The Lighthouse's Robert Eggers on his favorite tender moment between Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe

Director Robert Eggers’ first “New England folktale,” The Witch, became an instant genre classic, bringing literal Hell to the idyllic home of a Puritan family in the 1630s. And though his follow-up, The Lighthouse, maintains some of its predecessor’s more horrifying elements—isolation from society, evil birds, a mounting sense of dread—it also offers up a surprising amount of comedy and a bit of a “bromance” between its leads, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. We spent a few minutes with Eggers during the film’s opening weekend to ask him about the sometimes tender, sometimes volatile relationship at the movie’s core. We also touched on the director’s diorama-like approach to storytelling, and how he used the unruly elements of Nova Scotia to his advantage.