Random Wild Details Cast And Crew Has Revealed About Making 'Blair Witch Project' (14 items)

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  (#1) Heather Donahue

  • Actor

  After Donahue won the part of Heather, her family feared the premise of a low-budget horror movie was just a ruse to get her into the woods alone. According to Donahue's co-star Joshua Leonard:

  Heather’s parents were worried Ed and Dan might be taking her out into the woods to make a snuff movie.

  Donahue herself added:

  The initial reaction of my loved ones was that I definitely should not go into the woods with a bunch of guys I didn't know. My mom wanted to know if she could have all of their Social Security numbers. All of my friends pitched in to make sure that I bought a knife.
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  (#2) The Actors Families Received Sympathy Cards From People That Thought They Were No Longer Alive

  Prior to Artisan Entertainment purchasing the distribution rights to The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and Sánchez created a website featuring a missing poster with the names and pictures of the cast members. Set up as a real event in a time where this type of marketing was unheard of, people believed the movie to be a real documentary. After Artisan came aboard, they updated and improved the site for continued use as a marketing tool, causing many people to think Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually went missing and possibly perished in 1994.

  Leonard recalled his parents receiving sympathies and reactions from fans:

  Our parents were getting condolence calls. Then, when the cat was finally out of the bag and we started press, some people still didn’t believe us. They thought we were actors, hired to play Josh, Mike and Heather in order to keep the whole thing from seeming like a snuff film. To this day, there are still conspirac[y] theories about this stuff.
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  (#3) The Actors Were So Uncomfortable One Night They Fled To A Hotel

  The filming of The Blair Witch Project did not involve a sound stage but an actual forest in rural Maryland where the actors slept in tents. Over the course of the finished movie, it becomes clear the weather is chilly and some scenes even have rain. Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually had to sleep in the elements, leading to a night where they refused to spend another night miserable. According to Donahue:

  We left the woods and found the first house that we went to and knocked on the door. The guys were like, "You have to go, you have to go, because if a guy knocks on the door at a house in the woods at night, nobody is going to let them in!" So I knocked on the door, and I'm like, "I'm sorry, we're supposed to be lost in the woods, but we're not, and we have to call these guys!" They were weirdly nice enough and trusting enough to let us in, and they gave us hot cocoa. We ended up staying in a hotel that night.
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  (#4) The Actors Invented A Safe Word For When They Got Too Deep In Character

  Since the film included near-constant filming and staying in the roles of characters increasingly losing their collective sanity, the three actors decided to create a safe word. Leonard recalled:

  Tensions got high, we got hungry, we got uncomfortable, and we hurt each other’s feelings. So we came up with a safe word for whenever we had to break character and remind ourselves this was just a job: taco. We regretted that by about day three. It just kept reminding us how hungry we were.
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  (#5) The Nights Weren't As Intense As They Seemed

  On film, the nighttime sequences come across as nightmare fuel perpetrated by unseen forces tromping through the forest to wreck havoc on the cast. In reality, the fear portrayed by the actors masked their frustration and impatience with being woken up. According to Leonard:

  People always ask if we were actually scared when the filmmakers messed with us in the middle of the night. The answer is not really... because what was usually happening behind the scenes was we were exhausted and hungry and often wet. We’d set up camp and crash, and just about the time we got warm enough in our damp sleeping bags to fall asleep, the guys would start playing a boom box with creepy children sounds outside the tent. So a lot of what you’re seeing on film, is directly following a collective groan, when we realized we had to pull our shoes back on and start acting again.
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  (#6) The Directors Left Private Notes To Each Actor At Their Campsites

  Filmmakers Myrick and Sánchez planned the route the cast took and chose camping sites ahead of time. As part of their hands-off approach to getting realistic performances from their actors, the pair used the camp sites to drop off notes for Donahue, Leonard, and Williams. Williams revealed:

  The scenes were driven by notes that were left in 35mm film canisters throughout the woods, so we had a GPS that was programmed by the producers and directors, they had mapped out the whole locations. They pre-programmed what they called waypoints into the eight days. At each waypoint station, we would look at a GPS, and it would say, "waypoint number 3, waypoint number 4 is three km away," so you would look up in the compass and at the next waypoint there would be an event happening there.
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  (#7) The Crew Spent Nights Finding Low-Fi Ways To Scare The Actors

  Free of the big budget of Hollywood blockbusters, the crew had to think outside the box to create scares for the actors to encounter. Not only did filmmakers control how much information about the Blair Witch each cast member possessed, they also allowed them to believe the legend was real and not created for the film. Actual townspeople included plants meant to lead the cast to different conclusions or provide further detail about the mythology to create a sense of reality about it.

  As Donahue, Leonard, and Williams filmed, the crew stayed out of sight. During the night, the crew dressed in dark colors or camouflage clothing in order to snap branches in the woods, slam their hands on tent walls, or make creepy noises to antagonize the cast. Not every scare worked as it was supposed to, according to Myrick:

  We had this whole plan of having this guy - this creepy moment where there might have been an analysis where if someone looks closely there'd be a little glow-y, white humanoid figure in the woods somewhere. We had a friend of ours dress up in white long johns and be parked off in the woods just between the trees, and our hope was that as the camera was running, it would catch a little glimpse of this guy. That was what Heather was reacting to [when running through the woods], saying "What the f*ck is that?" but we never got it to read on camera. I felt bad for the guy, because it was pretty cold that night and he fell into the water. We had to take our clothes off to get to him. A lot of work for no end result, except for, "What the f*ck is that?"
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  (#8) The Crew Left Less Food For The Actors Over The Course Of The Shoot

  The filmmakers promised the cast their safety, but not their comfort through the shoot. A part of that included a lack of food commensurate to that of the fictional college students they portrayed. Making sure never to starve the cast, Williams remembered the rations:

  Let's say the first day was a sandwich and a bag of chips for lunch, and the second day was maybe just the sandwich, the third day was maybe just the bag of chips, the fourth day maybe we didn't have a lunch. By the last couple of days, there was enough to sustain, but not a lot of food. So they decreased the amount of food we were eating, which we knew was going to happen, but it wasn't like... It wasn't like we didn't eat for days. Our safety was never at risk. The whole idea was to have us as uncomfortable as possible without putting us in danger.
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  (#9) Donahue's Audition Was So Good That Filmmakers Changed The Role For Her

  Auditions for the movie's lead roles involved improvisation from the moment each actor entered the room with Myrick and Sánchez. Originally the filmmakers wanted to have three men as the college students lost in the Maryland woods while looking for the Blair Witch. However, once Donahue entered the picture, the role changed to that of a woman. 

  In 2015, Donahue told The Week how she landed the part:

  When we went into audition, he asked us to improvise, and my improv was: "You have been in prison. You've served nine years of a 25-year sentence, but you're up for parole. Why should we let you out?" And I guess I was the only person that said, "I don't think you should."
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  (#10) Donahue's Famous Monologue Was Improvised And She Shot It Alone

  The "I'm sorry" monologue performed by Donahue near the end of the movie became famous and much-parodied after the film's success. She received instructions for the scene in a note that told her she needed to apologize for causing all of the movie's events while keeping Williams unaware of her filming and its content. Donahue took the camera into a secluded spot in the woods and filmed the entire scene alone. She thought the camera was zoomed out to capture her entire face for the performance, learning only later that it was up-close and snot-filled.

  According to Sánchez:

  We told Heather, "You don't want to freak out Mike obviously, so take the camera and find an area near the tent and basically say goodbye to everybody you know. You're gonna die." We were feeding them ideas where they went as far as their character. At that point, Heather pretty much knew she was going to die, and then she went out and delivered this crazy, brilliant performance. It was one of those moments, as filmmakers, we hadn't seen her shoot that because we basically left her alone, but when we saw that we were like, "Wow, this could be really powerful."
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  (#11) The Ending Was One Of The 'Most Traditional' Parts Of The Production

  Perhaps surprisingly, filmmakers allotted two days to film the final scene and used several takes to get it right. Prior to filming, Sánchez recorded Leonard yelling for help and then used a boombox to prompt Williams to run into the woods looking for his lost friend. The moment where Donahue and Williams emerge from the woods to see a dilapidated house was real, as they had no idea where the movie's denouement took place.

  Myrick recalled:

  For example, the final scene with the house, it looks like it's all one take. Heather's shrieking in the house, and it looks like she's losing her mind, but we shot that over multiple takes and over two days—that was one of the most traditional segments of the movie. We had to really set and reset and be careful walking through that house so that nobody got hurt. It was much more orchestrated.
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  (#12) GPS Led The Actors From One Scene Location To The Next

  Filmmakers scouted out the locations for camping or other important scenes in advance, programming each one into GPS devices. Myrick told The Guardian:

  Using GPS, we directed them to locations marked with flags or milk crates, where they’d leave their footage and pick up food and our directing notes.

  Sánchez told Vice:

  Gregg was in charge of the whole waypoint GPS thing, the way we got them from one location to the next in the woods without leading them. He had to give them a lesson in how to work the GPS tracker, just stuff like that, basic survival stuff, basic safety things, like if something happened what would you do.
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  (#13) Filming Lasted 24 Hours A Day For Eight Days Straight

  Donahue, Leonard, and Williams really filmed and recorded audio for the entire film, explaining the shaky movements and sometimes poor sound quality of the finished product. This created an atmosphere where the cameras and the actors had to be on 24 hours a day throughout the eight-day shoot. 

  Myrick explained:

  We just led them around on a 24-hour-a-day stage play, really. We set up all the set pieces before hand, and they would just follow our directions...We shook their tent, we played sounds of little kids playing outside their tent, we made noises in the middle of the night, we led them to this crazy house at the end—we basically just played the Blair Witch.
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  (#14) The Premise Of The Movie Came From Myrick And Sánchez Wanting To Be Scared

  College friends Myrick and Sánchez came up with the premise of the movie in 1991 while lamenting the lack of really frightening movies available to them. After watching their favorite faux-documentary horror movies like Legend of Boggy Creek, the pair thought up placing filmmakers into a forest where they come upon a house filled with Satanic symbolism and compulsion to enter it. Sánchez explained their choice of antagonist:

  That was a big discussion. What is it [that they're looking for]? Is it a witch? Some kind of warlock? What the hell is it? And a witch, for us, was just kind of the only thing you could do. We liked the idea of it being centered in Maryland. […] And Maryland is close enough to the Salem witch trials - a really dark period of our history that a lot of people know about.
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  (#15) The Actors Received A Crash Course In Recording Sound And Video

  Only Leonard had previous experience with filming, but none with the specific CP-16 camera his character uses in the film. Each actor received a quick rundown of how to operate the CP-16 and Hi8 cameras used to make the movie. Williams served as the sound guy for the movie both as a character and in reality, learning to plug in the right cords and use DAT on the fly. This led to mistakes, some of which remain in the movies, as Leonard recalled:

  I’d never shot with the CP-16 before. It was a beast of a camera - mostly used for news broadcasts before video was invented. When I arrived in Maryland, I was introduced to the late and great Neal Fredericks, who was in charge of the film’s "look." He and I went out shooting for a day so I could learn the ins and outs of the CP. But even that didn’t save me from screwing up a bunch of the footage - that whole conversation in the movie about feet versus meters after we left Mary Brown’s house - that was real. That was me realizing that I’d screwed up the calculations for my measurements and the footage was probably going to be out of focus.

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