{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreif7mxw63yc7w2rei4cbyp3rci25brum3fnmzgkjw2eudyjbdiyv54",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:4jjxx3max7tcdxwmdkjrnyj4/app.bsky.feed.post/3mhfcmq5r4fs2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreicljdbxxszlfmid2aidrbssp5zihylwhsxhcxwmilrb4sqznwirra"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/jpeg",
    "size": 25764
  },
  "path": "/robert-eggers-roasting-the-witch",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-18T20:27:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://nofilmschool.com",
  "tags": [
    "The witch",
    "Directing",
    "Cinematography",
    "Directing advice",
    "Robert eggers",
    "he can't stand watching it",
    "Atticus Review"
  ],
  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nImagine you’re Robert Eggers. Imagine you made _The Witch_. That’s a dream for many filmmakers, no matter your genre—you make a veritable hit that becomes a horror standard and part of a cultural lexicon.\n\nNow imagine you hate that movie you made.\n\nThat’s the reality of Eggers’ relationship with _The Witch_ , a movie he says doesn’t live up to the vision in his head due to his own lack of experience as a filmmaker. This is evinced in the director's commentary track for one of the most celebrated horror debuts in recent memory, in which he spends roasting himself into the floor.\n\n\"This is the worst shot in the film. I hate it. Sucks.\"\n\n\"They're burning too many candles all the time in this film. The family would probably only burn one candle at a time.\"\n\n\"Sometimes I wish we'd CGI'd her earring holes out. But maybe that's getting insane.\"\n\nYes, this is funny. He wanted more dust; he doesn’t like certain frames. But it's also a serious filmmaker at work.\n\nThis isn’t evidence that _The Witch_ is flawed (it isn't, not in any way that matters), but we can still see it as a window into how that serious filmmaker thinks.\n\nEggers holds himself to a standard most of us would consider unreachable and still falls short of it, in his own estimation. Here’s what that teaches us.\n\n## Remember, _The Witch_ Was a Feature Debut\n\nHis first film, _The Witch,_ won Eggers the U.S. Dramatic Director's Award at Sundance. I remember that year, everyone was absolutely freaked out by the craft of that film—and it was scary. A24 quickly picked it up. It grossed over $40 million on a budget of around $3 to 4 million.\n\nAnd Eggers has been publicly saying he can't stand watching it ever since.\n\nThe director's commentary, which the above essay surfaces, is where this self-critique gets specific. It's like an itemized list of everything he hates about it.\n\nThe firewood looks too uniform. The goats are the wrong breed. A horse's lack of visible anatomy gets noted and then immediately dismissed as probably fine. \"I don't like this shot. It's bad storytelling. It's too austere,” he says.\n\nTo the rest of us, _The Witch_ looks and feels amazing. To Eggers, it's a document of everything he couldn't quite pull off.\n\n## Invisible Accuracy Is Still Doing Something\n\nFamously, Eggers obsesses over period detail, but not because he likes being correct. He does it because inaccuracy compounds. A wrong candle, wrong wood, wrong goat. Maybe none of that registers consciously to most viewers. But it accumulates into a world that doesn't quite hold. What he cares about is immersion.\n\n“If someone called you a witch,” he said at one screening (via Atticus Review), “they really thought you were a supernatural being capable of doing the things the witch does in this film. If I’m going to get audiences to go along and accept that, we have to be transported to the 17th century. We have to be in the mindset of these English Calvinists, or it’s not going to work.”\n\nHe's not asking audiences to notice the clapboards. He's arguing that the clapboards are part of the immersion. And, he says, if he lets that slide, the whole film can fall apart.\n\nWhat can we learn from this obsessive attention to detail? Every world-building choice either earns belief or erodes it.\n\nYou don't have to go full Eggers on the livestock. But you should be able to explain why every detail in your frame is the right one for your story.\n\n'The Witch'Credit: A24\n\n## Honest Self-Critique Is Like Research\n\nMost filmmakers avoid rewatching their own work too closely. Eggers does the opposite. He sits with _The Witch_ , names what didn't land, and carries the list forward. By his own account, _The Lighthouse_ got closer to what he imagined.\n\nHe mentioned in a featurette for _The Lighthouse_ :\n\n> \"I really don't enjoy watching _The Witch_ at all because it's not—I wasn't skilled enough to get what was in my head. I'm proud of many things about it, particularly the performances, but it didn't live up to—I couldn't get my imagination onto the screen. And _The Lighthouse_ , I really was able to do that.\"\n\nHe still does find moments of pride in the commentary, like when he says, \"This scene's great... I can't stand watching this movie, but this is a scene I get into anyway.\"\n\nSelf-critique done right is research, not punishment. Although it can obviously go wrong. You can wallow in the mistakes and only see the negatives. You can get stuck. Why even try?\n\nSo how can you make it constructive?\n\nThe goal is to close the gap between what you imagined and what ended up on screen. That gap doesn't disappear. It shrinks, film by film, if you're honest enough to look at it directly. That’s how we get better at our craft.\n\n## You Have to Make the Bad Film Before You Can Make the Better Film\n\nWhich brings us to the last thing we can learn from Eggers.\n\nThe most useful and humbling thing about this video is that Eggers couldn't have made _The Lighthouse_ without first making _The Witch_.\n\nThe skills he needed are ones he just didn't have yet. He made the movie anyway, with what he had, and it's extraordinary, even if he can't see it that way.\n\n\"I mean, I'm just doing the same thing. I don't know that I'm getting closer,” he says on an episode of The Big Picture podcast.\n\nHe says this with what reads like genuine uncertainty (nice to know he still has some imposter syndrome, even at his level).\n\nBut his films speak for themselves. The lesson for filmmakers, especially early-career ones, is that waiting until you're ready is a trap. You’ll never be ready. You just have to do it.\n\nThe only way you can get close to ready is by doing the work, taking the chance, reflecting on it, and then doing it again. We’ll always have moments where things aren’t as perfect as we want them to be.\n\nIf that happens, it’s not a sign that you shouldn't have made your project. It's the reason to keep making things.",
  "title": "What You Can Learn from Robert Eggers Relentlessly Roasting ‘The Witch’"
}