The Blair Witch Project

Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez

 

It really came out of our love for those old, late-1970s documentaries," says Eduardo Sanchez, co-director with Daniel Myrick of the Sundance favourite, The Blair Witch Project, which is screening in Directors' Fortnight. "Especially The Legend Of Boggy Creek about Big Foot. It affected both of us and we asked ourselves why. Why did it scare us? Because it was real. And we wanted to do the same thing."

Supposedly reconstructed from video and Super l6mm footage shot by three film students, The Blair Witch Project is ostensibly a documentary about the legend of the Blair witch, whose murderous activities stretch back as far as the 1700s.

After an expedition into the Maryland woods, the film-makers are never seen again.

Sanchez and Myrick shot the film over a period of eight days, spending two days in the town interviewing 'residents" about the legend of the Blair witch and six days in the woods "searching" for the witch. This resulted in 18 hours of raw footage which was first edited down to eight hours and, finally, to the 87-minute version that's screening at Cannes. "It was like writing a script," Sanchez says of the editing process, "but instead of words, we had footage."

Certainly, it was an unorthodox shoot, given that Sanchez and Myrick wanted cast members Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard to film the woodland scenes themselves and encouraged them to improvise. "We basically sent them into the woods and let them go - with some instruction," explains Sanchez. "Then we would give each actor character notes, describing their emotions, their feelings about the other characters, their changing moods. But each actor saw only his own notes. They didn't show them to each other. We did this four or five times a day."

The film was something of a mini-phenomenon at Sundance, and now it appears the Blair witch itself is about to become a mainstream phenomenon too. The directorial pair are currently at work on a one-hour special for the Sci-Fi Channel which goes into detail about the Blair witch legend and mythology. A comic and a book are also in the works.

With such a media presence and the convincing naturalism of the film itself, chances are that a good deal of the population is likely to swallow the legend of the Blair witch whole. So is there a single grain of truth in it? Absolutely not. "We completely made it up," says Sanchez. "And we keep adding to it." Jeffrey R Sipe