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.