"Night is an important element in my films."

His fifth feature film, Werwulf, is slated for theatrical release on January 6, 2027, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe. Highlights from American director Robert Eggers’s master class. 

 

SILENT CINEMA
I love it! Images are almost more important than sound. In The Lighthouse (2019), the characters speak a dialect that even the British don't understand. When we made the transition from silent films to talkies, there was a huge decline. But filmmakers like Fritz Lang managed to keep their works just as interesting by focusing solely on the visuals. I think I tried to do something similar with Werwulf, my upcoming film.

EYES WIDE OPEN
In my films, there are often extreme close-up shots where it feels like the actors are staring right at us. I like to position the camera very close to my actors so that they look directly at it while they’re performing. I’m fascinated by their gaze, and I really want them to directly address the audience.

SET DESIGN, LANDSCAPES & PSYCHOLOGY
The Lighthouse is perhaps the most telling example of my filmography when it comes to set design. I’m completely obsessed with the authenticity of the period I’m depicting, but sometimes I take a few liberties because I want to reflect my characters’ psychology. In the United States, no lighthouse contained as much clutter inside as the lighthouse in the film. So we built it from scratch.

NIGHT
Night is an important element in my films. And yet, I hate shooting at night. And the older I get, the harder it is! But the characters in my films (vampires, werewolves and witches) belong to the world of the night. I don’t like the ending of my Nosferatu, because in horror movies, the monster has power in obscurity; it’s scarier when it’s hidden. But when you show it in broad daylight, it kind of ruins everything.

ALIEN
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) is the best monster movie. I’m crazy about what H.R. Giger did with the creature of Alien. It’s terrifying and has an unimaginable hold on us, and ultimately, it looks like a human: its head is shaped like a penis, with a vagina below it, and it has no eyes! So you can’t capture its gaze, unlike with werewolves, and that might be its weakness.

BODY
I’m a big fan of the work of Jerzy Grotowski (Polish theater director –editor’s note) which deals with themes of oppression and the films of Andrzej Żuławski, and not just Possession. The naked body is meant to fight against that. On Werwulf and Nosferatu, I worked with a choreographer, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, who guided Lily-Rose Depp and drew inspiration herself from Grotowski’s work. Despite this emphasis on the body, one must never separate the body, emotion, and the psyche; on the contrary, one must always look at them as a whole.

VOICE
When you learn a new language, you discover other ways of thinking, so it’s interesting. Language isn’t perfect, because it never allows you to translate exactly what you want to express. However, it’s a very important element for me. In my films, I often use English dialects. For Nosferatu, we worked on every syllable, down to the decibels, to make Lily-Rose Depp’s voice sound even more astonishing.

CULTURE SWAP

Witches are creatures that often reappear in English folklore, and the idea that they can transform into rams or goats is very common, but not in the United States. I like the idea of being able to transport a culture from one country to another.

— Reported by Fanny Bellocq