It was seen at the dead of winter in a little theatre in Sundance and that worked for people.” That was what the experience was before it came out in the multiplex. Maybe it should have done $3 or $4 million at the box office and everyone who saw it loved it and it went on to become this little gem that you passed onto people and urged them to check out. This was something that was crafted by three or four guys on their credit cards and very few films are made like that – maybe Clerks or El Mariachi – and I think that Blair Witch belongs with those films.
I have said this before too… it was a very small film and no movie of that size before us came close to doing what Blair Witch did. “I think, looking back, that it became way too big for what it was intended for. “Yeah, it was a tiny $30,000 film that somehow ended up in theatres all over the world,” laughs Sánchez. Yet even Artisan probably never expected that, largely due to positive critic reviews and excellent word-of-mouth from Sundance, The Blair Witch Project was poised to be the tenth highest grossing film of the year… Moreover, with a solid deal from the troubled, but still prominent, independent distributor Artisan Entertainment (who had hit gold in the Eighties with Dirty Dancing) – Myrick and Sánchez arrived with plenty of ‘outsider’ cred. Yet, that is exactly what happened to The Blair Witch Project. Are you crazy? Who could have ever imagined that?” Daniel Myrick had no idea the film would break out in the way it did… No one could have anticipated that we were going to be the must-see movie of the summer. We were not prepared for it to break out in the way it did.
So as far as we were concerned, we thought we had something that was potentially successful but only as an independent film. We are probably going to be the size of Pi’ – which had shown at Sundance the year before. So after that we knew that we had a potential sale and Ed Sánchez and I were back at our hotel saying: ‘Well, this is still a small indie film so let’s not get too excited. It was reported that people were fainting and that is the best publicity you can ask for. “We had started to develop The Blair Witch Project at film school and we got to Sundance and suddenly we had all of this buzz after the first screening. That film was The Blair Witch Project, a collaboration between graduate genre buffs Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez which had, earlier in the year, taken Sundance by storm and encouraged a bidding war among distributors… “That whole period was just such a crazy time,” reflects Myrick when SciFiNow catches up with him. However, there was one notable exception – a little independent sleeper success that sneaked into American multiplexes on 14 July and, practically overnight, became the must-see shocker of the entire decade. The ‘event’ cinema of the May-August period was, therefore, almost entirely underwhelming, with lowbrow comedy such as Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, threadbare monster movie Lake Placid and an awful rehash of the Sixties horror classic The Hauntingoffering little in the way of big screen thrills and spills.
Witness the snore-inducing fantasy-farce of Wild, Wild West and, of course, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace which threw months of expertly crafted hype back in the face of anyone who was hoping for a new George Lucas masterclass. To a new generation of filmgoers, the summer blockbusters of 1999 probably seem like they belong to a strange alternate universe – certainly far more dated, and even forgettable, than their relatively meagre 21-year timespan would suggest.