The Blair Witch Project – Dialogue was entirely improvised
Speaking of The Blair Witch Project, let’s look at the original sleeper hit that shocked the world. Blair Witch was shot on a budget of $60,000, and is now in the Guinness Book of World Records for “Top Budget: Box Office Ratio.” The film made back $248 million, which means it has a ratio of $1 spent for every $10,931 earned. How crazy is that?
The film follows three students who vanished in the forest after heading out to film a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch. All that was found was the footage on their cameras.
Of course, the film was not about real film students who were making a documentary, but at the time, a lot of people were convinced the Blair Witch theory was real (it wasn’t), and that these students were missing. While it was all fiction, the actors still went through hell to make the film.
While out in the forest shooting the film, the actors shot everything themselves to get the realistic documentary effect. And to make their relationships more strained and to build animosity among them, the directors deliberately gave them less food each day of shooting.
Clearly, the directors were trying some unconventional methods to get a believable performance from their stars. In fact, Heather Donahue has said that the first thing her friends and family asked when she got involved with the project was if they were making a snuff film. And yet, she didn’t quit!
Much like in Paranormal Activity, the actors were not given scripts but instead an outline of the mythology behind the movie’s plot. They improvised every line, and most of the events that take place in the film were actually unknown to them at the time. The directors would often surprise them in order to get genuine reactions.
In one scene, for example, the actors were asleep in a tent in the woods. The tent started shaking violently, and they were all terrified. This wasn’t planned, but the director decided to shake the tent to intentionally scare them.