The Blair Witch Project: How the Film Was Made
The Blair Witch Project began with an image Daniel Myrick found disturbing: a stick figure hanging from a tree. Myrick had grown up around Florida's woods and swamps. With Ed Sánchez, a university friend who became his co-director, he developed that image into a 35-page treatment. It followed three students into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about a legendary witch. They would disappear, and the movie would appear to have been assembled later from their footage. Myrick connected the first-person approach with digital filmmaking's emergence in the late 90s, when he felt such a movie was inevitable.
The treatment established events but contained no dialogue. Myrick and Sánchez wanted the actors to improvise their lines. They initially planned to follow three men, until Heather Donahue's audition changed that decision. Actors were asked to imagine a parole hearing and explain why they should be released. Donahue responded that she probably should not be released, a response that persuaded the directors to cast her. Joshua Leonard agreed to play the cameraman because he was open to adventure at the time. Heather's parents, meanwhile, worried about the filmmakers taking her into the woods.
Preparation for the Blair Witch Project centered on a house in Germantown, Maryland, where Sánchez lived with his girlfriend. Between 10 and 15 people stayed there for six weeks, sleeping on couches and the floor. The shoot itself lasted eight days and operated around the clock. The actors handled the cameras, filming one another continually instead of working within a conventional filming arrangement. GPS guided them toward locations marked with flags or milk crates. At those points, they dropped off footage and collected food and directing notes. The system let the directors guide the action while the performers carried the cameras through it.
The notes gave the actors specific positions to play rather than finished conversations to recite. One instruction made Heather certain that heading south was the way out and directed her to insist on it. Another told Josh to reach the end of his patience during the day. The actors could decide how to perform these situations, with the directors intervening when they felt a scene needed to be toned down. Nighttime interventions added further prompts for reactions, including children's voices and a shaking tent. Leonard later said those interruptions often felt more annoying than frightening, arriving just as his sleeping bag had warmed enough for sleep.
The Blair Witch Project shoot also brought hunger, discomfort, rising tension, and hurt feelings among the performers. They chose taco as a safe word for breaking character and reminding one another that they were doing a job. By around the third day, Leonard said, the choice had become regrettable because it reminded them of their hunger. His final attack on Heather, turning the camera toward her and shouting about her motivation, expressed frustration as both actor and character. He felt bad about it at the time. Once his character was killed, Leonard took a long shower, got stoned, and went to Denny's.
The website for the Blair Witch Project suggested that the student documentary-makers had disappeared, helping generate attention before Sundance. A New York police officer who had worked in Maryland for years called Myrick to offer assistance. Myrick told him the disappearance was fake. At the first Sundance screening, the line stretched around the block and into the parking lot. Artisan then bought the movie for $1m. Myrick put the cost of shooting the footage at about $35,000 and the overall cost at about $300,000. The film went on to make nearly $250m worldwide, giving its small production a much larger commercial reach.
The result helped popularize the found-footage approach, but Myrick stressed the labor behind its apparent spontaneity. Making it resemble footage shot by three students over a long weekend took two years of effort. Leonard, meanwhile, felt the film anticipated the idea of brief fame. He recalled how quickly the cast moved from anonymity to the cover of Newsweek, a dramatic change in public visibility.
Artisan continued to promote the real-life disappearance angle around the Blair Witch Project. Leonard said the actors were specifically excluded from the Cannes premiere, and for a time IMDb listed them as deceased. Their parents began receiving condolence calls. Leonard said some people still did not believe the film was fiction. He reflected that Artisan might have preferred the actors to have been dead.