oe Berlinger, the award-winning director of documentaries such as Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, would seem an unlikely candidate to direct the highly anticipated sequel to 1999's surprise hit movie The Blair Witch Project. But the articulate filmmaker, who considers himself as much a journalist as a director, argues that Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 fits perfectly with his other work.
Blair Witch 2, which opens nationwide Oct. 27, marks Berlinger's fiction feature-film directorial debut. The film, which he co-wrote with Dick Beebe, is less a sequel to the first movie than a reaction to and commentary on the international media phenomenon that resulted from the first movie. It tells the story of five young people who travel to Maryland to visit the scene of the first movie and find themselves sucked into violence and mystery. In the film, Berlinger uses the conventions of narrative horror movie-making to look at the social context of The Blair Witch Project.
In casting Blair Witch 2 in part as a commentary, Berlinger has made a film that is a natural outgrowth of his previous documentaries. For example, the 1996 Paradise Lost, which Berlinger directed with longtime partner Bruce Sinofsky, was a non-narrated cinéma vérité examination of a year in the life of a southern town as it comes to terms with a series of brutal child murders.
Berlinger spoke to Science Fiction Weekly during a press briefing to promote Blair Witch 2 in Los Angeles.
Why did you pick Blair Witch 2 as your first fictional feature film?
Berlinger: I wish I could say that I woke up one day and said, "You know, I've got to make the sequel to The Blair Witch Project as my first movie." That is not to say that I'm not incredibly proud of what I ultimately did. I love this movie, and I'm very happy with it.
My documentaries [are] very narratively structured. I would think that they're the type of movies that Hollywood executives say, "Well, let's give this guy a chance at making a fiction movie because he shows a sense of storytelling." And I've come very close to a lot of movies, and they all seem to crumble.
I was actually at Artisan [Entertainment] pitching them a whole other movie, which I thought would be my first movie: this noir thriller about this bizarre L.A. murder case that would probably go to Sundance and open on five screens, and roll out to 50, as opposed to the 4,000-screen, six-country opening of Blair Witch 2. As I talked about my background, one of the young executives there who brought me into the pitch was a Paradise Lost junkie. And they just started getting the idea--because on the surface, I'm a guy who runs around the woods making films about real killers and child murders--that I would be an interesting choice for the Blair Witch project.
Windows of opportunity open in strange ways sometimes and sometimes you can't question opportunities. I just decided, as I've done with my documentaries, to take a giant leap of faith and jump out the window and hope there was a mattress on the other side to catch me.
What commentary are you trying to make in Blair Witch 2?
Berlinger: The comment that I'm trying to make is that evil is human. I'm trying to make a lot of comments, so it's hard to reduce them to one. It is a very dangerous thing that the blurring of the line between fiction and reality has gotten to the point where people walked out of the first movie and thought it was real. I'm very concerned about that.
We are a society that elects its officials on sound bites instead of really dealing with the issues. We burned down Los Angeles because of 20 seconds of Rodney King video, without really analyzing before, after or really having a thoughtful debate about it. O.J. Simpson is acquitted on the courthouse steps because of the great sound bites that the Dream Team did on the 11 o'clock news. We are a society where MTV Real World is considered the real world, when it's six beautiful people thrown together in a fake environment.
So I felt that was worth making a comment on. I loved the first movie, but [Blair Witch 2 is] an anti-sequel in the sense that The Blair Witch Project was such a unique cultural phenomenon, I thought it would be more effective and creatively more challenging to try not to compete with it, not try to replicate it, but rather, to comment upon it.
I think we have become undiscerning consumers of media, and the line between entertainment and reality has become dangerously blurred. It's as simple as that. What to do about it, I don't know. I like to raise issues, but not necessarily answer them. I don't like to force my point of view on people, but I like to raise issues for discussion. To me, the movie is a meditation on violence in the media, and whether or not violence causes people to do terrible things. On the deeper level, it's about as realistic to say that movies alone and censoring movies can cause people to do violence as to say there's really a Blair Witch. The issue is much more complex.
[Blair Witch 2 is about] how we as a society so deify our movie celebrities--we have become such rabid fans of television and movies--that life seems only to be valid if you're on television or movies. So it's about the nature of fanaticism; it's about how the media aided and abetted the creation of this phenomenon of this little movie.
Some critics may say you're being overly ambitious in trying to do so much in a 90-minute horror movie.
Berlinger: If some people perceive it that way, that would be a shame. I mean, I think in many ways this movie is a poisoned chalice, no matter what I try to do. If I made it shaky-cam and derivative, people would say I'm just ripping off the [first] movie. If I made it purely commercial, and didn't try to imbue it with the kind of social analysis and social commentary that I've done in my earlier work, people would say, "What a commercial exercise." And now, if it's being criticized as too ambitious, well, you know, I can't help that.
I had a very mixed reaction to The Blair Witch Project. And not mixed in the sense of the usual word. As a storyteller--and I consider myself as both a storyteller and a journalist--I loved The Blair Witch Project. The "you're watching a snuff film, found footage" conceit of that movie, linked to an occultic story of a witch in the woods, I thought, was absolutely brilliant.
[But] as a documentarian, I was deeply disturbed and almost offended by the movie, because I am very concerned about two things. One is, documentary makers don't shoot in the way that movie was shot. . I think we as a society have become very lazy about how we consume media, and fiction storytellers often rely on wallowing in the clichés of bad documentary making as a way of communicating reality. I was also bothered by the fact that it was marketed as a real story, when in fact it isn't. That's one more chapter in the history of the blurring of the line between entertainment and reality, which I think has become a very dangerous phenomenon in our society--worth commenting on, which is why I chose to make [Blair Witch 2] the way I chose to make it.
I could understand why people went into the theater thinking [The Blair Witch Project] was real. But many people left the theater still thinking it was real, despite the covers of Time and Newsweek with [photos of stars] Heather [Donahue], Mike [Williams] and Josh [Leonard]. People thought they saw a documentary. People became so obsessed with it, they went down to Burkittsville, [Maryland] despite the little town's protestations that there's no Blair Witch. The more that they would protest, the more these tourists would assume there was something conspiratorial going on.
To me, linking the sequel to The Blair Witch Project to the documentary tradition is not by being derivative and also dishonest to the documentary tradition by running around the woods and shaking camera around.
Linking this movie is to make a horror movie that's actually about human evil and talks about violence in the media, how media shape an event.
Blair Witch 2 cost about $12 million, which is hundreds of times more than the $30,000 or so that the first film cost. Is it hundreds of times better?
Berlinger: What propelled the first movie was hype, and what may tarnish people's ability to perceive this movie the way I intended it--which is as a stand-alone fresh start--is people's belief that this is going to stink because it's a sequel.
I tried to do something valid that is commercial. The thing is, The Blair Witch Project was this unique, cultural phenomenon. It represented the confluence of some pretty unique ingredients that I think can never be repeated. Those ingredients are a movie coming at a time when the corporatization of movie-making makes anything that's special and different [something that] people will gravitate to. [It's also a movie] coming at a time when young people are very spiritual-less. Young people want to believe there's something out there to grasp. And also, [it was a movie] coming at a time when the Internet was becoming popular, so this movie was marketed by calling it a documentary when it wasn't. This created this unique explosion.
I decided, I'm not going to compete with this. It would be like going to Germany trying to recreate how the Berlin Wall came down. I think I've carried on the tradition of low-budget movie-making. If you saw the film, you see that it's got very good production values. And when you're talking about Blair Witch 2, no one is cutting you any deals when you're renting equipment or hiring stuff. Twelve million dollars bought me the kind of movie I wanted to make, which was a cinematically lush, horror thriller experience that's got some social commentary to it.
