally, as the thing develops, you don’t need to write it’s a wooden door with iron, blah, blah, blah because you fucking can expect that by now.
John: These details can matter. Robert, you describe a character blowing the pounce off something and that’s just not the way we would say that in American English. Yet it feels completely appropriate to the period of time that you’re putting this in.
Robert: Also, the inclusion of that was because you needed a beat change anyway. You might have just wrote pause, which also could have worked, but because we needed a beat change, it was a way to work in a period detail that also keeps the momentum of the scene going in the right way, hopefully.
I’m always thrilled when someone punctures my mental image of them, particularly when they fall into the category of Untouchable Genius of Great Importance. Eggers is a pragmatist, and can express his ideas with such little pretense that it makes masterful filmmaking like his feel achievable and accessible. To hear him speak is to remember that great filmmakers come from everywhere, that they don’t have to manufacture a persona to find success, and that whatever your mental image of a “great filmmaker” is, it’s likely wrong.
In fact, I was wrong across the board. Robert Eggers should do interviews, and we’re very lucky that he does.
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