Robert Eggers’ new black-and-white arthouse drama The Lighthouse is the kind of film that’s just about impossible for a studio to market. It’s nominally a horror film, set in the brutal isolation of a remote, storm-wracked coastal lighthouse in the 1890s. But it’s hard to say what kind of horror film — Eggers and his brother and co-writer Max Eggers deliberately keep the details ambiguous. It centers on an older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) who takes on a young, initially reticent apprentice (Robert Pattinson) who eventually turns belligerent. As tensions rise between them, they deal with events that might be hallucinations, or an assault by the supernatural. It’s the kind of film that deeply frustrates conventional horror fans who just want a clear and present monster to show up and say boo.

But the easiest way to market it is to say “It’s the second film from Robert Eggers.” Eggers’ debut movie, The Witch, raised similar frustrations with some genre fans because of its slow-burn tension and lack of conventional scares. But for a certain breed of cinema fans, it was a stunning project — a beautifully realized period piece, impeccably written and acted, with highly controlled design that spoke to a filmmaker obsessed with getting the details right. That same care went into The Lighthouse: Eggers’ team built the lighthouse and other buildings in the film for maximum control over their setting, and obsessed over the details of cameras and lenses to give the film its unusual square silent-film aspect ratio (1.19:1) and vivid black-and-white cinematography. At Austin’s Fantastic Fest, where The Lighthouse previewed at a secret screening, I sat down with Eggers to talk about working with ancient lenses, vicious weather, actors with widely varying sensibilities, and deliberate ambiguity.

At the Fantastic Fest screening Q&A, you said you developed an entire camera language for this film. What went into it? What did you want to get out of it?

Jarin [Blaschke, the cinematographer] and I worked very closely together on developing this. It was our intention to tell the story through Rob’s eyes in the beginning, and the end shots are our objective director point of view. From the shot where Rob watches the lighthouse-tender disappear into the mist, up until the third-to-last shot of the movie, it’s from his perspective.

Now, you may not experience that as an audience the whole time. I hope you do. But when Jarin and I were deciding where to place the camera, we were thinking about how Rob was experiencing this moment. There are a couple scenes from Willem’s point of view, but only rarely. And then — it’s not like the least amount of cuts is somehow better, but we’re trying to get to something very essential, so we’d start out with a scene we were shooting from four angles, and get it down to two or three. Sometimes shot / reverse-shot is the best way to do things, but I’ve never shot a scene with traditional coverage, and probably won’t.

You can build a sense of momentum in the scene when you do a long oner. It captures a kind of energy if it’s done right. And certainly there are things about the cinematic language of this movie that are referencing old cinema. Not necessarily with any specific films in mind, but the handmade feeling, the way the camera operating is sometimes a bit off. We talked about how big the gear-head in Fritz Lang’s camera was — it wasn’t in good shape, and it shows in his films.

There’s a shot fairly early in the film where Pattison is moving toward the camera in the water, and it looks like a very early silent picture, particularly with the square aspect ratio. What did you want out of the silent-era feel?

I’m not trying to trick anybody into thinking this is an old movie. Our lighting is just not how anyone would have made a film back then. But by evoking the feeling of an early sound film, it more easily places the audience in the past. In the late ’20s and early ’30s in Europe, there was a little bit of a lighthouse genre, with a couple of French directors filming things in Brittany about the maritime community there. And in the early ’20s, there were some silent films, with Rin Tin Tin and a lighthouse [1924’s The Lighthouse by the Sea], and a silent film with a girl and an old man in a lighthouse [1924’s Captain January]. Shirley Temple made the color and sound version later. Somehow setting lighthouse stories in this era just feels right.

You’re using one camera lens from 1912, and others from the 1930s. How did you acquire those? What did you get out of them?

We got them from Panavision. Jarin has a good relationship with Panavision, and they know he’s into all this weird stuff. So when they’re in their dusty closets and they find something strange, they tend to let Jarin know about it. We had a zoom lens that we use for one shot that nobody knows what the hell it is. I think it — not unconsciously, but subtly evokes certain responses the audience wouldn’t be aware of. There are certain ways in which the whites bloom, and that makes it feel like an older movie. Creating an atmosphere is just the sum of all these tiny, tiny details, like making sure the buttons on the uniforms are accurate to the period, and the cutlery and the dirt under their fingernails is right. The little aberrations on these old lenses, the sound design, it all just builds to creating an atmosphere that you can buy into, and hopefully be immersed in.

Part of the atmosphere is the sense of impending madness, because of the threat of isolation and superstition. But because you’re dealing with madness explicitly from the start, the film feels ambiguous. We don’t know whether this is a fantasy or a psychological thriller.

Good!

So that ambiguity was key to the story?

Yeah! My brother and I worked really hard in the writing to answer all the questions for ourselves, but then to create all these misdirects for the audience. There are a few heavy-handed signposts — it’s bad luck to kill a sea bird — and we couldn’t be more obvious with the juvenile boom up the lighthouse to the Mary Poppins weathervane. But at other times, there are very important lines of dialogue that pass fleetingly, and if you aren’t there to grab it, you’re thrown off-kilter. That’s intentional! I don’t know if it’s successful, but we worked on it.

Was there any complication with retrofitting those old lenses for modern cameras?

Yeah, Panavision rehoused all the lenses for us, and that took a bit of work. The gear remotes for focus pulling, there were a lot of issues. We broke a lot of rain-deflectors in the weather. Eddy McInnis, our awesome focus-puller, was like — the rain’s coming, and he’s got a flashlight in his mouth, and he’s like, [Yells] “I’m trying to jam together three fucking eras of fucking camera equipment, all this bullshit! Raaarrr!” [Laughs] Good times.

When you talked at the Q&A about the terrible weather throughout the film mostly being real, my first thought was, how did you keep your lenses dry and clear?

Yeah as I said, we broke a lot of rain deflectors, and there were a lot of takes we couldn’t use because the lens was fogged. Take after take after take… Rob had to walk into the Atlantic Ocean like 25 times, because the lens kept fogging on that shot. Yup!

You’re drawing dialogue from contemporary sources, like you did with The Witch. What was the process like, stitching those old journals together into the story?

With The Witch, I started with other people’s words a lot, to build scenes. That was not the case here. Mostly, I was trying to translate what I was after. Defoe has a couple of sentences here and there that are completely intact from Sarah Orne Jewett’s sailors and sea captains. But generally, my brother and I developed a sort of thesaurus for ourselves. There are nautical dictionaries that were useful, and we’d come across things where we’d say “That’s a great phrase, we’ve gotta use that.” Like when Willem’s log becomes important to the story, that was from my research. I found a lighthouse keeper saying nasty things about his assistant, and used some of that. Once we got into the swing of it, Willem was so fun to write — I had to sit down with him to cut a lot of his dialogue out of the script before we went to camera, because I just couldn’t stop writing dialogue for that character. It was fun, but I’d gone far too far.

You said in the Q&A that Dafoe and Pattison have radically different rehearsal and acting styles. How did they approach the material?

Everyone needs something different. I’m speaking to you probably slightly differently than I spoke to the last people who were in this room. You’re always calibrating yourself for what other people need. Honestly, neither of them needs a whole lot. They’re very talented actors, and I cast them because I knew they could do this. But I need certain things. Both of them choose to take risks in the films they make, and the directors they work with, and they knew they’d have to relinquish some of themselves to my approach for the film to possibly succeed. It could still fail, but if they didn’t work on the terms I needed to work, there was no chance of succeeding.

There are certain things I do that Willem likes, and things I did that he doesn’t like, and same with Rob. Jarin and I needed the actors to rehearse, to know their blocking ahead of time, so the camera movement wouldn’t feel artificial. Willem comes from theater, and he’s used to rehearsal, and he was happy to engage with that. Whereas Rob really hates rehearsal, and he didn’t really feel comfortable. It wasn’t as if I exploited that in a Kubrickian evil way, but… you know, Rob’s character is uncomfortable and out of place too, so that only helped us in the end.

One of the film’s most striking shots has Willem Dafoe delivering a speech while lying in water with dirt in his mouth. What was it like shooting that scene? How did you manage?

Willem was not a happy camper. He was really in a terrible mood and we couldn’t do too many takes of that one. That water under him, if you notice it, it looks like just a nice texture. But he was lying in ice-cold water on top of everything else he has to endure in that scene. And we shot it on day two. But Willem Dafoe is Willem Dafoe, so he did it, and I’m just a lucky man.

We’ve talked before about how The Witch evokes a modern, relevant fear of female power. Do you see a similar contemporary resonance in The Lighthouse?

If if there wasn’t, I don’t think anyone would like the movie. You know, if it’s so obscure that only someone in the 1890s is gonna get and like and understand and enjoy what I’m doing, I’ve got a fucking problem! But I didn’t set out to make a feminist film when I made The Witch, that’s just sort of what happened. And similarly, with this film, I see it through a similar lens — people like to talk about tough, toxic masculinity in this film. As I said last night, and again in the fucking press notes, “Nothing good happens when two men are alone in a giant phallus.” Really, what else is supposed to happen in there, except what happens here?

You built the lighthouse and outbuildings for the film because you couldn’t find anything that met your needs. How did you find that control helpful?

The sets were designed to work with the aspect ratio. The furniture had to be built to accommodate the aspect ratio — the kitchen table needed to be a certain size where we could get a two-shot on a 50mm lens without blowing the walls out. And the interior of the lighthouse tower — I’m going to give away my secrets here, but we had to be able to move walls, because that is an eight-foot diameter space, and you can’t fit an actor and a camera in eight-foot space and do anything with them.

This was at least a little bit inspired by a real historical case of two men with the same name tending a lighthouse. How much did you draw from that history?

Just that. And the younger man had a sordid past, and was known for being violent, and the men got into a lot of rows in the lighthouse. So I used that as well. But the ending of that true story — I just don’t know how true it is, because the end of it is like a folk tale, or something out of Edgar Allan Poe. The old guy dies of a heart attack, and the young guy’s afraid he’s going to be accused of murdering him. So he ties the body to the side of the lighthouse to somehow tell people that there’s a problem. I know, “What?!” And then the corpse of the old man keeps tapping on the window.

You spoke at the Q&A about using orthochromatic film, which I had to look up. Why was that important to you?

They don’t they don’t make orthochromatic motion picture film anymore. So we used Double-X, which is basically the only 35mm black-and-white negative that you can easily get. But we tested some other film stocks. Kodak was entertaining the idea of making some stocks they make on 16, making them on 35 for us. We couldn’t afford to do it. But this is the stock we preferred, because it is has a more aggressive grain structure. And we used a filter to create more of an orthochromatic look. If we went with true orthochromatic, we would have used a deep blue filter. But we already needed so much more light to get exposure with the the Double-X that that we used a cyan filter. So it wasn’t as aggressively orthochromatic as the film stock of early cinema. But no one is used to working with a format that requires that much light these days. So it was a learning curve for everyone.