T - Raindance Film Festival

‘The main thing was to try and make a scary film,’ Ed recalls. ‘You know, in the early ’90s, when
we came up with it, there weren’t many scary movies coming out. And Dan and I started talking
about the movies that scared us as kids.’
Says Dan: ‘We had a common interest in a lot of the old ’70s mockumentaries like In Search
of… and Ancient Astronauts. We found them to be very creepy, mainly due to the fact that they
were portrayed as being real, or dramatisations of real events. So we thought it would be interesting
to create our own fictional “real event”, and build a narrative film around it.’
Shooting began in early 1997, for a film which would feature the first-person footage of characters
Heather, Mike and Josh, supported by archival footage and interviews.
Ed: ‘That was the original idea for the film. But we realised that every time we cut away from
the first-person footage, we lost a certain magic that the footage was creating. And in the end, right
before we entered Sundance, we thought: “OK, let’s just go with the footage and forget about
any of this other documentary stuff.”’
Dan: ‘It was this kind of creative evolutionary process: as we were going along, it ended up in
a place we hadn’t necessarily pre-conceived when we started shooting.’
It was this evolutionary process which would begin to capture people’s imaginations.
Ed: ‘About a year before Sundance, we had got some limited exposure on John Pierson’s show,
Split Screen. And that particular episode, about the Blair Witch, blew up on their website. There
were people discussing it, trying to get more information. So we were, like, we’ve gotta get our
own website up.’
Dan: ‘That got the initial interest going, which built up momentum for our website, which in turn
built up momentum going into Sundance.’
Ed: ‘When the site went up, we started getting a lot of traffic. And I started beginning to feel the
heat, the kind of pitched interest in this thing. Heather Donahue kept a journal when she was in the
woods. And it was a very cool, creepy journal. So I scanned all the pages, transcribed everything, and
I would put up a new page every week or two. But I would hide the page. And people would scour
the site, and if they found it too quick, I would change the URL. So I began to feel the momentum
that the film was carrying. And I was thinking, “Man, if we could just get into Sundance and find
an audience, I think this thing is going to be pretty huge for an indie film.”’
Dan: ‘Initial screenings with reviewers
‘ I couldn’t get in because
I had to give up my ticket
for Claudia Schiffer’
were very positive. The film was really
getting embraced early on, and once we
were at Sundance, we were kind of the
film to watch. And by the time we got to
Cannes, that’s when it started dawning on
us, I suppose, that we had something that was going to be bigger than your typical cult movie.”
Ian George: ‘It was bought for us by Berenice Fugard. And the price, well it was so low that she
didn’t even need approval from the higher ups. And then the US release happened. It exploded in
the US. It was a phenomenon. They’d done a real grassroots thing, and it was a phenomenon.’
Even before that, the film was making waves in Cannes.
Elliot: ‘That’s where I heard about it. So I hounded Pathé for it. Finally, I got through to Maj-Britt
Kirchner, who was running Pathé at the time. And I kept bumping into her on the street. Well…
I kinda got her schedule… Then, one day I got a call from Margaret, saying: “I think Raindance
is the perfect place for Blair Witch.”’
Ian George: ‘You couldn’t have got a better platform for us. A lot of European territories had
rushed it into release to capitalise on the US thing. But we felt we needed to replicate their
SEVENTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
19
Opposite Noel Gallagher at the London premiere of The Blair Witch Project, Raindance 1999