In “The Lighthouse,” a manual of instructions for lighthouse keepers, from 1881, helped structure the action, and the Maine dialects of Sarah Orne Jewett’s nineteenth-century novels and poems informed the language. Eggers insisted on building his own seventy-foot lighthouse with a working Fresnel lens. The movie’s financiers wanted him to shoot in color, but Eggers stuck with 35-mm. black-and-white film, forgoing around six million dollars (more than half the film’s eventual budget) in the process. Eggers talks about constructing a doll’s house, in which his movies take place, and in which, through a massing of detail, he can claim his characters’ memories as his own.
THE LIGHTHOUSE remains one of my favorite films of the last few years, so I can’t wait for Eggers’s latest, THE NORTHMAN. Knight’s New Yorker profile on Eggers, above, is a must-read. Love the dollhouse analogy.