For example, with Heather’s confession at the end, Mike did a confession too. So it became a case of having to decide what to cut. We ended up with so much footage – something like 20 hours – that could have been edited to make a much longer film, and we wouldn’t have had to repeat anything. There were only two scenes that required us to do multiple takes. Somehow we managed to get all those original ideas on video. We still kept around 95 per cent of the original beat of the movie and the script. That’s really the story of the film: it was all done very quickly and spontaneously. The ending we eventually came up with was a very spontaneous idea which we executed very quickly. How do you shoot a satisfying ending to this movie? That was a big thing for us. We hadn’t quite figured out what would happen in that house. It’s the only time in our careers where we didn’t even know the rules we were breaking.īut we still didn’t have an ending. Of course, it was also a very exciting time for us. Most of the time we were either prepping the next scene – putting stick men in the trees for example – or planning the next day. It was very tiring and exhausting for all involved. We had to make sure they had food and water, the batteries in the camera had to be charged – all that technical stuff. But then we couldn’t actually hear them, so we abandoned that pretty quickly.Īt that point it became about building a world around the actors, giving them only the most basic logistical information they needed. We set up these areas – we thought of them as directing nodes – where we could watch the actors. We wanted to limit our contact with them, so at first we just sort of shadowed them. We were in those woods working on pre-production for almost a month, using GPS systems to set up all the different waypoints where the guys would be camping. Everything had to be meticulously thought out and planned. The logistics of navigating three actors through the woods was a constant challenge. People don’t realise how much work went into creating the stage for the actors to perform. It was a continuous shoot, where the actors were the cameramen and all the dialogue was improvised. We shot the movie in two sections: phase one, which is everything in the woods, and then phase two, which ended up being used for the Curse of The Blair Witch TV documentary. The phase one stuff was shot over about eight pretty intensive days. It was supposed to be more of an investigative documentary about the Blair Witch, featuring interviews with the parents and the investigators. Our original vision was very much like an In Search of… episode. “It’s the only time in our careers where we didn’t even know the rules we were breaking.” Ed’s older sister had gone to Blair High School, and we were both huge fans of Linda Blair… It just seemed like a believable name, and it ended up sticking. We pitched it to Gregg Hale, who was one of the first producers to come on-board, and he immediately got the ball rolling. Then in ’96 we returned to this “Woods Movie”, as we were still calling it up to that point. That’s how the original concept was born, but we shelved it to concentrate on other projects we were working on at the time. So we came up with this idea of a group of student filmmakers investigating some local legend they disappear, and their footage is found years later. We wanted to do the same thing for modern audiences. So we rented a bunch of those movies and we were surprised how much they still freaked us out. We started thinking about all these pseudo-documentaries like The Legend of Boggy Creek, In Search of Noah’s Ark, Chariots of the Gods, exploratory, investigative films linked to paranormal encounters, and how they really freaked us out as kids. One day we got to talking about this show called In Search of…, which Leonard Nimoy hosted in the ’70s. Our favourite horror movies were things like The Exorcist, The Shining, The Amityville Horror and Jaws. So we’d pretty much just hang out and do whatever we could afford to, which often involved watching movies. We were studying at the University of Central Florida at the time, and like most college students we didn’t have any money. We came up with the basic premise for what eventually became The Blair Witch Project back in the early ’90s.
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