You’ve always been fascinated with myths in your films. Do you have a favorite mythology or a favorite origin story?
I think the Bible is the synthesis of so much of the “pagan mythology” that came before. Mesopotamian mythology, some roots in Egyptian mythology. There is so much in the Bible that I learned as a kid. For me, it was a great cosmology. Grand and crazy and violent. The more I age, the more I lean on that. Not as a piece of belief—I’m not a practicing man—but as a template. I’m not so attracted to Nordic stuff. I love Celtic lore. I really love the juxtaposition of Pagan mythology becoming the roots of fairy more in English myth. Victorian anthropological studies of fairy lore are fascinating because of that.
Fairies can be traced back to the battle between God and the devil. The fairies tell God they are going to remain neutral. And God says, “Well, then you’ll remain on Earth,” and he makes them the children of the Earth. He curses them to stick to the Earth. The way the Celtic mythology travels from the continent up to England and the United Kingdom, it comes from Europe and through Spain, through Galicia, and into the UK. It carries a lot of stuff from Eastern Europe, a lot of stuff from the East. It’s so fascinating to see how it’s a [tapestry].
Once you go down the rabbit holes, you find that all of these myths meet somewhere in the beginning.
You can find Apollo in Christian mythology. You can have the cycle of death and resurrection from Egyptian lore in Catholic myth. All the figures start crisscrossing in a way that is delightful, because we actually have a bunch of fundamental questions that are answered through that.
I was raised Catholic and read the Bible, and I’ve always wanted to see somebody make a movie about those early chapters where they are just listing how long everybody lived, and who their children were. Speaking of mundane!
Maybe they were vampires!
Exactly.
One of the things I’ve addressed from Cronos all the way to Frankenstein is that I believe that wisdom and peace exist within limits. We are living in a time where limitless power, limitless knowledge, limitless lifespan are being pursued. I think that there is no happiness in the limitless. Even Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick shot for hundreds of days, but with a limited crew. And he was known to be very thrifty.