BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Oct. 16, 2000 — It was probably the most-spoofed concept of last year: Three young ‘uns running into the woods, getting spooked out, screaming, cursing, and mysteriously disappearing. All captured on jiggling black-and-white film.
Once “The Blair Witch Project” mined tens of thousands of dollars into a $140 million phenomenon, its likeness turned up everywhere: on television shows such as “Dawson’s Creek,” the MTV Movie Awards and this summer’s “Scary Movie.” Essentially, it became to 1999 what “Survivor” is to 2000: hugely successful, widely debated and most of all, itching for a sequel.
So just as the marooned reality series plans a second installment in January, “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” is riding the coattails of the film-that-was-not-a-documentary and returning to the woods with a new crop of curious youths. This time, the gang consists of a Wiccan (Erica Leerhsen), two grad students writing a book about the Blair Witch but disagreeing on its plausibility (Tristen Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner) and a Goth psychic (Kim Director).
After watching the movie, the group head to Burkittsville, Md., where the film was made. Led by a former mental patient (Jeffrey Donovan), the crew spends one drunken, drug-filled night at one of the Blair Witch’s sites. When they wake, they find that they have no memory of the past few hours, bringing about a nightmare that blurs the constraints of reality.
Hollywood.com sat down with the cast of unknowns and director/co-writer Joe Berlinger, who makes his feature-film debut after cutting his teeth on acclaimed documentaries such as “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” and “Revelations: Paradise Lost 2.”
——————————————————————————–
So what were your reactions to the first film and news of a sequel?
Jeffrey Donovan: I was part of the first audiences that went to see it. … The person I was with was cutting off my circulation. But it’s great happenstance that I’m in this because I was more fascinated with people’s response to the movie than the movie itself. I thought it said more about our culture than anything else.
Stephen Barker Turner: I didn’t see it. … I knew about the hype — you’d have to live in a cave to not know — but I think that was a blessing in disguise, because I didn’t have any preconceptions about going in. After I saw it, our movie made a lot more sense.
Erica Leerhsen: I was really skeptical when I heard they were doing a sequel because I felt there shouldn’t be one. But then I read the breakdown and I read these three fascinating women who were very multidimensional and not like the female characters I usually read for … I was very intrigued.
——————————————————————————–
“Blair Witch” was such a success, but there seems to be a lot of skepticism out there about following a love-it-or-hate-it movie. Why did you decide to do it the way you did?
Joe Berlinger: I thought it was a real problem to continue the second movie where the first movie left off. Because “The Blair Witch Project” was sold as a real documentary, and then we saw Heather, Josh and Mike on the cover of Time and Newsweek. So to ask audiences to once again suspend their disbelief, I thought was unrealistic.
Donovan: I haven’t met anyone skeptical about it, and I’m not concerned with it. Because ultimately, when people see the movie, they are really going to be satisfied that we didn’t try to follow the footsteps of the first one and really try to make our own movie about the Blair Witch phenomenon rather than the Blair Witch mythology.
Berlinger: This movie is a poisoned challis on many levels. No matter what I chose to do, people will find something to criticize. If I did it in shaky cam, they’d say, “Oh my God, you’re ripping off the first movie.” If I choose as I did to choose it in a very commercial style, very cinematic style but infuse it with real ideas, people are going to criticize that. I thought that the best way to deal with a movie that came from nowhere and exploded onto the scene in a very unique way … is to not even try to compete with it.
[PAGEBREAK]
What about the decision to make it a more commercial horror sequel?
Berlinger: Look, this is a press junket for a movie opening on 4,000 screens in six countries with a $10 million budget. We’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think this is a commercial endeavor. Instead of making it a completely vacuous commercial endeavor, I chose to infuse it with an anti-sequel. … None of the characters from the first movie appear in the second; the story isn’t continued but rather is commented upon and at the end I question the validity of the mythology of it. … I thought this was the smarter way to do the sequel. This is me, this is how I chose to do it.
——————————————————————————–
Tell us about the experience of shooting in the woods outside Burkittsville. Since the town’s been flooded with tourists ever since “Blair Witch,” how did they treat you guys?
Kim Director: I didn’t realize the shoot would be so grueling. … It was physically grueling because it was long hours and it was freezing and we were outside in the woods. I was improvising this line about how much I hated nature and Joe afterward said, “That’s a great thing for your character.” And I said, “No, it’s me. I don’t want to be camping.” You want so badly to concentrate on the scene … but then it’s 20 degrees outside and you’re freezing and you’re going to the bathroom and squatting in the woods.
Leerhsen: We give the Burkittsville people an actual chance to speak in this movie. … Joe just wanted to use actual people doing their own lines. He gets them into a state where they’re saying the funniest thing, you think it’s scripted. He only cares about reality.
Turner: When you wake up at 4 in the morning and you’ve got a day that’s gonna take you into 8 p.m, you’re not thinking about the pressure [from the studio] and [opening on] thousands of screens. I think everyone was concentrated on the task at hand, and Joe was the mad scientist in the laboratory.
——————————————————————————–
Do you think audiences will react favorably?
Director: I think Joe and Artisan went 100 percent in the right direction, which was to do everything the opposite. And I think what’s fascinating is it’s not a story about the sequel … it’s about the phenomenon.
Turner: If they don’t like it, I hope they vehemently don’t like it; I hope they despise it. Because at least if they do, it means they’re thinking about it. … I hope people want to see it again and try to put together the pieces of the puzzle because the biggest achievement of our movie is ambiguity and its unwillingness to point fingers in a certain direction.
Donovan: If people were afraid of the witch in the first movie, be very afraid of this one.
“Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” opens Oct. 27.
