THE WITCH written and directed by Robert Eggers, with Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie and Lucas Dawson. An Elevation Pictures release. 92 minutes. Opens Friday (February 19). For venues and times, see listings.
It’s kind of weird to be talking to Robert Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy – respectively the writer/director and star of The Witch – in the bar at the Trump Hotel.
Everything is clean and shiny (this is TIFF, after all), a total contrast to the movie they’ve made. Set in 17th century New England and focusing on a Puritan family crumbling under their own paranoia and fear of the supernatural, The Witch is a film awash in dirt and blood.
“I wanted it to feel like a nightmare from the past,” explains Eggers, “as if we could upload a nightmare from a Puritan into the audience’s mind.”
To make it convincing, Taylor-Joy and co-stars Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie spent a week rehearsing both their dialogue and their characters’ chores.
“They had time to learn how to do things on the farm, spend time with the animals, all that kind of stuff,” Eggers says. “And then a lot of conversations about what the world view was. I gave these guys prayer books and documentaries and all kinds of things to check out beforehand so that everyone was very prepared and understood what the rules of the world were.”
“So many books,” Taylor-Joy says, shaking her head. “So many books.”
But as the actor explains, there was nothing she wouldn’t do to play the role of Thomasin, a young woman who finds herself suspected of causing her family’s run of terrible luck.
“The other day I was thinking about it,” she says. “‘Wow, I was 18 and just got on a plane and went to Canada with a whole bunch of strangers to stay there for five weeks!’ And it wasn’t scary at the time at all. I was like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to go, and this is what I’m supposed to do,’ and we all just instantly became a family. It was pretty perfect.”
“I was really fortunate to be able to cast not just people who were right for the roles, but people who were really good people,” Eggers says. “This sounds so cheesy, but we needed to have some love in order to be able to show this family in utter despair, in chaos.”
Shooting the film against the bleak backdrop of late winter in Kiosk, at the northwest tip of Algonquin Park, helped create the right mood.
“I thought, ‘Oh, we’re in Canada, the land of wilderness and moose and snow and stuff! We’re gonna find trees everywhere!’” Eggers says with a laugh. “But where we were allowed to shoot for the [Northern Ontario] tax credit, there had been so much logging that in order to find large enough secondary growth that could be ominous, we had to go way out there. But everyone knew that the film wouldn’t work if we didn’t have this oppressive gloom at all times. It was quite a challenge.”
“The freakiest challenge,” Taylor-Joy agrees. “Spring was coming, so we’d all get in the bushes and pick the buds off things to make it look more dire. But it worked.”
See our review of The Witch here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
