The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.

After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.

Witches were really scary to me as a kid.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.

I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.

My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.

The Diary of Samuel Sewall,' 'The Diary of John Winthrop,' these are easy for anyone to get their hands on. This was really common stuff and there's tons of cases of demon possession.

I think I had my answers to the questions in 'The Witch,' and I had my answers to the questions in 'The Lighthouse;' I need those in order to write and direct them.

For me, rehearsal is only about blocking and pacing; it's not about performance.

For better or for worse, my brother and I both have some Jungian leanings, so we're tempted to think that these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone's heads somehow to some degree, and they just need to be jiggled into the front of their head in the mind again.

I certainly grew up in coastal New Hampshire, but I prefer to play in the woods than go to Hampton Beach or whatever.

The Witch' was very well planned, but 'The Lighthouse' was so much more so.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you're just turning the camera on what's happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.

For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.

I'd love to do more theater.

I always wanted to do film. And I still love theater.

I'm trying to communicate with other people about humanity and stuff, man!

Nosferatu' has a very close, magical connection for me.

Certainly as a director you want to be working with people who are on the same page as you and that you can trust and get along with.

As a second-time director you don't want to be working with someone who's a star that wants you to get down and kiss their feet.

Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.

I grew up in New England, and the woods behind my house seemed haunted by New England's past.

What's so interesting to me about history is - what's interesting to anyone - is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we're the same.

Willem Dafoe is a huge hero of mine.

I bow down to the altar of genre, because it allowed me to get 'The Witch' financed.

I enjoy the act of research. I'm researching as a means to an end, but I literally just enjoy reading about how people lived in the past and understanding it better.

Since the release of 'The Witch,' I'm actually much more warm towards bad horror movies than I was making 'The Witch.'

It's pretty easy to learn about lighthouses because there's a lot of lighthouse enthusiasts. Really, there's lots of books about it, and it's fairly easy to find lighthouse keepers' journals and logbooks.

Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.

If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.

Haxan' is really cool. There are a lot of things about it that are just great.

The Lighthouse' isn't scary. A few people have said it is, but I don't think it is.

Being a wannabe auteur and my favorite filmmakers being part of the dead canon of European, Japanese art-house masters, I want to say that I don't want to care about genre and how it's limiting and all of that stuff.

People return to the same things. Charles Dickens wrote the same story a million times - and 'A Christmas Carol.'

I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.

Every actor demands different things. Every human being you come in contact with in your life, you have to deal with in slightly different ways.

The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.

Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.

You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.

We grew up on Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett. You're making something about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you're going to look to those guys.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.

When I was younger, I used to think it was kind of cool to abuse actors mentally, but I really disagree with that now.

What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.

The Lighthouse' couldn't have been made without this kind of freedom that is allowed to some filmmakers to be able to play around with genre. Jennifer Kent's 'Nightingale' is more horrific than any horror movie - but also, I don't think you could make that movie without this kind of freedom.

I am not trying to be one of those sadistic, Kubrickian directors who is trying to make these tensions any worse or exploit them, but... the camera sees what the camera sees.

Ben Wheatley continues to be one of the most original voices in contemporary film.