Interview (Written): Simon Barrett (“Blair Witch”)

A Flickering Myth interview with Simon Barrett, screenwriter of Blair Witch:

From a writing standpoint, was this one more challenging for you than your last few projects? The first ‘Blair Witch’ was based on a 32-page outline and then crafted in the editing room afterwards. Was this more tightly scripted or was there a lot of footage shot and then worked through afterwards?

SB: We knew we weren’t going to improvise the movie the way they did that first film because that’s just not the way we make films, and they’d also already done that. You don’t want to imitate too much of what the first film’s doing because what’s the point of making another one then, you’d just watch the first, which is my overall approach to remakes and sequels.

I’ve been offered a lot of remakes of films that I really like but it’s like, “I don’t know that I would do anything differently to what the original film did, so I don’t have anything really to add to this”. You have to find that magic property where it’s a property that you really love and you also see a different creative direction for it that could add to the legacy of the original, which I would say, so far, the only two films that people have brought to me that I’ve felt that way about are The Blair Witch Project and the Korean film I Saw The Devil, which we’re working on a remake of.

Those are very unique and films that I love in a really unique way. It was weirdly challenging. We wanted it to feel very authentic and we wanted the actors to do some improv and have a certain spontaneous looseness in the scenes but we still were trying to make a very tight film with a very tight narrative. What I would do is I would script longer versions of scenes than we intended to use.

Say, I wrote a page long scene but I know we were only going to use two or three lines in the middle. That way it would feel like the scene was being edited like a documentary, like someone’s found the footage and used the snippets that they needed. If I’d just written those two or three lines, the actors and Adam and everyone would have had a difficult time making that feel right. In that way you have the looseness to the scenes but then you could cut into a very tight edit.

The script was much longer than any script I’d done previously. I think, at one point, it was 128 pages and the film is 94 minutes, I think, with credits. That was always, pretty much, what we were going for. I knew I was writing something long but I was explaining to Adam along the way, “This is how I see this scene playing out. This””. He was very down for that. Even then, sometimes, it didn’t work and we’d end up reshooting a scene two or three times during production just to get it just right because you could see sometimes, “Wait, we don’t have the correct outpoint for an edit here”.

I’ve edited stuff before and I, at least, have an understanding of how that works so at least I could see, once we’d failed at something, how to do it correctly usually. It was a lot of trial and error in the filmmaking process. The writing process, it was difficult. This was the first time I’ve ever written something from scratch that wasn’t based on my own ideas and so it wasn’t entirely the creative process that I’m used to, which is completely inventing the story, the characters and the world.

It was challenging for me honestly, a little bit at first but then it also was a mythology that I really loved and a film that has a really huge amount of material hinted at in the original but never fully explained or expanded upon. It was such a cool tool box to be able to work with that once I got over the initial hump of I have to adhere to what people are expecting me to write a little bit here, I was able to get back into my usual creative process with it.

Is there a part of the lore that you particularly enjoy or is there a part of the film that you love having seen it a few times now?

SB: Yes. It’s not in our film, it’s referenced briefly but I love the story of Coffin Rock. I think Robin Weaver is the young girl. This would have taken place in 1896 in Blair Witch mythology and she sees a woman whose feet aren’t touching the ground who leads her out to the house in the woods and leaves her there and she escapes. The men who are sent looking for her are found eviscerated and bound together in a circle, each man’s hand bound to the next man’s feet. I think that’s how it’s phrased in the original film.

Yes. You’ve just reminded me myself. I used to have this book, ‘The ‘Blair Witch Dossier’, I think it was called. It had all that stuff in it. I think Oni Press might have released a comic book when I was a kid. I saw ‘Blair Witch’ when I was maybe 15 or something at the cinema for the first time.

SB: They did three different comic book series of The Blair Witch and The Blair Witch Chronicles I think, the one that had the Coffin Rock story in it, which is really great. It’s referenced in Dave Stern’s ‘Dossier’, of course. It is referenced in the original film though, like everything in the original film, somewhat obliquely. I think that’s such a cool, creepy little bit of mythology and it’s almost why I didn’t want to address it in our film because I almost want people to discover it on its own because it is just a really creepy tale.

All the details are really bizarre and it makes you start thinking, “Wait, is that Rustin Parr’s house? If so, how long has it been there?” It just makes you start connecting other bits of the mythology together. We referenced Coffin Rock. We have a character actually say the words but we don’t give in to the legend. It’s partly because I think that legend is so cool that I’m hoping that people watch our film and revisit the original or look it up online or something like that and then it’ll make, if anything, our film feel even scarier.

For the rest of the interview, go here.