The Lighthouse Screenplay Book — A24 × MACK Edition
This is The Lighthouse screenplay book in the A24 × MACK edition: a large-format embossed hardcover that presents Robert Eggers's script not as a production document but as a reading object — measured, material, and editorially expanded well beyond the film itself. It belongs to the A24 Screenplay Collection, produced in collaboration with Mack Books.
The Film and the Screenplay
The Lighthouse (2019) is a chamber film set on a remote New England island in the late nineteenth century. Two wickies — one senior, one new — are stranded together as weather closes in, labour grows punishing, and the boundary between myth and psychology dissolves. The film was co-written by Robert Eggers and Max Eggers, and shot in black-and-white in a near-square aspect ratio that already feels like a printed page.
The screenplay-as-book format suits this particular film precisely because so much of its force lives in language: the cadence of period dialogue, the density of nautical and folkloric vocabulary, and the deliberate rhythms of stage direction. Reading the script slows the film down into something examinable — a text that rewards the same attention the film demands from a viewer.
Editorial Contents
The edition opens with an introduction by Willem Dafoe, who played the senior keeper Thomas Wake. His contribution is written from inside the production, offering a perspective on the material that neither a critical essay nor a making-of account could provide.
Two literary essays follow. Lauren Groff — known for fiction that engages closely with landscape, isolation, and myth — contributes a piece that reads the screenplay against its wider cultural and literary coordinates. Ian McGuire, whose novel The North Water occupies similar territory of nineteenth-century hardship and psychological extremity, brings a novelist's attention to the script's construction and language.
The volume also includes selected pages from an 1881 lighthouse keeper's guide — archival material that grounds the film's period detail and functions as a documentary counterpoint to the screenplay's fiction. Taken together, these elements make this edition considerably more than a printed script.
This publication sits within the Film Books & Film Culture category alongside other serious treatments of cinema as a textual and visual practice.
Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers is an American filmmaker whose features — The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and Nosferatu — are set in periods ranging from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. His work is characterised by historical exactness: close attention to language, costume, architecture, and ritual, drawn from primary sources and period documentation rather than generic period atmosphere.
The Lighthouse, co-written with Max Eggers, concentrates that sensibility into an extreme chamber piece. Two men on a remote island, cut off by storm and labour, in a world governed by myth, superstition, and psychological fracture. The screenplay carries the same precision as the film — period vernacular, dense stage direction, and a formal severity that makes it as much a literary document as a production script.
