Throwing out the rulebook on movie-making

The Blair Witch director is using old-fashioned values but modern technology to reach his audience, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

Daniel Myrick's name causes less of a reflex action than his most famous work, The Blair Witch Project, a film he directed and edited along with Eduardo Sánchez. The Myrick name may soon resonate louder but for quite different reasons. Quietly, he has become the first of the major directors to go web-only for distribution. It's a huge step and to date has gone without fanfare.

Seven years ago Myrick and Sánchez invited their audience into a spooky Maryland wood. The reason you heard about Blair Witch, or went there with them, is either you bought in to the conceit that three young documentary makers had disappeared in Burkitsville, Maryland, and the movie was pieced together from the leftover footage from their shaky hand-held camera, or because you heard a couple of young guys just made a blockbuster movie on an eight-day shoot. And for less than $100,000.

The Blair Witch Project grossed around $60 million (€48 million) in the first three weeks after release and more than $150 million in all, a sum boosted by merchandising and computer spin-offs. It became the most profitable investment in movie history.

The New York Times called it "where panic meets imagination", adding its makers had "a game plan so enterprising it should elevate to pin-up status at film schools everywhere." The Irish Times headlined it as "Sects, Lies and Internet Hype". What happened next? After a puzzling hiatus - seven years is a long time without a hit but even longer without a movie - a Myrick film is due back on the big screen later this year.

"I have a bit of a rebellious nature," Myrick begins. "I don't like it when people, artists, whoever, are held to a status quo that may not necessarily be in their best interests."

In Solstice a young girl uncovers a disturbing secret about her twin sister, who committed suicide, and who appears to be communicating with her from beyond the grave. It's a return to familiar territory: the occult, the transcendental, and the horrifying.

So reconcile this. A rebellious director who won't be shoehorned into the status quo, who happens to be famous for his work in horror, is now back making horror movies. But Solstice is not why Myrick agreed to discuss his film-making philosophy and recent career.

Myrick, since Blair Witch, has been active on the internet, the place where he and Sánchez made The Blair Witch Project such a triumph. His internet projects reflect where he wants to be as a film-maker.

"I see today's technology as a liberating force from production to editing and now for distribution," explains Myrick. "The system is heavily weighted against the artist with regard to producing meaningful work and profiting on that work."

Producing meaningful work is coming back into vogue. George Clooney's recent career testifies to a new, or at least revived, morality among film-makers. Myrick's departure to the internet is less of a headline-grabber than George mucking around in the oil industry. But its importance can easily be underestimated. It began by way of a five-part series (recently re-cut to seven shorter episodes) called The Strand, launched on the internet in early 2005.

The Strand is a "live action" movie about the lives of the people of Venice Strand in California. In fact, it mixes real lives with Myrick's method film-making technique, giving actors minimal lines and encouraging a highly naturalistic performance. Like Blair Witch, The Strand was shot in eight days. So, is the film any good?

Its life on the Internet has inspired none of the praise that accompanied the Witch. This is not a horror movie nor a clever ruse, and the web hype has been underwhelming. The Strand, though, is great movie-making. Because it is set in California and CA is stunning, the first thing to say about The Strand is that Myrick creates a visually engaging panoply. He winds us back from the jerky habits of the MTV generation and allows his images to do some work.

The action mounts slowly. Nothing of narrative impulse happens for the first half hour. It's like somebody has forgotten the rules of the modern movie. In that half hour we meet a variety of characters who, in one setting and another, are in conflict.

An old woman is about to be evicted from her house because her husband took out a second mortgage without her knowing, and then died. The bank rep arrives on her doorstep. A young couple argue over his lack of earning power while sharing a strawberry smoothie. A cop tries to get his teenage daughter out of bed in the morning. It's the everyday abrasion of life. The steady accumulation of these conflict-riven events carried me, the viewer, to the point where a narrative began to take shape.

The effect is to reprise an older set of values in film-making. The action of The Strand is not rushed, the narrative conflict is not stated upfront. The search for one resolution, the hallmark of modern movies, does not drag viewers into a series of action or conflict points that make resolution less and then more likely: The Strand is not written in film-writing school mode.

As important, Myrick chose to make The Strand specifically to avoid normal distribution channels. It is direct from him and his actors to me and you. This is not a film that couldn't make movie theatres and so got rushed to DVD, nor is it a set of web trailers priming a launch. It is Myrick's take on how to make movies for the web. Its internet "box office" has been disappointing but Myrick is undeterred.

"Of course, I would love to have had The Strand getting huge numbers but I understood two years ago that we were ahead of the curve. Somebody had to start thinking in terms of online, episodic production, not as an augment to TV, but as a first choice in distribution."

Myrick has just signed up to make one of three new films in a series for Warner Home Video. The series, Raw Feed, consists of movies by the talent behind 24 and The X-Files and then Myrick. Solstice is nearing completion. The Strand is due to go back into production, and Myrick will be launching a new film portal later this year to promote Strand-like projects. When The Strand launched back in early 2005 viewers got episode one free, and then had to buy the following four episodes at $0.99 per episode. In June 2006 Myrick decided to let viewers download it for free.

Since then, viral buzz around The Strand has started to gain momentum. It's now available on Google video, it has an official fan page on MySpace, and what we've seen to date is now being described as the Beta version, with a final cut due this month.

Myrick's commitment to The Strand also speaks volumes because it is a commitment to an older set of values that seems redundant in mainstream movie-making. We've seen some of those values resurface in Syriana and in Good Night, and Good Luck.

But while Clooney's recent films have tackled the issue of big corporate influences on society, The Strand is about the simpler aspects of life: the diversity of viewpoints people bring to their shared lives in a time when reality and fiction are of their own making.

"I find it much more interesting exploring these aspects of human nature which I think audiences can identify with in themselves," says Myrick. "We're all basically the same animal inside, which is why many films have no political or cultural boundaries."

Coming from the man who made his name in horror, those words would be surprising only to people who have not watched The Strand. Myrick says it has inspired other film-makers to go the web-only route. More may be stirring in the thickets of Hollywood than the good citizens of the film world currently know.

www.solsticethemovie.com, www.strandvenice.com. Haydn Shaughnessy blogs on digital culture at www.mediangler.com