Do we like Robert Eggers?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record on both tests, but we found little on charity or public stands, so it's a solid seven rather than a nine.
Eggers is the guy who made horror look like a museum exhibit that wants to bite you. He grew up in Lee, New Hampshire, and first saw the Nosferatu vampire at age nine, in a picture in a book. His mum later helped him find a VHS of the silent film.
That obsession paid off early. For a high school senior project he staged a scene-for-scene Nosferatu and played the vampire himself. He told the Boston Globe it “definitely changed my life”, and that it made him want to be a director. Decades later he made the full film, which is a nice full-circle story.
The nearest thing to a stoush on his record is professional, not personal. Around The Witch, he said, A24 marketed the film with a Satanic Temple endorsement, and he worried people would think he was a Satanist. He also said a Polish film office official opposed his scouting trip for The Lighthouse for the same reason, and it took a week to sort out. That's more comedy than scandal.
On the harm check, we looked for anything he'd said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and for the company he keeps. We found no harmful statements, no dodgy campaigns and no work with grievance-peddling studios. Of his own words, the best on record are about women: he said the witch reflects men's fears and fantasies about female power, and that “without any agendas, feminism rises to the top.” He's a bit of a period-detail nerd, so don't expect a manifesto from him.
As a boss he seems well regarded. Dafoe, who has worked with him three times, says Eggers “inspires me terrifically.” Eggers says he tailors his approach to each actor: “Different actors need different things.” We found no lawsuits, allegations or set complaints, though that's absence of evidence, not a character reference.
Recent work is a werewolf film called Werwulf, which Eggers has called “the darkest thing I've ever written by far,” and then Romeo and Juliet. Both are with Focus Features, a mainstream studio, not a culture-war outfit. Honestly, that's the whole list of what we found: no charity work or public stands came up in our searches, so the good stuff here is mostly craft.