Robert Eggers names the 10 greatest films of all time
Robert Eggers might have only made three feature films, but he is already one of the most prominent filmmakers in the industry. Ever since his 2015 debut feature, The Witch, critics and horror fans have kept a close eye on Eggers’ development as a transgressive artist.
This year, Eggers returned to the world of cinema with the historical epic The Northman. An ambitious interpretation of the legend of Amleth, Eggers has created a fascinating vision of cinematic violence by playing around with mythological structures. Although it had some initial failures at the box office, The Northman received widespread critical acclaim.
Despite Eggers’ achievements in The Northman, his finest film remains the 2019 masterpiece The Lighthouse. Starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, the cinematic nightmare is a perfect representation of the inevitable spiral into insanity spawned by complete isolation from human society and its comforting realities.
One of the films that influenced The Lighthouse has made it onto Eggers’ selection of the ten greatest films of all time for the Sight and Sound poll. John Huston’s 1948 magnum opus – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – depicts a similar descent into madness, facilitated by a total breakdown of trust between comrades.
While talking to BFI, Eggers explained: “I like John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956), but I don’t know how much we got out of it. But his The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was on the mind. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but we were having a hard time figuring out how Rob’s character was going to talk.”
Eggers added: “For the first version in which the character had any kind of personality, we were thinking about Humphrey Bogart and Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We knew that was not the character and that he’s never going to be like that in the end, but our first way in was with that character. Finally, we had something to hold on to.”
Check out the list below.
Robert Eggers’ 10 favourite films:
- Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
- The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
- Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (john Huston, 1948)
- Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
- Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
- Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
Eggers’ list is almost self-explanatory for all fans of his work, especially the inclusion of directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer and Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev placed at the top of the list, signifying Eggers’ love for the Soviet director.
Previously, Eggers cited Andrei Rublev‘s last scene as the greatest achievement in cinema history. He declared: “The last act, or the last movement of Andrei Rublev is probably just the best thing in cinema history. That bell casting sequence is just so powerful.”
