Trivia / The VVitch

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • When William is dragging Thomasin into the house after Caleb's death, the script said that Thomasin would be in hysterical tears. Anya Taylor-Joy however felt that Thomasin would be angry and convinced Robert Eggers to play the scene that way.
  • The script just said "Katherine prays" as a stage direction. Kate Dickie drifted towards a prayer book called The Practice of Piety to draw inspiration for what her character was actually praying depending on the scene.
• Breakthrough Hit: For Robert Eggers.
• California Doubling: Despite wanting to film on location in New Hampshire, they had to film in Canada for tax reasons.
• Creator Backlash: Robert Eggers stated in a 2022 interview that he can't stand watching the movie, claiming that he was too unskilled of a filmmaker to make the vision he had for it in his head a reality.
  Robert Eggers: It's not that it's bad, and the performances are great, but I was not skilled enough as a filmmaker to get what was in my brain onto the screen.
• The Danza: Kate Dickie plays Katherine, who is affectionately called "Kate" by her husband.
• Dawson Casting: Anya Taylor-Joy was a few years older than Thomasin, who is supposed to be fifteen or sixteen. She was already twenty when the movie was released. As the story involves a teenage girl's growing sexuality and requires her to strip naked at the end, casting an older actress was necessary.
• Enforced Method Acting: The hotel the cast stayed in was quite small, and they were nearly the only residents. That helped them play a family stuck in a claustrophobic environment. The remoteness of the area they were shooting in helped with the feeling of isolation.
  Ralph Ineson: "I was talking to Kate about it and we decided that we really couldn’t have done it if we were going home at the end of the night, going back to our families and that sort of thing. It was the isolation of it and the fact that we were all thousands of miles away from home, living in this place in the middle of nowhere and driving out to the middle of the woods, working a very hard schedule."
  • Ralph Ineson's increasingly unhinged performance as William slips further into paranoid madness is often credited to spending a goodly chunk of filming high on painkillers due to Charlie the goat breaking his ribs.
• Fake Brit: Mostly averted, as Robert Eggers wanted an authentically British cast, to reflect newly arrived settlers in America. Anya Taylor-Joy however is half-Argentinian (and Spanish is her first language), making her a very mild example.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: The goat Charlie (Black Phillip) was not very well trained and gave trouble during the production, even ramming Ralph Ineson for real and injuring him. On the other hand, the rest of the animals used in the film were easy to work with.
• No Budget: The film was made on a budget of $4 million.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The movie doesn't look cheap by any means, but its story was pretty obviously written to accommodate its shoestring budget. For a period drama in the 1630s, an isolated farmhouse at the edge of the forest is much cheaper to depict than a bustling town—hence, the family's exile from the Commonwealth of New England. Tellingly, only the very first scene takes place in a major population center; the first part of it is indoors, and the very next part just gives us a fleeting look at the town streets from the back of a wagon.
• Shrug of God: Robert Eggers has said that the supernatural stuff could just be hallucinations or rationalised if people wish to interpret it that way, but still maintained he believed it was all real.
• Sleeper Hit: The film grossed a very respectable $40 million worldwide, which is ten times its budget and appeared on many "Best of 2015" lists. It currently has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is credited with helping revive Folk Horror as a genre.
• Star-Making Role: The one-two punch of this movie and Split is what put Anya Taylor-Joy on the map.
• Typecasting: Not the first time Kate Dickie plays a mother who's slightly mad and tries to kill a teenage family member (a niece in the former, a daughter in this).
• Word of Saint Paul: Ralph Ineson says he felt that William continued to see Thomasin as a little girl, and refused to believe she was growing up.

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