Robert Eggers’ Horror Follow-Up to The Witch Apparently Drove Robert Pattinson to the Brink of Madness

Robert Pattinson survived the emotional and physical strain of shooting and promoting five Twilight movies, so you know that when he calls something a rough shoot, he probably knows what he’s talking about. That’s why it’s so interesting to hear him talk about Robert Eggers’ upcoming The Lighthouse, the writer-director’s follow-up to A24’s critically acclaimed The Witch. The film is now wrapped and ready for a 2019 release, but according to Pattinson, it was quite the ordeal.

“That’s the closest I’ve come to punching a director,” he said to Interview Magazine. “However much I love Robert [Eggers], there was a point where I did five takes walking across the beach, and after a while I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on? I feel like you’re just spraying a fire hose in my face.’ And he was like, ‘I am spraying a fire hose in your face.’ It was like some kind of torture. It definitely creates an interesting energy.”

The Lighthouse stars Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, and like The Witch is a period piece—this time set in Nova Scotia in 1890. Unlike The Witch, this film was shot on 35mm, in black and white. All we have to go on, plot-wise, is that the movie is about “an aging lighthouse keeper, named Old.” Considering that Pattinson’s character is named “Young,” the film could be about two versions of the same person coming into conflict with each other. It is described as a “horror fantasy,” after all.

Dafoe backs up Pattinson’s description of the shoot, saying the following: “It’s funny, because when [Robert Pattinson] and I shot The Lighthouse together, the conditions were so harsh that we hardly talked outside of scenes.”

It will certainly be intriguing to see just how much of that unpleasantness makes it on to the screen, but let’s hope it means that Eggers was able to wrangle some believably tortured performances out of both his stars.