Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you're just turning the camera on what's happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.

For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.

I'd love to do more theater.

I always wanted to do film. And I still love theater.

I'm trying to communicate with other people about humanity and stuff, man!

Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.

Certainly as a director you want to be working with people who are on the same page as you and that you can trust and get along with.

As a second-time director you don't want to be working with someone who's a star that wants you to get down and kiss their feet.

Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.

I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.

What's so interesting to me about history is - what's interesting to anyone - is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we're the same.

Willem Dafoe is a huge hero of mine.

I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'

It's pretty easy to learn about lighthouses because there's a lot of lighthouse enthusiasts. Really, there's lots of books about it, and it's fairly easy to find lighthouse keepers' journals and logbooks.

Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.

If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.

Haxan' is really cool. There are a lot of things about it that are just great.

The Lighthouse' isn't scary. A few people have said it is, but I don't think it is.

Being a wannabe auteur and my favorite filmmakers being part of the dead canon of European, Japanese art-house masters, I want to say that I don't want to care about genre and how it's limiting and all of that stuff.

People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times - and 'A Christmas Carol.'

I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.

Every actor demands different things. Every human being you come in contact with in your life, you have to deal with in slightly different ways.

The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.

Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.

You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.

We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.

When I was younger, I used to think it was kind of cool to abuse actors mentally, but I really disagree with that now.

What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.

The Lighthouse' couldn't have been made without this kind of freedom that is allowed to some filmmakers to be able to play around with genre. Jennifer Kent's 'Nightingale' is more horrific than any horror movie - but also, I don't think you could make that movie without this kind of freedom.

I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.

Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary film.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

I think the thing that is most influential about 'Haxan' is the casting of the witches as just old women and the strength of that.

Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult - these are the things I'm most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I'm very passionate about cinema.

I went to Salem as many Halloweens as I possibly could.

When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.

Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.

Three years into getting 'The Witch' financed, I was hanging out with my brother and he was like, 'I'm working on this script. It's a ghost story in a lighthouse.' I thought, 'Damn, that's a really good idea, I wish I'd had it.'

Certainly in Catholic countries, the peasantry have always found ways to integrate pagan things in a way that makes it a little bit easier just to be a human being.

I saw a picture of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in a book in my elementary school and I lost my mind.

Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He's responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from 'Nosferatu' to 'Faust' to 'Sunset.'

What I love about research is when I'm having a bad day and I can't write, I'll just research some more, I'll learn some more and I'll have better command of the world of the film.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

If you're a part of this urban intelligentsia, you're not around animals all the time the way people were in the past. So animals become a part of the folklore.

Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.

When 'The Lighthouse,' bizarrely, became the film that people wanted to greenlight, it was really clear that those were the only two people to play the roles. And I knew that they would want to do it.

I had these fashion history books that I really enjoyed looking at. I liked costumes and used to wear them to school until I got beat up for it.