How did The Blair Witch Project come about?
DANIEL: Ed (Sanchez) and I were both fans of the In Search of … series, with the haunting Leonard Nimoy voice-over, and movies like Legend of Boggy Creek, which had a limited theatrical run for a while.
There were all kinds of these UFO, Bigfoot faux documentaries television shows and features that kind of walked the line between fact and fiction. And we always found them very scary and haunting and they resonated with us.
I think Blair Witch was born out of wanting to re-visit that and recreate that, on a more contemporary video language. So, we definitely used those films and television shows as our inspiration and tried to stick to what scared us as kids and put that into Blair Witch.
What was your guiding principle on the project?
DANIEL: Our logic was rooted in method acting. We took that theory and applied it to the whole filmmaking process.
We hated a lot of traditional fake documentaries, because there was always some sign or red flag in them that would be a little telltale sign that it was scripted or faked in some way. The camera would happen to be in the right place at the right time too many times. A line of dialogue from a testimonial just sounded too scripted, too convenient.
So, our theory was: let's shoot this like a documentary as much as is humanly possible and set the stage for our actors to play in character their roles within this documentary, so hopefully when we come out the other end we have, effectively, a documentary.
Without infusing our own subjectivity in the shooting process, I think we came away with what looked very natural and what looked like very unpredictable footage.
Then we cut, from that footage, the story that ultimately became The Blair Witch Project. Not to say that this wasn't scripted and outlined; but the shooting process had to look like it was done like a documentary.
That was our theory, our logic behind it: not to become our own worst enemies and not become victim to our own narrative conceits by wanting to have the camera at the right place at the right time and stuff like that.
Instead, allow that free flow and unpredictability and spontaneity to happen, and then you just get what you got. As a result, it came across as very authentic and very real, which we thought ultimately would lend to the horror.
But you did have to step in on a few occasions, in order to keep things on track, right?
DANIEL: We had to do that because we did have a narrative to follow. It was a balance that we were trying to strike, where you saw what you needed to see to propel the plot and the story, but where it didn't look contrived.
And there certainly times when it did look contrived and that was part of the edit process, editing out all the moments and lines and camera angles that just didn't feel authentic. That was the first step of our process, cutting all that stuff out.
But we had to re-set certain scenes just logistically. For example, when the kids were running out of the tent, we certainly didn't want them running into any low-hanging branches or anything like that. So, we had a whole path cut out. And so, logistically, that was set up in advance, so they knew where to run and exactly how to run out of the tent.
Same goes for the house at the end; that was a compilation of five or six takes, because the blocking that was required for them to go upstairs and back down was too complicated to just have it happen the first time. It's a credit to the actors, because they were seamless. We shot that house scene over two nights and it looks like it was done in just a few minutes.
Do you ever get tired talking about The Blair Witch Project?
DANIEL: No, I'm as fascinated by it as anybody else.
Certainly, I'm very proud of Blair Witch and it's opened up a whole wealth of opportunities for us. But at the same time, it was like this science experiment that took on a life of its own.
It's always interesting for me to hear other people's perspective on what happened and what their take was on it. It was this phenomenon that was greater than any of us had anticipated. For most of that ride, we were on the outside looking in like everybody else and were as fascinated by the evolution of the whole Blair phenomenon as anybody else was.
We had an inside look at what was going on, but to this day I look back at the confluence of events and the timing and the Internet and the reality approach we took to this—how everything intersected—and what happens when that does. I find that fascinating to this day.
I have people today still e-mailing me, convinced that Blair Witch is real and just refusing to accept the fact that it's not. They're the exception to the rule, but it is humbling to me to see how people can be convinced to believe certain things. Even when we were, all along the way, telling people exactly how we shot the movie. The intent of Blair Witch was not to be a hoax, but to feel real. But to this day people still think it was real.
It was a really polarizing film, from the moment it was released.
DANIEL: It definitely polarized audiences. There were people who were upset with the film for various reasons. One, they didn't understand what was going on. Why was Mike standing in the corner, or it was too shaky, or they were just unprepared for this kind of movie.
The other extreme was people say it was the greatest thing ever made.
My experience has been that movies that have a long-term effect on people have a tendency to polarize audiences. And it is a movie that disarms you. The minute you walk in and sit down and watch that opening title card go by and you know the people you're watching die in the end of the movie, it puts you ill at ease, because now you realize that anything can happen, that the hero is not going to live in the end, and all the traditional safety nets that you're accustomed to seeing in Hollywood filmmaking or television are gone.
Some people are very comfortable and like that experience and like that challenge, and other people are very uncomfortable with that. We had people get really angry with us at the film; but I'll tell you one thing: the overwhelming majority were scared. And that's ultimately what we were going after.
What lessons did you take away from the experience?
DANIEL: There are lessons specific to the film industry and then there are overall life lessons that you learn. Things do change, dramatically. People all of a sudden want to do business with you and they want make movies with you, and you didn't know them from Adam the day before.
We had this three-picture deal, post-Blair Witch, with Artisan that we thought was our guarantee to making movies into the decades to come. And we found out that a lot of those so-called "three picture deals" are ways to just leverage you later down the road. You effectively sign off the rights to your next two movies, which are two of your pet projects, to the distributor and then they can, in turn, hold that as leverage to get you to do, or try to get you to do, Blair 2 for example.
That's a specific example of us learning a hard lesson where we signed off a couple of our best ideas because—in the heat of the moment—we thought our distributor was going to line them up and start making these movies with us. And then you come to find out that their primary interest was just making more Blair movies. And that wasn't where we wanted to go creatively at the time.
With that kind of notoriety, it's very easy to lose your perspective on this business and on this industry because of the success and how big it became. And it was good for us to remind each other where we were just a few months prior to Blair Witch hitting it big and kind of keeping our feet on the ground.
You have to take it all with a grain of salt. You really have to be happy and excited that you've reached a level of success that you've always dreamt about; but at the same time, remembering why you got into this business and remembering the kind of movies you wanted to make is very important as well. Because it's really easy to go down that road of all of a sudden people are sending you scripts and they want to pay you a lot of money to go do bad movies, just because they want to throw your name up on something.
For me, it's about common sense. We were offered several different movies, like Exorcist 4, I've forgotten the names of most of them. For better or worse—myself in particular—there's just a great reward in doing something that not everyone else is out doing. I certainly don't have anything against the Hollywood system. I grew up on Hollywood movies, and if I subscribe to any kind of filmmaking model, I think Soderbergh is a really good example of a filmmaker that can go out and make a Hollywood film or a larger-budget film, and then turns around and does something like Traffic or Full Frontal. And that's the kind of thing I want to emulate.
It's too hard of a business, it's too hard of a process to go through and put your family through and put your wife through, if it isn't something you really believe in. There's nothing worse, I think, then seeing a filmmakers who's just miserable, with a lot of money at stake, having to take on a job or take on a film that they're really not passionate about, just to pay their huge mortgage.
There's a certain level of freedom that keeping things in perspective can give you. You can go into a meeting and say 'No' if you don't believe in the project. And I like having that freedom, I like having that autonomy.
Looking back, what do you think were some of the best decisions you made on the film?
DANIEL: The best decision we made in pre-production was the idea of using GPS systems. Those little GPS systems—which our producer, turned us on to because hunters use them—made it possible for us to shoot the movie the way we did. It allowed us to set up wait points throughout the woods so the actors could get from Point A to Point B without having to be guided or corralled by a crew. So it allowed them to be more in character throughout the whole process as well.
We initially shot two phases of Blair Witch: one was kind of a framing device, which was more like a traditional documentary, where you had interviews. The best decision we made in post-production was to jettison that and stick with footage of the students.
Initially when we went out to shoot, we were only hoping to get fifteen or twenty minutes of the footage in the woods, never anticipating that we'd have enough to cut an entire feature. It was always to get just a handful of really good moments within the construct of the storyline. And then, much like The Legend of Boggy Creek or an In Search of…, have it sprinkled throughout what would be more of a traditional documentary.
And when we came back with so much great footage, and because we had scripted our time out in the woods with a complete narrative arc, we came back to the edit and said to ourselves, 'You know, we have a movie in just this footage. It's a very risky movie, but we do have a movie.'
So, Ed and I each did two different cuts on the film and it was a very tough decision for us to jettison that original concept for the film. And I credit Gregg (Hale) and Ed lobbying to do that. I was more resistant to jettisoning that stuff. But once we did, I was really glad that we decided to do that, because ultimately, that became the movie.
We used what we called the Phase One footage, that traditional documentary footage, in the Sci-Fi channel special, which preceded the movie and which was, at the time, their highest-rated special. And we used a lot of that material on the website.
So, you had this complimentary experience between the special on television, the website material, and the actual film itself to round out this whole experience on Blair Witch. You could choose to see any part of this experience at any time. Some people liked the idea of just going to the movie by itself and then checking out the website and the special. Other people opted to really dig into the mythology beforehand, so they knew more about what they were looking at on screen.
I think that was one of the most interesting aspects about Blair Witch, that it was more than just a film on screen. It was a whole kind of mythology and experience.
What was the test screening process like?
DANIEL: We screened a very long cut of the student's footage and it was set up like a very traditional test screening, where we called in all of our friends and their friends and who ever would give up a couple hours of their afternoon and come check out this film.
We handed out questionnaires, about what they liked and didn't like. And from those questionnaires you can draw a consensus about what people are turned on and turned off by. And we had more than a few comments telling us, 'You know, this really is your movie. We don't really want to break away from the narrative story of what's going on here.'
We were always really concerned about how much shaky-cam there was, whether or not audiences would endure that for a feature-length film. So, based on that consensus, Ed and I went back and did another cut, and went to great pains to cut out as much of that shakiness as was humanly possible. We thought that Blair Witch was probably destined for television or the Sci-Fi channel anyway, so on the small screen it wouldn't be as big a factor as it would on the big screen. Little did we know at the time.
And what was the best decision you made after the movie was finished?
DANIEL: I think the best decision we made after the movie was finished was coming to an agreement among ourselves that we want to market Blair Witch as a narrative film; that we weren't going to try to fool people into thinking it was real.
And I think that decision—effectively letting the press in on what we were doing—really made them embrace the movie.
But there was always that layer there, that if you were an audience member and went onto the web site or watched the film, we didn't have any spoilers. We didn't have anything on the web site or in the movie that gave it away. But we weren't going to play it up like a hoax.
I remember coming to that decision, because we were grappling with that. Even when we got accepted to Sundance, we were like, 'Well, how do we submit this? Do we submit it as a documentary, or do we submit it as a narrative film?' We had that swimming around our heads for about five minutes, and then went, 'No, it's a narrative film. We've got to submit it into competition and see what happens.' And ultimately, we got into the midnight showing.
But even after Artisan picked it up, there were discussions about whether we should play it up as 100% real or not. I think we came to the decision that we're treating this like a movie, and let the audience believe what they want to believe.
We empowered the press to say what they wanted to say, and it ended up really becoming something that they embraced. And the same thing with audience members that were in on it, that knew the film was fiction. I've heard endless stories about boyfriends taking girlfriends to the movie theater, or husbands taking wives or vice versa, where the one taking the other was in on it, had seen it before with a friend or something. I don't know how many repeat screenings we probably got because of that, but it really made Blair Witch a sense of discovery, rather than it being that you felt like you had the wool pulled over your eyes.
If would have marginalized the film, I think, if it had come off as a hoax. It was a fine line to walk, because we felt that the realism of the film played to the horror, and that's what it was intended for, but we never wanted to marginalize it as a hoax. Otherwise, we would have alienated more people than the movie ultimately did.
That was the biggest thing I learned on Blair Witch: Allow the actors to do their thing. I think Hitchcock once said that 90% of direction is casting, so if you find really good, talented people, and take great pains to do that, and then let them do their thing on set, you'll come away with material that you couldn't possibly script.
And that's what we applied to Blair Witch.
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Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
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Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
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