It's been described as the scariest film - ever !!!!!

Read this interview with the directors of "The Blair Witch Project": Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick

Can you give us a short synopsis of the film?

Eduardo Sanchez:
The film is basically about three film students who go off into the woods near a town called Burkittsville in Maryland, shoot a documentary called The Blair Witch Project and then disappear. About a year later, their footage is found and this film is about what's in that footage.

Can you explain your approach which you call 'method film-making'?

Daniel Myrick:
We shot the entire film over the course of eight days and we brought the actors in and essentially just allowed them to improvise throughout the entire film. Ed and I came up with an outline, a detailed story outline, prior to shooting and then we asked the actors to really improvise all their lines and their actions within the context of that outline. And so they didn't know what was coming from one moment to the next. We were able to guide them through the woods with GPS (Global Positioning System) so we didn't have to directly interact with them while they were in there. The purpose of this was to keep them in character as much as possible to get as genuine reactions from them as we felt we were going to get and also to keep it as much in the spirit of the documentary as we could.

So the actors were actually film-makers as well?

ES:
Yes, the whole thing about 'method film-making' is that they are in the scenario for eight straight days. They are in a kind of eight day play and they actually shot the film. They had the camera, we supplied the fresh batteries, fresh tapes, food and directing instructions five or six times a day and that's how we did it.

Can you tell me about the Blair Witch web site and the whole mythology you created around the film?

DM:
Well, the mythology started pretty early on when Ed and I were coming up with the idea for the premise. We had to have a reason for these film-makers to be out in the woods so we created this folklore, along with the help of our producer, Greg Hale. Dreaming up what the Blair Witch was all about, the mythology behind the Blair Witch and the cycle of events that take place out in the woods - all that's been an growing, evolving process. From the very beginning we were able to take all that mythology, put it on the web site and build from there. This allowed a fan base to develop from interacting with the web site (which complements the film rather than being redundant information). It is a little bit about the film, but mainly allows the fans to poke around and investigate and find out all the world surrounding the film, rather than just information and clips from the film itself. The fans have been absolutely amazing and part of the collaboration on this whole project.

What do you think horror is?

DM:
I think the intent of horror is to scare you. That's all we were trying to go for with Blair, to find a way and determine what scared us. And this is just one format that always scared us as kids. Old documentary reality-based television shows about Big Foot and fuzzy pictures of UFOs and things like that always freaked us out. We wanted to do a film that tapped into that primal fear that was generated by those shows. Blair was just one way of us doing that, but it still comes down to scaring people and I think good horror, for me, is the unseen evil. The Exorcist or The Shining leave it up to your own imagination, what the boogie man really is. And that's what we're trying to do with Blair.

How was it received at Sundance and here at Cannes?

ES:
It was received pretty well at Sundance. It went in with a little bit of hype because of the web site. So we just wanted to sell the film to video or cable or somewhere so we could make the next film. We showed it at midnight on Saturday night and we sold it four hours later, after the screening. That was pretty cool. It was just really well-received. They added another show the next Saturday and it was sold out. People really seemed to dig the film. And the reaction here at Cannes has been pretty good too. We had a party last night after the screening and all the people were coming up to us and saying they really liked the film so we feel happy about the reaction that we've been getting all along.

Can you tell me something about your new project?

DM:
It's a comedy but we can't tell you too much about it, or we'll have to kill you.

ES:
It is a comedy called Heart of Love - and the title says it all - it's just a really dumb film. We wanted to just do something totally different than Blair and not take ourselves too seriously. We wanted to show people with this film that we're just a bunch of idiots.

DM:
It should be a lot of fun. That's what we want to do, we want to have a lot of fun - an irreverent look at comedy. We want to strip away all the rules like we did with Blair and approach comedy in the same spirit of horror in Blair.



Go to the review here !!

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