Finding the myths behind the madness
Director Robert Eggers on what inspired his hypnotic horror THE LIGHTHOUSE
ROBERT EGGERS is a stickler for period detail. His 17th century-set supernatural horror The Witch was eerily authentic, borne of going neck deep into New England Puritans and their supernatural fears. For his follow-up The Lighthouse, an absurdist 1890-set drama starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, he doubleddown. Surrounded by piles of books about lighthouses and their keepers in his personal study, Eggers tells Empire where he went to find what he was looking for.
THE LIGHTHOUSES
“It was much easier to find evidence of the material world for this than The Witch,” says Eggers, revelling in the relative modernity of 1890. “Craig Lathrop, the production designer, found many archives of blueprints of lighthouses.” For the film, Eggers wanted to feature a Fresnel lens — which delivers the lamp’s beam — so he and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke visited a 1909 Californian lighthouse which has such a lens. “It was truly hypnotic,” he says. “We could have stayed there all night just staring at the thing.”
THE KEEPERS
To research lighthouse keepers — aka ‘wickies’ — Eggers unearthed original documentation. “There’s a lighthouse keepers’ manual on the internet,” he says. “But we also found old diaries and logbooks.” One exchange gave him “ammunition” for the story he and his coscreenwriter brother had already begun. “It was an argument between this lighthouse keeper and his assistant, with the assistant complaining about all the horrible things he’d done. One of the lines was, ‘I do not feel safe with him.’”
THE PAINTERS
For visual references, Eggers looked to Pennsylvania painter Andrew Wyeth. “Wyeth and Hopper are the most referenced American painters by American filmmakers, so I feel a bit sick mentioning Wyeth,” he says. “But he captures an archetypal New
England-ness. There’s a million photos of lighthouses that look the same as the Wyeth things. But he makes it slightly romantic, and even though this movie has all these naturalistic details, there’s something storybook about it, and that’s intentional.”
THE DIALOGUE
“There’s this 744-page book called The Sailor’s Wordbook,” says Eggers, pulling it off a shelf to discuss how he wrote such authentic dialogue. “There are many publications readily available with nautical slang.” Key, though, was the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, a 19th-century New Hampshire writer, who interviewed seamen and transcribed their dialect phonetically. Later, Eggers’ wife found a thesis on Jewett’s work, filled with glossaries. “We were far along by that time,” says Eggers, “but it made many dialogue polishes a million times better.”