The Blair Witch Project Director Eduardo Sanchez Looks Back on the Groundbreaking Film 20 Years Later

Development

ComicBook.com: The Blair Witch Project marks the first feature film produced by your company Haxan Films, a clear reference to the 1922 film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. Have you always been a fan of witches or was the name of your company merely a way to celebrate your inaugural film?

Eduardo Sanchez: That's exactly what it was. We were doing Blair Witch and we were basically renting every VHS tape that had anything to do with witches. This is early on, when Dan and I were still researching the movie. And we came across this Haxan, and it was the jazzed up 1976 version. And it just blew us away. This is just such a crazily advanced film for its time. And the fact that it was Swedish for witchcraft, or witch or whatever, so when it came time to, "Hey, we need to get a company name for this movie," [we thought], "Hey, why don't we call it Haxan Films?" It just kind of stuck.

You've spoken previously about your inspiration for this movie being rooted in your frustrations with the horror genre in the '90s and how everything had become a parody of itself. Did you know right away that you were going to make a witch movie or did you toy with other narratives?

Basically, when we came up with the idea, we knew it was going to be the woods. Because that was a great way of isolating people, and they're creepy, and that was where bad things happen. When we knew it was going to be a group of filmmakers that get lost, and their footage was found later, our other thing was, "Why are they in here? Why are they in these woods? Why did they come to visit this small town?" So we always knew it was going to be some kind of supernatural mythology.

There aren't too many options in that area. You either go with a creature or you go with a witch, because the area is relatively close to Salem, and it's believable that something like that happened in that era. We didn't have many options. We thought for 10 seconds, "Is it a warlock? Is it this whole wizard out there?" But "The Blair Wizard Project" wouldn't have had the same ring to it, you know what I mean?

We pretty much knew it was going to be some kind of witch, and then the name, Blair, we just came up with it right before we drew up the first treatment for it. It just popped into my head, and I wrote it down, and I was like, "Well, if Dan doesn't like it, we can change it some other time." And it just stuck.

Bigfoot Swarm

Speaking of creatures in the woods and jumping forward a few years, you ended up making Exists in 2014, a found footage style movie about people being attacked by a Bigfoot. Was that idea rooted in your early Blair Witch concepts?

Absolutely, I think it was definitely connected. I'd been wanting to make a Bigfoot movie since I was a little kid. Honestly, if Dan and I had had a real budget, we would have probably built some kind of crazy suit or something for the end of Blair Witch. If somebody would have said, "Hey, let's do a Bigfoot film," I think both us would have said, "Yeah, for real money!" But at that time, we were basically trying to make a movie for nothing. So that was the only thing we had.

I've always had this idea of doing a Bigfoot movie where, first of all, you have a guy in a suit, and you make it look good. That was my main thing. I was always wondering if you could do a good "guy in a creature suit" movie still. Also, just my love of Bigfoot. I mean, Bigfoot was like, The Legend of Boggy Creek and the Patterson-Gimlin film, and In Search Of..., those kinds of things really fit Dan and me. That's where, really, Blair Witch was developed when we were kids.

To be able to go back and do a movie on Bigfoot, for me, was like a dream come true. I mean, found footage and Bigfoot go hand in hand. That's really what Patterson-Gimlin footage is.

For me, it's not a stretch to do a Bigfoot found footage movie. For us, Exists, we were going to shoot it normally, just conventional coverage, and then we realized that it was just the perfect found footage film. So we switched, really late in development, to the found footage idea. It's an obvious choice when doing something like that, and it just happened to be that a lot of other people were having the same idea we were having.

The Right Actors

Back to Blair Witch, once you settled on the narrative, did you focus more on developing the backstory and mythology or on how you were going to actually shoot it?

I think it was a little bit of both. It was always going to be, not a "found footage" movie, because that term hadn't been coined yet. But it was going to be a documentary. If you would have asked us back then what it was, it was basically a feature-length In Search Of... episode about this footage. That's what the idea was for a long time until late in the editing process. So the style was already there.

We were like, "It's going to be mostly handheld. It's going to be a lot of improv. We're going to have to leave the actors alone for certain periods of time." We wanted to make this documentary, but we especially wanted to make the footage that of Heather [Donahue], Mike [Williams], and Josh [Leonard] running around, really, really authentic.

That was our big thing, is trying to make that footage as authentic as possible and not be apparent with any of the tricks that we were using. No lighting, and, obviously, no film score during the movie, just a lot of fake footage. That was always the desire. Everything stemmed from the idea of it feeling real. That was our big thing. We wanted to make sure that the audience, that there was nothing in the film that gave away the fact that it was not real. So the style developed completely from the premise. It was totally a premise-based thing. It was always a given of how we were going to shoot the film.

Extreme Conditions

We know the process of making the movie involved giving the actors various details about their motivations on a daily basis while you and your team were out in the woods creating various anomalies, so were there moments while shooting that made you doubt whether this would ever pay off?

All the time, man. All the time. Because you always have doubts when you're making something. I think that's just natural, but we had all gone through this experience before. We'd all had projects that we thought were going to be the next thing, only to have them fall flat on its face. Dan and [producer] Gregg [Hale] and I were the main creative guys on the ground. We'd already all gone through that stuff. For us, we knew we were doing something cool, but other than that, we had no idea.

I remember one time, we were walking back, I think it was me and Gregg, and it was two o'clock in the morning, and we were one of the last ones to go and drop off the final directing notes to the actors. I'm not sure what we were doing that night. And I remember saying to him, "We might be doing a complete piece of crap movie. We don't know what we're doing here. We don't know if it's good or not, whether it's going to be good or not. But we're definitely going through a really unique filmmaking experience. I don't think anybody's done anything like this."

It kind of empowered us. At least it empowered me. I always think of Steven Spielberg, because he's so influential in my life, and he's the brand filmmaker guy. And I remember saying, "Stephen Spielberg could never do this. It would be impossible for him to do this kind of deconstruction of what filmmaking is about." The unions wouldn't... even now, you couldn't do a Blair Witch. Anybody with any real career or belonging to any real unions would not have done Blair Witch. We broke every union rule there was. So those kinds of things, those kinds of moments always happen.

Filmmaking is hard work, and there are plenty of times when you're just exhausted, and you haven't slept in a while, and you're just watching, and you're looking at something, and you're thinking, "Man, this is not going to work, this is going to be the stupidest thing."

We always joked that we were either going to have a really good horror film, or a complete comedy, just making fun of the fact that we tried to do this thing, and we put actors in the woods. But luckily it worked out.

Were you guys often surprised with the actors' decisions or did the narrative mostly play out how you anticipated?

To me, there was so much surprise. And it's not that we didn't see it coming, but it was like, we knew that if we hired the right actors, that they were going to give us what we hoped. That was our dream, that if we'd take enough time and we'd find the right actors, they were going to give us a lot of material. They were going to give us too much material, and then we could edit around the boring parts, or the parts that don't adhere to our outline.

We were surprised all the time. Even now, there's quotes from the movie that still pop up in my head daily. Just little things that Josh said, or Heather, or Mike, that I've listened to a million times during the edit, and then afterwards, watching the movie. The map thing was, for us, kind of a jaw-dropping moment that it was completely a surprise. But a lot of this stuff, like the scene that we set up that was at the end of, I think the night before Josh disappears, where he's harassing Heather with the camera, and Heather starts crying, and Heather's like, "I can't, I'm done, I can't." And he's talking to her about why he's always with a camera, and he says, "It's all I've got. The camera's all I've got."

That moment, we set up. We were building up Josh to be this antagonist toward her, and we were like, "Look, you've got to let her have it. You guys are in danger of actually dying. This is not funny anymore, and she is to blame." So I remember giving those notes. Watching that scene, it just breaks your heart, how he is with Heather, and Heather's performance, and Mike's voice, and just the hostility behind Josh's attack on her. Like I said, every scene was a surprise. We definitely cast the right people.

Another moment, that we had scripted but we didn't realize how powerful it was going to be, is the Heather confessional. We just told her, "Point the camera at yourself, go off somewhere quiet, point the camera at your face. Just say goodbye to the world. Apologize, say what you got to say to Mike's parents, and Josh's parents, and your parents, and just lay it all out. You're not going to make it out of these woods. It doesn't look like you're going to make it out of these woods."

We were priming these situations with the actors, through our directing notes, and they just knocked it out of the park.

No Romance

And what's interesting is, early on in the movie you wonder what the romantic relationship could be, given that virtually every movie offers a storyline like that, but those gender roles are dropped completely and you watch three desperate characters who feel completely helpless.

When Dan and I wrote up our basic character arc for our story for the film, for us, the romantic thing was never any priority. If you write it, there is a romantic relationship, then you have to really worry about the chemistry. That's really important. For us, we didn't have any of those worries, because we never thought that there was going to be any romantic connection between them.

For us, Heather was just this leader. She was like the general, and these two people were her soldiers or her companions. It wasn't like, "No, you guys can't have any kind of personal connection, sexual relationship or anything," because they were all adults. It was, "If things are going to happen out there, then as long as you guys are respectful to each other, and you know the boundaries, then we have no problem with that." But as soon as we got them together, and they all started to know each other, that option was out the door. Because we just thought, it was not going to be genuine. There was a different energy there and I don't think anybody was interested in that kind of thing.

They were just interested in making the project, and then, obviously, getting out of the woods. So for us, that did not really come into the picture at all. I think it could have been an interesting kind of element to the film, but it definitely didn't need it.

Mythology Explained?

Most of the film revolves around what we hear as opposed to what we tangibly see, with the exceptions being when Josh gets slime on his backpack and when Heather finds teeth wrapped in sticks. Just for anyone curious, did these two things have larger mythological explanations or were they just ways to cause visceral reactions in the performers?

I would love to say that it was something that we had read, and maybe it was. But I mean, I think the slime was mostly like a Ghostbusters thing. I mean, honestly, when we first wrote the outline for Blair Witch, the sound guy, which was played by Mike, he was the one that was supposed to disappear in the third act. We had auditioned it that way. We did this scene in the callback process, where we had somebody playing the sound guy, who was unnamed at that time, calling out from the woods, and the other two friends, companions, were like, "Where are you?"

The whole plan was for Mike to leave. But then, after three or four days in the woods, Heather and Josh, we noticed a lot of the footage was them fighting, like they really were at each others' throats a lot, like, too much. We actually, during the edit, we denied a lot of that, and we built up the antagonistic properties of Mike and Heather's relationship.

We just felt that we made a decision, Dan, Gregg, and I made a call in the middle of the production, that we're like, "I think we should pull Josh out. I think it'd be a lot more interesting if Josh came out." And then you had this piece between Mike and Heather at the end. Then they're both freaking out about Josh, who's kind of the glue between them, as far as the characters are concerned. Because Josh is the one that brought Mike into the picture.

We just felt that it was just going to be a better fit for the film, a third act that was kind of different from the previous two acts. Josh, I think, up to that day, Mike thought he was going to be pulled out, and Josh thought he was going to stay. Once we decided that Josh was going to go, it's this thing of, "Okay, how do you single him out? How do you target him?" We were just thinking, "Well, what if we do this, and what if we steal his thing, and what if..." We'd needed something that he was going to react to on camera.

The idea of just sliming his stuff, for us, it was like a mark, but that was what that was about. That's about as much mythology as was involved with that. And then, the teeth and the sticks were just, it was meant to be like the idea that these are the remains of Josh. Like this thing, or whatever it is, or these people, or whatever the hell that's out there, torturing Josh. Like, literally pulled out his teeth, and sent you a little package, just to remind you that they have him, or whatever it is. For us, it was just this little freaky moment.

[Production designer] Ben Rock and a couple of other people did some research into folk tales and mythology, especially like in the Northeast area of the United States. But most of the stuff that happened in the movie was just very much, "Okay, what's the next horror beat that we need?" We were making a horror movie. That was the main impetus for everything. A lot of the stuff that we had, that we put in the movie, we, later on, started the mythology like the Stick Man. We're like, "Okay, what are the Stick Men? What does it mean?" And we're like, "Okay, let's trace it back to, maybe, Native Americans were using that, whatever." Basically, we kind of worked backwards on a lot of that stuff, and then, trying to connect the dots that way.

Mostly, it was just us trying to scare them, and come up with cheap freaky ways to freak them out, you know.

Game-Changing

In a short span of time, the film proved to not only an effective horror movie, but it also revolutionized the world with marketing campaigns, internet hoaxes, and the "found footage" concept. Was there a specific point where you realized how game-changing the film was?

The thing is, what I told you earlier, is that Dan and Gregg and I, all of us, [producers] Mike [Monello] and Rob [Cowie], all the main guys, we had all gone through our film heartbreak many times. We were in our late 20s, some of us were in our early 30s, and for us, it was kind of like, we didn't dare hope. Because we had gone down that road before, and we knew how painful it was, when you realize that your film's not going to get bought, and your film's not getting good reviews, or whatever it is. We had already been through that.

At least for us, I think there was a lot of just, "All right, calm down. Relax. Let's keep our expectations low." In fact, we've kind of made this thing where it's like, what's the basic goal here? The basic goal is to make our money back so that maybe we could make another movie. That was our goal, to make our 30,000 bucks back, or whatever the hell people had put into the movie at that point.

There were a lot of little moments. The screenings on Split Screen in '99, or '98, when John Pierson's Split Screen showed a little segment from Blair Witch, and his discussion board blew up. Then that prompted us to build our own website and that started a whole thing. But there were all these little pops. We built the website, and we started getting these ravenous fans coming, asking questions, and I would put stuff up, and they would devour the information, and they loved the mythology. Even a couple fans started their own side websites, and it was just crazy. So there were a few of these moments, but I think, a lot of it was in my head. I'd be thinking, "Holy shit, man, this movie, it's going to be huge, it's going to be this, whatever." But then, it was always like, "All right. Stop talking nonsense and get back to work."

I think that the moment, for me, and it's a moment that I'm sure a lot of filmmakers share the idea, it's when they called us from Sundance. Because up until that point, we'd had validation from a lot of people, from our friends, and a lot of other people that we didn't even know. We did a screening in Orlando, one of our first screenings in Orlando, and there was a guy there named Kevin Fox, who eventually ended up being our executive producer, and he was a Hollywood indie producer. He came up to me afterwards and said, "This movie's going to be huge. The movie's going to go to Sundance, and you're going to do this, and you're going to do that." So there was a lot of little moments, and a lot of people saying, "Holy shit! That's the scariest movie I've ever seen, and you guys are onto something, this is crazy."

There was a lot of that buzz, but for me, it was like, Sundance is validation, because Sundance, for us and for a lot of filmmakers, is like, "Okay, if I can get my movie into Sundance, then I have a really good shot at selling it." Not that all movies that go to Sundance get sold, but I had a pretty good shot. I mean, if this really gets sold, it's going to be at Sundance. That's the best shot it's got. Just, the fact that that was the goal that we were aiming for, Sundance, and we got that call finally, right before Thanksgiving. It was like, for us, a validation, like, "Oh, shit. Somebody over there is seeing the value of this movie, and that means that other people are going to see the value of this movie."

A lot of other things, just daily reminders, just the love of the fans. By the time we went into Sundance, we had 10,000 members of our mailing list, which was a pretty huge number for 1999. And this was without any promotion at all. This was just us having published a website, and then people, through word of mouth, spreading it. There were just so many little moments that gave us clues that something crazy was going to happen. And they continued to happen, right until the movie's release, and even after.

So not only was that response validating that you made a decent movie, but also validation that there was a passion for this thing in the horror world that you guys had been wanting to bring to the community. These people weren't just fans, but they were peers.

Absolutely, man. I talk to people all the time. This is, like you said, this is the kind of movie that I wanted to see. This is the kind of horror movie that I wanted to see at the time, and you're right. It's just the basic indie story. We just did it, no matter what people told us, and people were just helping to make it happen. Luckily it worked, man, because I know that if the film hadn't sold, we wouldn't be talking. Then, secondly, I'd be in a much different position. I wouldn't be directing television shows right now.

I'm super grateful for what happened. I think Blair Witch, I can't think of any other movie that just basically blew up in so many different ways. It was like the planets aligned. It was just a crazy combination of marketing, and a new kind of film, and word of mouth, and some bootleg copies that somebody made, VHS bootlegs were being distributed. It was just perfect. The cover of TIME magazine, the fact that we competed with major Hollywood movies with a small indie movie, the first time that ever happened, just the scale of that kind of movie.

Being in MAD Magazine, those kinds of things were... our dream was always [films like] Mariachi or Clerks. This one has just surpassed even that. Even those movies, even those indie movies, indie supposed blockbusters, Blair Witch did something that nothing had ever done. And we were just as much in awe as anybody else, man, honestly.

Continued Adventures

While there was the sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and the quasi-reboot Blair Witch that both found an audience, they fell short of earning the same attention as the original. Do you think the franchise could ever come anywhere close to replicating what the original did? Would the franchise have to reinvent itself in a drastic way?

I think going after something like another Blair Witch is a futile exercise. I liked Blair Witch. I liked [director] Adam [Wingard]'s film and [writer] Simon [Barrett]'s film, and the video game looks amazing, and I even like Book of Shadows. I think it was kind of like a cousin of our film, it wasn't really a sequel, and that's really my biggest complaint about it.

I still think that there is a way to bring back a little bit of the mystery of Blair Witch, which is the newness of it. I'm not sure if going on the sequel route is the way to do it. For me, it would have to be a uniquely singular film. It'd have to be a film that somehow had, not found footage again, of course, but something that does something that doesn't look like a normal film, that doesn't have the same subject matter as a normal film.

I think that the Blair Witch film property should have gone backwards. We should have gone back in time and done period pieces of the mythology, and those elements. But again, bringing a unique vision, whether it's a new filmmaker or a new screenwriter or somebody, but bring a unique vision to it, that sets it apart from everything else in the universe, in that world.

I think Adam and Simon did a pretty good job. We were involved in development, but we were just trying to keep our mitts out of there, because we wanted them to make the film that they wanted to make, and we trusted them. They're great filmmakers, and we knew that they respected the material. They weren't going to shit all over it. I'm not sure what happened, but I think that they were stuck with this story that they had. I think that was something that the studio put their foot down on, that they had this sequel story. I think Adam and Simon did the best they could to make a unique experience out of. Blair Witch is very much a reboot of Blair Witch Project. It's different characters and different beats, but it follows a very similar path.

I just think that Blair Witch needed something. I think that the, not the movie, but the property, the Blair Witch property, the Blair Witch Project properties, that the movies, the world... I think people were looking for something more unique. I don't think a lot of people were looking for a remake of the original movie. Blair Witch [Project] made a ton of money, but I think it made a ton of money off the fact that a lot of people saw it, that probably didn't get the movie.

After all, it was a super experimental film. So I think that there was a certain horror audience that was like, "What the hell is this? Where's the slasher guy, and where's the girls with the big boobs? Where are all the horror tropes?" I think some people really loved that about it, and some people didn't. I think that once Blair Witch came out, and everybody's thinking, "Oh, it's almost like a remake," and this and that, people were saying, "Hell no. I'm not going to go and be tricked into that shit again. Because they didn't do it the first time."

I've always had a desire to do the original story of how Elly Kedward was found guilty and banished into the woods, and what happened to that, Blair Township, in the late 1700s. What happened to them? To me, that was the movie that I wanted to make after the first Blair Witch. We had a little bit of a window where I think we could have got it. We could have gotten it done, but the timetable wasn't right. It just wasn't, for a lot of different reasons.

I know Dan and Gregg and I, when we talk Blair Witch franchise, we always felt that each of the films would have their own signature. First of all, they obviously shouldn't be found footage, especially the period pieces. We were thinking of shooting the Rustin Parr story in black and white and shooting the Elly Kedward story with completely unknown actors from Europe, with really thick accents. Making it as unique and authentic as possible. What the United States looked like at that time. I think that that, to me, I'm still excited about, because whether it's the Blair Witch or something else, I still have these ideas, and I still have some films that I'd like to make, whether they're with Blair Witch or not, I don't know.

I like the fact that they're doing a video game, and hopefully it's successful. We've been talking about possibly doing a TV show, a TV series with Lionsgate for two or three years now. So it has been batted around and we've actually put out ideas. We have been talking to them, but until they decide to pull the trigger, we really can't do anything about it.

We still love the world. We still have a lot of passion for it, and we still have ideas, and I think that that can be done in this world.

Regrets

With the massive success that the film earned and the attention your team was given, when you look back, are there any things you would have done differently? Not so much as regrets you have, but in a multi-verse sort of way where you wonder what would happen had you followed different paths?

I mean, look, I think the sequels were a mixed bag for us, because I think that it's just weird for me. I never thought that somebody would be making a sequel to one of my movies. It just never computed that way, so there's a little level of, "What are they doing with my kid?"

But at the same time, I'm not super unhappy about, especially Blair Witch. I liked that film, and I think Book of Shadows was a decent film. It just wasn't the sequel that we thought should have been done. There's so many things that I think we could have gone back and done differently. But for me, everything turned out pretty good, man.

There's always, I think that after Blair Witch, as far as the movie's concerned, a lot of people ask me, "Would you change anything about the movie?" I don't think I would change anything about the movie. There's nothing in the movie that I regret. It's one of these few movies that I've made, that it just is what it is.

I think that other than putting out a 20th-anniversary, or a 25th-anniversary, at this point, DVD or Blu-ray, with a lot of extras, maybe a longer cut of the film, and maybe all the stuff that we shot for phase two that didn't make it into Curse of the Blair Witch... there's a lot of things that I think we could fill a DVD with.

But other than that, I really do love the film. I do think that it was a great collaboration with a lot of people. I think Artisan, there was the company that bought the movie, I thought they were the perfect company to buy it. They really respected our kind of marketing ideas, and they really, they became part of the two teams that are locking us out of the process.

They took a chance with this movie that a lot of people thought was not going to do anything, and they were rewarded big time. Now after the movie came out, we started having some problems, because money kind of changes everything, as Cyndi Lauper says. But there is still, even then, and I think that some things happened after Blair Witch, where we were... you know, we were young then.

I was 30 years old, and things had blown up around this. There was all this anticipation for the next film, and there was a lot of, "Okay, who's really the talented one? Is it Dan, is it Ed, is it Gregg? Who's the one that's really leading the vision?" And also, there's a lot of money coming in. For the first time in my life, we actually had a little bit of money, that we could buy a house, and I did actually start enjoying life a little bit.

So I think that there's a lot of stuff that happened after Blair Witch that a more mature person, or somebody with a little more experience, I think we could have taken advantage of certain things that were offered to us. But I think that in the end, I mean, I'm pretty happy, man.

I'm making a living directing TV shows. We are about to, I think we're really close to having our own couple TV shows on, producing our own shows, and there are features that are being developed. I think that we're in a really good place right now, and I think that you can be the Monday quarterback all you want in your life. But I think at a certain point, you just have to accept it, because there's nothing you can do about it. I think there's things that Gregg and I, we're still the only ones that are left of the original five Haxan members, and we've slowly been building this television empire. I mean it's not an empire at all, but I like to call it the empire or whatever, but we're just slowly trying to build this thing, and I think we're at a point where we're going to be able to start producing our own shows.

We have taken a lot of the lessons we learned on Blair Witch, like, if we do have success again, and we do have a hit show, or we have another hit movie, maybe down the road, there are things that we're going to do differently, obviously. But as far as the original movie, I think that everything worked out the way it was supposed to work out, man.

I think that I'm in a pretty good place, and there are opportunities that we let drop, that we missed. But at the same time, you're like, "Well, did I want to be a filmmaker, or did I want to be a businessman?" Because there are more opportunities for not just filmmaking, but running our own label, and a lot of things that we just weren't really interested in, you know what I mean? So I think that it seems like, and we'll see what happens, but it seems like things are meant to happen a certain way. And I for one am not really, I don't really think about the past very much. You just live with regrets, you know? And the fact that people like you are still interested in it, I think it's a testament to, we did something right. We definitely did something right, so I try not to dwell on the negative stuff.

*****

Stay tuned for details on the future of the Blair Witch franchise.

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