The next thing we knew, Artisan had bought the movie for $1m. There was a queue around the block and out into the parking lot for the first Sundance screening. I got a call from a New York police officer who had worked in Maryland for years and wanted to help. We already had some buzz going into the Sundance film festival, partly because of the website we built suggesting our student documentary-makers really had disappeared. It cost about $35,000 (£26,000) to get all the footage shot. Then there were the “gags” we’d pull at night that they had to react to – like hearing the children’s voices, or feeling the tent being shaken. Don’t take no for an answer.” Or: “Josh, somewhere along the way today, you’ve had it with this bullshit.” They had the freedom to decide how to play it: we only intervened if we felt they needed to tone things down. These would say things like: “Heather, you’re absolutely sure that to get out of this mess you go south. Watch a trailer for The Blair Witch Project 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. It wasn’t like a normal film: the actors would work the cameras, filming each other all the time.
The shoot took eight days and was a 24/7 operation. There were 10 to 15 of us there for six weeks, sleeping on couches and on the floor. We set up a base at a house in Germantown, Maryland, that Ed shared with his girlfriend. She said: “I probably shouldn’t be released.”
We asked actors to pretend to be at a parole hearing and explain why they should be released. The original plan was for it to be three guys, but we had to cast Heather Donahue after what happened during her audition. The treatment covered what happens, but it had no dialogue – we wanted it all improvised. In the late 90s, with digital coming into its own, it was only a matter of time before someone made this kind of first-person movie.
The idea was that this film was put together later, using the footage they shot. Ed Sánchez, a friend from university who ended up co-directing, helped me work this into a 35-page treatment about three students who go missing after heading out into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about a legendary witch. For a long time, I had this idea of seeing a stick figure hanging from a tree and it creeped the hell out of me. I grew up around the woods and swamps of Florida.
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