If you go down to the woods today...

Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez sure had a big surprise when they arrived in Cannes. The writer and director of The Blair Witch Project didn't exactly get the traditional red carpet reception.

First thing Monday morning, they rolled up the red carpet that ran the length of the Croisette. Not much sign of a red-carpet reception outside the Majestic come Monday afternoon, either, at least as far as Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez were concerned.

We were due to meet them in the bar at 3 o'clock. By 3:10, no sign of them. Then Richard, the photographer, and I catch sight of a guy gesticulating wildly at us in the distance. Being well-brought-up lads, we pretend not to notice. But this is Cannes, so we go over.

It turns out that the guy is with Dan and Ed, the writer/directors of the Quinzaine film, The Blair Witch Project.

The Majestic won't let them in.

This seems a little harsh. They have had their film - which got a rave reception at Sundance - invited to Cannes. They have flown from Orlando to New York, then on to Nice on the daily Delta flight. They've flown coach and they`ve been up all night. This is Dan's "first time more than 10 miles east of the Florida coast" and now some guy is pushing them out of the back door of a hotel jabbering something about a badge.

They don't seem fazed. Other members of the Blair Witch team turn up. They practice saying 'Bonjour!' to one another and are getting quite good at it by the time we decide to cut our losses and do the interview in the Gray Albion bar.

Dan is from Orlando, born and bred. Ed was born in Cuba but raised in DC. They met at film school at the University of Central Florida.

"We were part of the inaugural class there, and we started making films together," says Ed.

"It was a no-name, very small, nothing school when we went. "It's still pretty small," says Dan.

"And still no-name," observes Ed.

But it was in Orlando, where some pretty heavy-hitting industry companies are based.

"They had a lot of equipment for us to use, and it was very cheap, so we went there," is how Ed finally sums it all up.

They started thinking about The Blair Witch Project about six years ago. They shot it in eight days in Central Maryland in October 1997 for "about as much as the price of a decent car", says Dan.

"A nice car" corrects Ed.

Actually they didn't shoot it; their cast members did. That was always the idea; they invented an entire mythology around Elly Kedward, a witch who supposedly hounded to her death in Blair, Maryland, in February 1785. You can find the history in the press book or on www.blairwitch.com.

In October 1994, also supposedly, three college students with camcorders hiked into the woods near Blair to prepare a project on the Blair Witch myth and were never seen again. The film is made up of the tapes they supposedly shot, and which were discovered a year later. The result is very, very creepy.

"We wanted to shoot a horror film that an audience thought was real," says Ed. "This was 1993, remember, before Scream - before the genre had been so much played out. And then it was, like, there hadn't been a really scary movie in a long, long time. We thought, 'What movie scared us when we were little kids?'"

So what movies did scare them when they were little kids?

"Omen and Exorcist, The Shining, The Changeling," says Ed. "But I think the thing that really stayed in our mind was those Bigfoot documentaries. That one little piece of film, that Super-8 film of Bigfoot walking away is, like, the scariest thing I ever saw when I was a little kid. That was actually our biggest inspiration for this film. We weren't going to have a guy in a goddam monkey suit."

"What made that thing so scary," adds Dan, "was the reality that it created. Bigfoot wasn't close, he was far off and the camera is shaking. It was realistic you know? And we thought if we could get back into those kinds of situations, we could do something pretty good."

The process certainly scared the actors, none of whom knew what the others were going to do or what was going to happen to them. They camped out in the Maryland woods with the camcorders and Dan and Ed did things to scare them. "Do you have any idea how freaky it is to wake up and have little kids laughing outside your tent in the middle of the night in the woods?" asks Dan gleefully. "They knew we were going to mess with them so they'd go to sleep thinking, what the hell are they going to do to us tonight? But they knew they were safe and they let themselves go and they trusted us, I guess."

They shot 28 hours of material, and Dan, Ed and the rest of the guys had it down to two-and a half hours when Kevin J Foxe showed up by chance at a screening in Orlando.

"He wasn't a huge producer, but he had made films: he knew how to get money, he knew how to make films," says Dan. "He came out of there and he was saying 'You guys are going to go to Sundance, you're going to sell the film, you're going to do this, you're going to do that.' He was the first guy outside of Orlando, but he was for real."

Working with Dan and Ed`s film-school buddies from Orlando, Gregg Hale, Robin Cowie and Mike Monicello, who are the producers of the film, Foxe got Blair Witch down to 82 minutes. He got it into Sundance, where Artisan picked it up. And it was Artisan's president, Amir Malin, who got them into Cannes, reckons Dan.

But not into the Majestic. We suggest going back to recreate them being thrown out for a photograph. Dan and Ed are up for it. Richard positions himself casually in the lobby and waves discreetly at them. They march forward, the doorman holds the door open and they walk straight in, "Bonjour," they say happily.