Honestly, I'm a snobby person.

African Queen' is pretty darn great.

Witches were really scary to me as a kid.

The Witch' was intended to be a horror movie.

Bergman's my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose.

You've got to love a movie where a witch is your nanny.

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

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

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

The Wicked Witch of the West really scared me as a child.

The 'Friday the 13th' Jason movies were way too scary for me.

I still know the lyrics to pretty much any 'Mary Poppins' song.

I grew up doing a lot of theater - acting and making sets and costumes.

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

The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.

I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.

American audiences, a lot of people couldn't understand a word of 'The Witch.'

For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.

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

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

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

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

The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

I was totally shocked when Willem Dafoe's manager said that he wanted to have lunch with me.

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

To be honest with you, the forest resonates with me more, like instinctually, than the sea does.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

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

Conan the Barbarian,' 'Star Wars,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' were my earliest VHS obsessions.

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

I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.

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

Parajanov's love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate.

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

I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.

I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.

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

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

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.

I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

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.

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.

If you could custom build new cinemas for every release of every movie, I think filmmakers would work in a lot of different aspect ratios.

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.

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.

My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.

This makes me sound like some new age, crystal-worshipping weirdo, but the woods behind my house really felt haunted by the past when I was a kid.

The intention behind 'The Witch' was to be very restrained. I think that story, while it sometimes annoys me, needed to take itself incredibly seriously.

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.

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