Robin Cowie, co-producer of the phenomenally successful off-beat horror movie The Blair Witch Project, is a fresh- faced 28-year-old who was born in Durban and went to the United States at age 15 when his father got a job at IBM. Along with Gregg Hale and co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, they made The Blair Witch Project for some $30 000. It has now taken more than $145-million in the US alone, and has spawned an Internet cult that develops the mythology behind the story.
How did you get into the movies?
My dad was in production here, a company that did industrial training and stuff like that. I twisted his arm into videotaping a puppet-show when I was, like, seven. When I was 14, he got sick and I edited a movie for him. I started doing video stuff at high school [in the US] and that got me into film school. That’s where I met the other guys. Dan [Myrick] had the idea for the film then, but it wasn’t until three years ago that we regrouped after we’d all tried out various different things. It was a last- ditch effort for a lot of us.
So the basic idea for The Blair Witch Project was pretty fully formed by the time you started on it?
There was a TV show in the States called In Search of … It was this mystery show, and it asked questions about things that were maybe true, like Bigfoot. What Dan and Ed [Sanchez] wanted to do was sort of recreate that. When we started the film there were two elements to it, the video element that is the film now, and an internal documentary that was a sort of analysis of the footage. A lot of that material ended up on the Internet. So from those two phases we developed the 200-year mythology [that is the background to the film], and it’s still developing – we’re going to release four games during next year that delve into the mythology even deeper. We really wanted to make the mythology as detailed as possible. A lot of the fun is creating this really believable world where you kind of blur those lines between fact and fiction. The very process of how we shot the film was what we called “method filmmaking” – there’s not a scripted line in the movie. It’s all reaction to things that we put in their way.
So were you one of the people running around in the middle of the night, planting stones and things outside the actors’ tent [to scare them] and so on?
I was trying to work out how we were going to pay the bills! My role was finding the money, but everybody was doing a lot of different things. I called in a lot of favours.
Did the film’s success surprise you?
We always realised that Blair Witch was an unusual film. It’s shaky and it’s grainy and it has no-name stars, and it doesn’t give you all the answers. It’s not a traditional movie and it’s really great that people responded. A lot of people have told me it doesn’t scare them at all but they really liked the movie, and then some people, it just gets hold of their spinal cord and really terrifies them. I would love to be able to watch Blair Witch never having heard of it, not having any expectations – to just get lost in the woods with them.
The Blair Witch Project opens in South Africa on December 3. In the meantime, Robin Cowie will attend and give workshops at the Sithengi film market in Cape Town. He was interviewed by Shaun de Waal
Future plans?
We’re doing a comedy, naturally, the same team. It’s called Heart of Love. We’re currently in script development, and we’re doing a lot of Internet stuff on it too. Then we’re doing a pilot for Fox, called Fearsome, a freaky, weird TV show.
So the Internet is a large component of what you do.
Our intention was never to use the Internet as a marketing tool, though obviously it worked as that. But our intention [originally] was to find some outlet for all this stuff, because we’d been working so hard on it, and at the time nobody had seen any of it. We started out really small. Now our mailing list is 20 000 people a month. But we try and keep it on an intimate level – that’s really important to us. That’s the reason we’re not moving to Hollywood.