Tell Me Where You Are Josh

“The film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It’s like going to get all the ingredients together, and you’ve got to make sure before you leave the store that you got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake – or not.”

-Philip Seymour Hoffman

You had to know I was going to do a post about The Blair Witch Project (1999). It’s my favorite movie and it’s a good blend of fiction and non-fiction storytelling. In nearly every scene, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (the film’s directors and editors) make compelling editing decisions. They had over twenty hours of raw footage and they managed to cut it down to 81 minutes.

I do have to offer a brief defense of this post. The Blair Witch Project is, of course, fiction. But it’s important to note that Myrick and Sánchez gave their actors very loose scripts and geographic locations to reach every day–and then proceeded to hide in the woods and (actually) scare the hell out of them. It was, essentially, a completely fictitious, mostly unethical documentary. After filming, the directors then had four different types of material to sift through. Here’s the list:

• Video from a Hi-8 camera
• Film from a 16mm camera
• Audio from the Hi-8 camera
• Audio from a DAT machine

They had to make very deliberate decisions about how to put all of these types of media together. The way that they chose to do it disorients the viewer while, at the same time, gives us clues about the locations of each character. Take the final scene of the film, for example, in which Heather and Michael are looking for their lost friend Josh:

Heather has the 16mm (black and white), and Michael has the Hi-8 (color with audio). They no longer have the DAT machine so all audio comes from the Hi-8. That is to say: all sound is being recorded by Michael. This scene starts off quietly because Heather (who is being loud) is holding the 16mm with no audio. She can only be heard when she gets closer to Michael. She asks, “Mike where are you?” and, as if to remind us that we can only hear through Michael’s ears, Michael says, “I’m right here!” Throughout this entire scene we get two visual representations of space while only getting one auditory perspective.

Myrick and Sánchez create this dissonance just in time for Josh, who has been missing for a few days, to call out to his friends from a distance. (Unless, of course you don’t believe that that is really Josh!) Michael says, “I hear him. I hear him. I’m going upstairs,” because sound is the only way that Michael, Heather, and the audience can figure out where the characters are in relation to each other.

But it’s the next part of the scene that is probably the most skillfully crafted sixty seconds of the film. In the attic, Michael believes he hears Josh in the basement and runs to find him faster than Heather can follow. Myrick and Sánchez cut back and forth between the Hi-8’s video and the 16mm’s film, but they are still forced to only use the Hi-8’s audio. So, without wide or establishing shots, the directors are able to give us a sense of increasing distance between Heather and Michael. They do this by showing that her screams get quieter and quieter as Michael bolts to the basement while she slowly moves down the stairs, paralyzed with fear.

After Michael’s camera is knocked out of his hands (thereby no longer providing useable video), we can only see through the 16mm and we can only hear through the Hi-8. We don’t need to know the exact layout of the house to know how close Heather is getting to what we know will be her death. Her voice gets louder and clearer as she descends the stairs, rounds the corner, and is overtaken by the Blair Witch.

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman said that films are, “made in the editing room.” There are few films for which this is more true than The Blair Witch Project. (Turner p. 30) Even though Myrick and Sánchez had a somewhat clear idea of what they wanted their film to be, they left almost all of the camera work to chance. It was their decision to carve a compelling narrative out of the footage that makes this film work. Because, in the end, the directors did have the final say over what images and what sounds came through, and they were able to mold that material into a kind of film that had never existed before and has yet to be duplicated.

Work cited:

Turner, Peter. The Blair Witch Project. Leighton, Buzzard: Auteur, 2014. Print.