FILM 2106: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

TRIVIA: Dafoe and Pattinson stated that they barely spoke a word to each other on set and were too exhausted to hang out together after a day of shooting because filming was so physically demanding due to the miserable weather conditions. While Pattinson stayed at a normal hotel with the rest of the film crew during the shot, Dafoe lived in a little fisherman cottage in solitude. On set, on the other hand, Pattinson would tend to eat and stay by himself in filming breaks, while Dafoe stayed with the crew. Both stated that they liked each other very much as soon as they had their first real conversation a few months later.

Since the film is set in 1890, it was shot on 35mm black and white Double-X 5222 film, all while augmenting the Panavision Millennium XL2 camera with vintage Baltar lenses from as early as 1918 to as late as 1938. This makes the aspect ratio approximately 1.19:1, which is practically square. To enhance the image and make it resemble early photography, a custom cyan filter made by Schneider Filters emulated the look and feel of orthochromatic film from the late 19th century.

The cast and crew filmed under extreme weather conditions: Freezing temperatures, cold atlantic water, intense winds, snow, rain and no protective flora on the Forchu terrain kept them exposed to the elements throughout the shoot. Three Nor'easters blew across Cape Forchu during various stages in the production. Much of the film was shot in real weather elements, so rain and wind machines weren't needed most of the time, with Eggers stating that, "The most crazy and dramatic stuff was shot for real."

Pattinson's accent is based off a very specific area of Maine farming dialect, while Dafoe's is the jargon of Atlantic fishermen and sailors of the time. Director/writer Robert Eggers was very precise about the actor's accents and line delivery. He would for example give instructions to "say the second sentence of your third line 75% faster."

The story is very loosely based on a real-life tragedy from 1801 (called "The Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy"), in which two Welsh lighthouse keepers, both named Thomas, became trapped on their lighthouse station during a storm. Other influences were seafaring literary classics by Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, and supernaturally tinged weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood.

Central to the sound design is a bellowing foghorn, so sound designer Damian Volpe turned to J.J. Jamieson, a craftsman in Shetland, Scotland who makes YouTube tutorials on operating and maintaining foghorns, for recordings of a period-accurate foghorn. Using Jamieson's samples, Volpe manipulated the sound and created a foghorn that was ominous, memorable, and unique to the film. The fog horn heard throughout the film is a recording of the Nash Point Lighthouse Fog Horn (located in Wales, UK). The Nash Point Fog Horn is sounder with compressed air.

Willem Dafoe learned how to knit for his role.

Robert Eggers stated that the scene where Dafoe's character's eyes shines the light to Pattinson's face is heavily influenced by the painting "Hypnose" by German painter Sascha Schneider from the year 1904.

When asked to describe the movie, director/writer Robert Eggers always used the same choice of words in every interview: "Nothing good can happen when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus."

The design of the mermaid's genitals is based on shark labias. The mermaid labia was constructed entirely out of silicone. Eggers on the backstory: "The mermaid on the Starbucks cup that has two tails is based on an early mermaid design: Medieval and Renaissance mermaids were always split so that these anima figures of male fantasy could perform their role that had been unfairly thrust upon them by their male imaginers. But no surprise that in the Victorian era, they closed the mermaids up and made them impenetrable. So that single-tail mermaid silhouette has become the archetypal mermaid look for people today, and also what a mermaid would have looked like in the period of the movie. But we still had to figure out how mermaids can copulate and create more mermaids. So, we studied shark genitals."

The word "wickie" used by Wake is the 19th Century slang term for a lighthouse keeper and is based on the "wick trimming" that was required of lighthouse keepers.

Eggers' preparation for The Lighthouse began with the creation of a look book, detailing and distilling the film's aesthetics through works of literature, music, historical documentation, including photographs of New England mariner life in the 1890s. Also paintings by Andrew Wyeth, an early 20th century realist who painted the land and people of rural Pennsylvania and Maine, and symbolist painters like Arnold Boecklin, Jean Delville, among others, whose allegorical and mythical subjects inspired some of the fantastical imagery in the film.

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