The Lighthouse - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Lighthouse or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Lighthouse

[liam]

The scene where Dafoe's character gives the sea curse to Pattinson's character because he doesn't like his cooked lobster was shot in one single take. According to Robert Eggers, Willem Dafoe didn't blink for over two minutes.

[jessica]

Willem Dafoe learned how to knit for his role.

[kristen]

Robert Eggers stated that the scene where Pattinson's character gets excrement in his face was inspired by The Big Lebowski.

[frederick]

According to Robert Eggers, the two lead characters represent figures in Greek mythology: Wake represents Proteus, an old prophetic sea-god, who was called the "Old Man of the Sea". Winslow represents Prometheus, a Titan and trickster figure, who defies the gods (Wake's character) by stealing fire (represented by the light of the lighthouse).

[caroline]

No seagulls were harmed while filming this movie. Fake ones made out of rubber were used for that particular scene. The one-eyed seagull was played by three trained rescue seagulls from the UK, named Lady, Tramp, and Johnny. The missing eye was done in post-production. Other seagulls seen flying around in the distance were living in that area and were always around while shooting, much to the anger of the filmcrew, because the seagulls quickly realised to use them as their foodsource.

[kylie]

The audio of Willem Dafoe's farts was added in post-production.

[victoria]

According to Robert Eggers, the film was meant to include "a very juvenile shot of a lighthouse moving like an erect penis and a match-cut to an actual erect penis" (belonging to Pattinson), but it got cut after the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

[beth]

For dialogue inspiration, the brothers read the works of Melville, Stevenson, and more, consulting 19th century slang and nautical dictionaries for concise jargon. Dafoe's character is prone to articulate soliloquies in the style of Shakespeare and Milton. For naturalistic dialogue, the Eggers brothers turned to the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, a Maine-based poet and novelist best known for her works set on the Eastern seaboard, including 'Tales of New England' and 'Strangers and Wayfarers', both published in 1890. As research for her own work, Jewett interviewed old sailors and farmers, often writing in their dialect.

[kim]

The design of the mermaid's genitals was based on shark labia and was constructed entirely out of silicone. Eggers on the backstory: "The mermaid on the Starbucks cup that has two tails is based on an early mermaid design: Medieval and Renaissance mermaids were always split so that these anima figures of male fantasy could perform their role that had been unfairly thrust upon them by their male imaginers. But no surprise that in the Victorian era, they closed the mermaids up and made them impenetrable. So that single-tail mermaid silhouette has become the archetypal mermaid look for people today, and also what a mermaid would have looked like in the period of the movie. But we still had to figure out how mermaids can copulate and create more mermaids. So, we studied shark genitals."

[michele]

The very first scene they filmed was Pattinson's masturbation scene.

[beth]

While writing the screenplay, Robert Eggers was listening to hours of YouTube videos of subwoofer rumblings, waves crashing, wind blowing, and foghorns.

[gerald]

Willem Dafoe played a marvel super villain Green Goblin in Spider-Man (2002) and Robert Pattinson plays a DC super hero in The Batman (2021). They both played Vampires, Dafoe in Shadow of the Vampire (2000) and Pattinson in the Twilight (2008) movies.

[jesse]

The script didn't explain what Wake and Winslow's characters were seeing when they are staring into the light of the lighthouse. When Dafoe and Pattinson were playing these scenes, they didn't know either. The script only explained how their characters felt while looking at the light.

[morris]

When asked to describe the movie, director/writer Robert Eggers always used the same choice of words in every interview: "Nothing good can happen when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus."

[camila]

The film has an aspect ratio of 1.19:1, an almost-square frame that was used in the early sound years by filmmakers including Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst. They choose the format because "the spaces in this movie are meant to feel confined, it's more of a close-up movie than The Witch. The idea of widescreen only came about in the 1950s - we wanted to take people back further than that."

[manuel]

The cast and crew filmed under extreme weather conditions: Freezing temperatures, cold atlantic water, intense winds, snow, rain and no protective flora on the Forchu terrain kept them exposed to the elements throughout the shoot. Three Nor'easters blew across Cape Forchu during various stages in the production. Much of the film was shot in real weather elements, so rain and wind machines weren't needed most of the time, with Eggers stating that, "The most crazy and dramatic stuff was shot for real."

[kylie]

Every building appearing on screen was made for the film. The lighthouse complex was actually two sets: For the exteriors shots, a full-scale, 70-foot lighthouse tower that could withstand 120-kilometer winds on Cape Forchu in Nova Scotia, Canada, a unique outcropping of volcanic rock, was built. The skeleton for the lighthouse was covered with plywood, then wrapped in a thin sheet that resembles brick facing and got torn down after shooting finished. A few of the interiors were filmed there as well, but the majority were built inside soundstages and warehouses outside of Halifax. In the writing phase it became clear that it would be too cramped to maneuver the camera inside the lighthouse tower.

[manuel]

Wake mentions that it's bad luck to kill a seagull because of a superstition stating that seagulls contain the souls of sailors. Wake also mentioned that his fellow lighthouse keeper partner went mad and died. The seagull that antagonizes Winslow is missing an eye. The rotting head later found in the lobster trap (likely that of Wake's partner) is shown to be missing the same eye as the seagull, heavily implying that this seagull contained the soul of Wake's former partner.

[jessie]

This is the third movie, starring Robert Pattinson, in which his character has a masturbation scene, after Little Ashes (2008) and Damsel (2018), with a possible fourth in next year's The Devil All the Time (2020).