While slightly less frenzied on the business front, this year's festival still offered a slew of fascinating films.
by Stephen Pizzello,
Overhearing the intercom at Salt Lake City's airport squawk "Will Julie Delpy please come to the information desk" is a pretty sure sign that you've arrived at the Sundance Film Festival. If that's not enough of a wake-up call, try an hour-long shuttle ride to Park City seated next to a beleaguered Hollywood agent barking into a cell phone.
If previous festivals are an accurate barometer, Sundance '99 was a bit quieter on the buzz front. The biggest sale was the acquisition of the popular comedy Happy, Texas by Miramax Films, for a reported total sum of $10 million. Audiences also championed the blood-curdling terrors of The Blair Witch Project, which was one of the first flicks acquired off the auction block — for a cool $1 million-plus shelled out by Artisans Entertainment. Fine Line soon followed suit, picking up the boy-meets-boy farce Trick for a mid-six -figure sum, and then grabbing Tumbleweeds, a tale of renewal among a divorcee and her daughter, for almost double that price. Meanwhile, the documentary American Movie found a home at Sony Pictures Classics for $800,000, and won 15 minutes of fame for its subject, a struggling no-budget director named Mark Borchardt.
As always, overcrowded screenings were the order of the day. At the small Holiday Village Cinema triplex, a throng of viewers nearly trampled actor Ben Affleck and others while attempting to bum-rush their way into the premiere of the Hughes Brothers' documentary American Pimp (which featured an in-house appearance by Rosebudd, a major domo of the "escort" set). The anarchic spectacle, which brought to mind the Who's ill-fated Cincinnati concert in the mid-1970s, nearly prompted festival officials to call in Park City's finest to enforce some much-needed crowd-control. Voyeurs also flocked to Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, which documents the feminist graduate student/porno star's infamous attempts to stretch the limits of unsafe sex.
Boosted by the resounding critical success of the Brazilian film Central Station (a Sundance '98 World Cinema entry), the festival's international/foreign-language category boasted a number of excellent entries, including La Ciudad, a realistic black-and-white look at impoverished émigrés struggling for survival in New York City; Run Lola Run, an ultra-energetic German entry about a woman in a 20-minute race to save her boyfriend from mobster retaliation; and Lovers of the Arctic Circle, a lyrical Spanish tale of two lifelong friends' love for each other. The festival's most feted film, Three Seasons (see full coverage in AC Feb. '99) also painted a portrait of distant shores. Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui's saw his poetic, three-part picture score a festival first by taking a trio of major awards: the Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award, and Best Cinematography honors for director of photography Lisa Rinzler's nuanced work.
Throughout the 10-day festival, AC's merry band of moviegoers managed to take in close to 50 motion pictures. After careful consideration, our Sundance team opted to profile the following films, all of which offered intriguing visual styles.
— Andrew O. Thompson
The Blair Witch Project (U.S.)
Directors: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
Cinematographer: Neal Fredericks
A primal frightfest shot on a shoestring budget, The Blair Witch Project was one of this year's must-see Sundance entries. After a debut screening that generated wildly enthusiastic word-of-mouth and a distribution deal with Artisans Entertainment (which picked up Darren Aronofsky's equally inventive 
(Pi) at last year's festival), Blair Witch became Park City's toughest ticket. Those lucky enough to score a seat were promptly treated to a truly harrowing film that does for camping trips what Psycho did for hot showers.
The tale's premise is deceptively simple. As the picture begins, a somber title card provides the backstory: in October of 1994, college students and budding documentarians Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams (played in the film by actors who just happen to have the same names) headed off to Burkittsville, Maryland to interview the townsfolk about the 200-year-old legend of the Blair Witch. After continuing on into the Black Hills Forest to capture footage of key historical sites for their class project, the three vanished without a trace, never to be heard from again. However, as the title card tells us, the trio's Hi-8 video and 16mm footage was found a year later, along with digital audiotapes and Donahue's journal.
What follows onscreen is a cinema vérité nightmare that documents the friends' final days, as they lose their way in the woods and are subjected to an array of increasingly ominous supernatural events. The group's tenuous personal bond is tested repeatedly over a series of terrifying nights, as they are tormented by eerie aural phenomena, the mysterious appearance of paranormal portents, and their own agonized imaginations.
The most remarkable aspect of The Blair Witch Project is that is manages to raise gooseflesh without ever resorting to the horror genre's predictably lurid clichés — i.e. gratuitous blood and gore. According to the film's co-writers and co-directors, Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the primary goal was to avoid the literal while crafting an atmosphere of bone-chilling dread. "Ed and I went to film school together at the University of Central Florida, and we always enjoyed psychological horror films like The Shining and The Exorcist," says Myrick. "We found out through brainstorming discussions that we were also both fans of the old TV series In Search Of, and creepy quasi-documentaries like The Legend of Boggy Creek. We loved those old grainy shots of the Loch Ness monster, or the shaky camerawork on Bigfoot moving through the woods, and we decided that we wanted to do a horror film that seemed 100 percent real."
The duo attained that goal via decidedly unconventional strategies that were based partly on producer Greg Hale's training in the U.S. Army's Special Forces. Working with cinematographer Neal Fredericks (Dreamers), Myrick and Sanchez designed a "method filmmaking" plan that would immerse the actors in the story's reality. The three thespians were given a two-day crash-course on how to operate the production's Hi-8 and 16mm film cameras, and then turned loose to capture their experiences in real time over eight days. During the shoot, the trio made their way to various predetermined points, encountering planted actors (and unplanted civilians) with whom they would then act out improvisational scenes based on notes passed to them by the directors and cinematographer. Once the actors entered the forests of Maryland's Seneca Creek State Park, they used Global Positioning System (GPS) handsets to navigate the terrain; the production team tracked the players via GPS or simply stalked them through the woods to observe their movements. Directorial notes, extra camping and film gear and food were left in milk crates marked with day-glo orange bicycle flags. Sanchez explains, "Dan and I provided detailed outlines with all of the events that would happen to the actors on each day — from eating breakfast to being chased out of their tent — and the time of day when the events should take place."
To push the actors even further into their roles, the production team would creep up to the perimeter of their campsite each night and harass them with frightening sounds and other morbid surprises. This gleefully sadistic exercise continued during the daytime, as the actors were required to cover more and more ground with less and less food. "It was like extreme theater in the outdoors," Williams attests. "From an acting standpoint, it was a great challenge, because we didn't have any contact with our directors. We just had to hope that performance-wise, we were going where they wanted us to go. After a few days, we were really able to turn the freedom they'd given us into an advantage, and take any risks that we wanted. It was an actor's dream, and the more we immersed ourselves in the characters, the scarier things got. At the end of each day, we would ask ourselves, 'Okay, what's going to happen to us tonight?'"
With a wry grin, Donahue adds, "We always knew that we were safe, because everything was so well thought-out and planned, but it was still a freaky experience. Every time we turned around, we were hearing the cries of dead children or finding voodoo symbols hanging from the trees!"
The project was also a unique experience for director of photography Fredericks. Since actors Logan and Donahue shot most of the footage, Fredericks worked more as a supervising cameraman, offering the duo technical tips via written notes left in the woods. "As a cinematographer, you want to have as much control over the imagery as you can, but on Blair Witch that objective became rather difficult," he says. "We did allow ourselves to control certain aspects of the shoot, however. For example, the 16mm night footage that Joshua shot [on Kodak's 200 ASA 7222 black-and-white stock] was pushed two stops in the lab to give it a grainy, rough, student-film look. Also, the light we gave him to attach to the CP-16 camera was a 750-watt ENG fixture that Ed and I had previously tested to be sure that the spread would only extend a certain number of feet. We wanted the nighttime scenes to fall off into blackness so the audience would have to wonder what was out there beyond the range of the light. Most of the action was off-camera or away from the light, and everything was staged in conjunction with a variety of sound effects to create a scary atmosphere.
"Heather shot most of the video footage, which was designed to provide a more immediate, you-are-there feel for their day-to-day, behind-the-scenes experiences on this fictional class project. I've had some experience transferring video to film, so I knew that when we eventually transferred all of the footage to a 35mm print, the aesthetic qualities of the 35mm film would take some of the edge off the video, making it a bit softer and more pleasing to the eye."
Though Logan did have some prior experience as a freelance photographer and videographer, he had never worked with a CP-16 before. He says that serving double duty as an actor and cameraman on Blair Witch proved to be a valuable lesson, and a physically and psychologically daunting one at that. "The CP-16 is a very cumbersome camera, and we were already loaded down with backpacks and everything else. Neal had explained the aesthetic that we were going for, though, and I think that began to come through subconsciously as I shot the footage — even though I was concentrating on my performance as well. As an actor, you don't get such an opportunity very often, and it was interesting to try to maintain that balance. The fact that we were shooting in sequence really enabled us, as an acting unit, to live in the moment. We got very tired and very hungry, and our nerves were constantly on edge. As the filmmaking process went on, there was less and less need to pretend. Everything got very raw, and I think that comes across on the screen."
The film's enigmatic ending leaves the ultimate fate of its characters in limbo, but those who thirst for insights are encouraged to hunt for clues on the production team's website www.haxan.com which offers excerpts from Donahue's fictional diary. Assessing the picture's refusal to pander to viewers' preconditioned reflexes, Logan concludes, "I think audiences have really become conditioned to seeing violence and blood onscreen. It's all been done before, so it worked to our advantage to play on the psychological element and let the viewers use their imaginations to create their own vision of the Blair Witch. If you show the boogeyman, it becomes a clichˇ, and the film then falls into the same category as any other horror film ever made. That's not the kind of payoff we were looking for."
— S. Pizzello
The Loss of Sexual Innocence
Director: Mike Figgis
Cinematographer: Benoît Delhomme, AFC
Directing from his own 17-year-old script, British filmmaker Mike Figgis launched The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which offers a non-linear look at the life experiences of Nic (Julian Sands), a documentary filmmaker on assignment in the arid outpost of Tunisia. Intercut with images drawn from the "fall from paradise" myth, this $3 million film explores Nic's recollections of his various sexual awakenings: as a boy in colonial Kenya observing his grandfather's bizarre, Bible-reading ritual with a native girl clad only in lingerie; as a young teen engaging in a postpubescent tryst with his girlfriend; and as an adult holed up in a country abode, where he hopes to enjoy a weekend's worth of sensual delights with his wife.
The film itself is structured as a series of short and uniquely visual vignettes shot on location in Tunisia's Sahara Desert, northern England, and the Italian areas of Umbria and Rome. Figgis had been quite taken with the collage of lighting styles and handheld camera moves on display in Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo (see AC Aug. '96), so he enlisted that film's cinematographer, Frenchman Beno”t Delhomme, AFC, whose other credits include When the Cat's Away, The Scent of Green Papaya, Artemesia and The Winslow Boy (covered in Points East, AC Feb.''99). "Mike loves to find symbolic colors for different sequences, and to push the meaning of some sequences with just color and lighting," affirms Delhomme. "He wanted lots of handheld camera — no grips and no sticks. In watching Cyclo, he saw the exact style that he wanted [for Sexual Innocence], so our conversations with one another [during preproduction] went quite smoothly." After trying out various stocks and exposures, Delhomme and Figgis resolved to shoot the film's stranger sequences on Kodak's 16mm reversal Ektachrome stocks, and then subject the footage to cross-processing (see "Soup du Jour," AC Nov. '98).
Prior to Sexual Innocence, Delhomme had worked with cross-processing only on a commercial shoot, but that situation was somewhat different since the end result was colored on telecine. To prepare for any eventuality, he and Figgis tested the Ektachrome stocks' latitude by underexposing and overexposing it in one-stop increments. Aside from having to deal with reversal's erratic nature, issues of contrasting skin tones were also a consideration for the film's "Garden of Eden" sequences. Delhomme photographed these naturally-lit daytime exteriors on both the 125 ASA 7240 and the 400 ASA 7251, in the rural areas of Umbria, Italy. "Since Adam was black and Eve was white, the results were fantastic," says Delhomme. "When underexposing, Adam would completely disappear in the frame, while Eve was still there. While overexposing, Eve became completely transparent while Adam remained within the frame."
In these trips to "Paradise," the cross-processed results resonate with an almost painterly, glowing golden tone. "You tend to have a very strong yellow element when working with cross-processing," adds Delhomme. "I thought that this could become problematic, but Mike said, 'I want it to be golden, almost like a Renaissance painting.' While grading the film, I tried to highlight its golden-reddish attributes."
| [ continued on page 2 ] | © 1999 ASC |