Anne Taylor:<\/strong> We’d been developing projects together for a while, and still are. From day one we’ve always really had a working relationship, so we don’t really know anything different. I think we were both really excited. I mean, I can’t speak for Josh, but I was. (laughs)<\/p>\n Josh Anthony:<\/strong> “Well, Brent, the thing is…” (laughs) No, as she says, from the moment we met pretty much, we just started talking about films that we enjoyed and liked, and hit it off. The cool thing about Annie and I is that\u00a0we’re actually very different —\u00a0which is great, and challenges both of\u00a0us to actually do better.\u00a0It seems like a good combination. And for me the process has been great because we get to lean on each other in other ways that you probably couldn’t do with other people. Not to say that every film after this will be that way, but in this particular one I think it was a really great dynamic.<\/p>\n ShockYa: What was the process of selection like for the film’s setting, of actually finding Happy Camp, California?<\/strong><\/p>\n AT:<\/strong> If you Google Happy Camp —\u00a0and I think Josh was actually the one who initially discovered the town when he was interested in making a film about Bigfoot — it\u00a0has some of the most Bigfoot sightings in Northern California, it’s kind of a hot spot for that sort of thing. That’s initially what attracted us to the town, and then going up there and meeting everyone was where I think the story started to develop.<\/p>\n JA:<\/strong> We took a virtual talk through Happy Camp on Google, and in the center of town there’s that big statue. Now, granted, we wanted to keep that as a bit of a reveal in the film… but we said, “Oh my God, look at this place, that’s a great place for a movie.” We showed some people at Flower (Films) and they said, “Okay, we get it,” so we went up for a drive and it really seemed like the spot.<\/p>\n ShockYa: The film reminded me some of “Darwin: No Services Ahead,” a documentary from a couple years back about small town in the Death Valley region of California, and the crazy characters of this dried-up, out-of-the-way place with (only) three or four dozen people.<\/strong><\/p>\n JT:<\/strong> That’s interesting. The Harmony Korine movie “Gummo” was one that we had just seen before heading up to Happy Camp, [and] that was something that helped us out and pointed us in the right direction.<\/p>\n ShockYa: You have a rough outline in your mind, no doubt, before heading up there, but how much\u00a0of (the story)… was specifically tailored to surroundings, since you do make use of some non-professional actors?<\/strong><\/p>\n AT:<\/strong> Josh had been up there a few times and then we all went up as a group to scout a few weeks before we actually went to shoot. We just tried to meet as many people as we could. We went to the bar and met “Rattlesnake Frank” (one of several\u00a0real-life townspeople who appear briefly in the movie)\u00a0who could have a documentary all on his own — he’s one of the most interesting human beings I’ve ever met in my life. He’s\u00a0had a crazy life.\u00a0But we wanted first to make a character piece — we wanted it to be about this guy going through this journey, and\u00a0then we also wanted it to be this cool Bigfoot movie. But the town is also a character in and of itself, and we really wanted to show that — to put the people on screen and let them do their thing. They were amazing, they were great.<\/p>\n ShockYa: And did you meet folks who claimed to have seen Bigfoot?<\/strong><\/p>\n AT:<\/strong> Oh yes, lots.<\/p>\n JA:<\/strong> Yeah, we shot about 100 hours of footage, and I would argue that about 50 of it is folks telling Bigfoot stories. The woods are huge. For me, I don’t doubt that there’s something out there. I mean, we’ve seen some home video footage that people shot and showed us, and we said, “Yep, that’s scary.” It’s stuff that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.<\/p>\n AT:<\/strong> We even had an incident one night where we were shooting out all night, and for some reason our brand new generator just kept turning off randomly. So all of a sudden we would go from this fairly well-lit wooded area to pitch black, and we’d have to go back to the car,\u00a0and you’d start hearing things. Then we’d come back to the set and some of our props would be missing. Now it could be anything, but when you’re already in that mindset it’s the scariest thing ever. It was terrifying.<\/p>\n JA:<\/strong> It’s crazy how dark it gets out there — miles and miles and miles away from anything. After that night that she’s talking about, I think it will be a long time before we go camping again.<\/p>\n AT:<\/strong> It will be. It\u00a0was pretty intimidating, to be honest. We’re both from pretty small towns and have been camping and all that, and it was still scary.<\/p>\n ShockYa: How did Flower Films, Drew Barrymore’s production company,\u00a0come to be involved?<\/strong><\/p>\n JA:<\/strong> I’ve been working with Flower Films over the past 12 years, just on and off, professionally. I’m really close with Chris Miller, the president at Flower Films — I met him 12 years ago on the set of “Charlie’s Angels 2” and we just developed a good relationship. I knew that they were looking to get back into some horror\/thriller stuff — you know, they’d done “Donnie Darko” — and so I was kicking around some ideas with them. We circled around this, and that’s when I met Annie and we put our heads together, we put together a little rough outline of what we wanted to do, we found Happy Camp and sent it to Flower, in a pitch to Drew and Nancy (Juvonen) and Chris and they got behind us from the beginning. …At the end of the day, we knew we didn’t have a ton of money, and Annie and I come from a background of finance so we knew we had to stay within the restraints of a budget, so that also came into play too. But we worked really hard at making it a really professional environment even on a smaller budget.<\/p>\n ShockYa: The advantage of the horror genre and in particular\u00a0the found footage format is that you can control a lot of costs… yet you did have a director of photography, Matt Sanders, and a very defined visual scheme.\u00a0How much extra mental effort went into that planning?<\/strong><\/p>\n JA:<\/strong> Even from the earliest development, Annie and I were thinking about documentary-style films, and we wanted to evolve (the look of the movie) even more. So what we came up with, in talking with Matt — and (co-writer and fellow actor) Michael Barbuto too, who had a huge part in this as well — was\u00a0starting off the film\u00a0very wide. You see everything, and get a great (sense of) landscape. That’s why you see long cutaways and stuff.\u00a0We expressed that desire from day one, and Matt is phenomenal — he’s going to have a nice career, for sure. So we started off wide and then at the end of the movie we wanted to make it more claustrophobic, and so things get smaller and shots are a little tighter.<\/p>\n
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