Robert Eggers’ favourite movies that aren’t set in the past
If there’s one thing Robert Eggers loves, it’s making a movie set many years away from the present. While many filmmakers happily leap many decades or centuries into the future to create sci-fi or dystopian epics, others, like Eggers, shudder at the mere thought of having an iPhone or a computer ruining their shots.
“The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill,” the Nosferatu director once told The Hollywood Reporter.
The filmmaker has made four features so far, starting with The VVitch, which took viewers to 1630s New England, where Anya Taylor-Joy’s character is accused of practising witchcraft, while The Lighthouse centred around Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s characters stranded during a storm in the 1890s. With his third film, The Northman, Eggers went all the way back to the Viking era, proving his resistance towards anything remotely modern, before making the lush gothic adaptation Nosferatu, which takes place in the 1800s.
It seems as though the director won’t ever make a contemporary movie, but that doesn’t mean he’s against watching them. He has various favourites that have taken place in decades as modern as the ’90s, ’00s, and 2010s, and some have even inspired his work. Talking to Letterboxd, the filmmaker revealed that he has a huge affinity for The Big Lebowski by the Coen brothers, which is widely hailed as a comedy staple of the ‘90s.
Blending crime drama with the slacker comedy genre, the film was released to instant acclaim in 1998, and it’s one that Eggers always comes back to. “The Big Lebowski I’ve watched a lot. We have a little bit of a nod to it in The Lighthouse when [Pattinson] throws their shit off the cliff, and it hits him in the face. It’s pretty damn close to the ashes of Steve Buscemi.”
Still, that’s a film set several decades ago, and if you go into any secondhand store these days, you’ll find many items from the ‘90s and early ’00s labelled “vintage”. What about more recent films? Eggers is a fan of many modern classics that have emerged to widespread praise, revealing, “Recently I thought Trey Edward Shults’ Waves is great, Hereditary is great”. While Waves is a psychological drama and Hereditary is a horror, both take wildly different approaches to present an unflinching portrait of family and tragedy.
It seems as though he is attracted to stories that dig deep into the complexity of the human psyche, especially when it is affected by huge life events. In the case of Hereditary, trauma and mental illness manifest with horrific elements, something that can also be seen in Eggers’ work.
The filmmaker highlighted Burning as “great”. too, which was released in 2018. The psychological thriller received considerable praise, racking up countless accolades for its stellar depiction of masculinity and class relations. Finally, he championed the work of the Columbian filmmaker Ciro Guerra, who directed the Oscar-nominated film Embrace of the Serpent, a powerful tale about colonialism and nature.
Eggers’ interests may lie predominantly in illuminating the past, but to get there, he knows how important it is to study the present alongside it.
