Pattinson and Dafoe on the oddities of ‘The Lighthouse’

TORONTO

“Weird” is a vague and imprecise word but it’s probably fair to say it can be applied to a boxy black-and-white movie about the feverish psychological battles and explicit mermaid-infused visions of two isolated and increasingly mad lighthouse keepers in 1890s Maine.

For writer-director Robert Eggers, real and mythic collide in strange and hallucinatory ways. He makes rigorously researched period films that nevertheless have an otherworldly fairy tale quality. His first film, the 2015 horror hit “The Witch,” wasn’t just set in 1630 but grew out of the real folktales and period-authentic nightmares of a family in puritanical New England.

Now, he has moved slightly north for 'The Lighthouse,' a gothic tale of even greater and frothier intensity with still worse fates befalling the local wildlife. A goat figured prominently in 'The Witch.' Seagulls have a starring role in 'The Lighthouse.'

So do Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who play the two seamen who alone tend a remote lighthouse. Dafoe is Thomas Wake, a crusty and tyrannical salty dog and the possessive “keeper of the light,” and Pattinson is his new and progressively frustrated and unhinged assistant, Efraim Winslow. The expressionist imagery and heated atmosphere recall something from Bergman, if transplanted from Sweden to Melville’s Northeast. But there are hints of an even stranger brew.

“The hope is that people go in there like, ‘(Expletive), I’m watching a boring Hungarian art-house movie,’” says Eggers. “And then Willem starts farting and there’s a clue that there’s something else going on.”

It’s perhaps fitting that a film so relentlessly blustery, filled with stormy seas and the blare of the lighthouse’s fog horn, first signals its more comic dimension with the breaking of wind. As the movie’s deranged pitch heightens, so does its humor. Slate has perfectly summarized 'The Lighthouse' as “artsy fartsy.” It expands nationwide this weekend.

“For me, it was a mea culpa after ‘The Witch,’” says Eggers, speaking alongside Pattinson and Dafoe in an interview. “I wanted to make another miserable movie but be able to laugh at the misery. These guys are hilarious and really comedic performers. I was even concerned the film was going to be too funny after we shot it. That’s not a surprise about Willem but Rob is a very physical comedian and there are flat-out Buster Keaton splits and things that we cut out because they were just too much. But he went for it.”

Dafoe and Pattinson are very different performers but “going for it” has been a modus operandi for each. Pattinson, in particular, has in recent years been on a self-described quest for “weirdness,” one he grants he may have taken to its limit in “The Lighthouse.”

“I definitely feel like you can’t find something weirder,” Pattinson says. “But it’s not weirdness for weird sake. I think what I meant was just originality. Whenever you find something where you don’t really have any kind of archetype to fit it into, you don’t have any crutch of something you’ve done before, it’s always so exciting.”

Eggers initially offered Pattinson a very different role that he describes as “a posh, sherry-drinking gentleman.” (Eggers came close to remaking the 1922 classic “Nosferatu.”) When Pattinson turned him down, the 36-year-old director realized the actor was after something more inscrutable.

“I don’t particularly know how to describe what my character is at all,” says Pattinson, grinning. “That’s kind of what I’m always looking for.”