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Five young people apply to live in an isolated house together for six months
whilst their every move is filmed by numerous cameras. Each has their reason
for wanting to be there - fame, money, adventure. The prize - $1 million. The
rules - if one person leaves, everyone loses. It becomes the ultimate morality
test.
When Danny's beloved grandfather dies, does his greed overcome his love? When
the skittish Emma finds blood on her pillow why does she still stay behind? And
what dark secret does the house harbour that leaves them feeling as though
they're being watched by more than just a million pairs of eyes?
A chilling horror movie in the tradition of The Blair Witch Project.
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Interview with the director, Marc Evans, and executive producer, Tim Bevan.
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Q. How did Big Brother
influence the film?
A. Tim - Because it was about
a reality website we thought it would kind of feed into it. While we were
writing it, the second series was on TV and the third has just been on now so
we had to have a little bit of a dialogue with that. If you go to see the film
expecting it to be parody or satire or something like that it's not going to
deliver. What it does do, I think, is at times it becomes increasingly cruel.
Between the first and second series, Big Brother turned into a different show.
You could sense the smell of blood in the last Big Brother series and that is
where this film steps in.
Q Was it really that cold?
A. Marc - Yeah, it was. That was why we ended up there because on this kind of
budget we didn't even contemplate trying to create snow and we needed that kind
of wilderness for the whole concept of the film to work. So we went straight to
Nova Scotia and it was touch and go whether it would snow or not but it was,
generally speaking, minus twenty. We hit a week where it was minus twenty-seven
and we had to stop painting the house because all the paint brushes were
sticking to it and three of the painters got frost bite and had to go to
hospital on one day because we were literally on the edge of this peninsula.
Q. Is it true that at times
the actors weren't aware that they were being filmed?
A. Marc - It certainly broke
down all the things like hitting marks and hitting boxes that actors are used
to, being very aware that a single camera was on them. Especially these
American actors who are very technical. Very rarely was it a case of them
asking "Which shot's mine?" because they wouldn't know where that was. Of
course they were complicit in all the process but, for example, in the DIY, low
tech way in which we made the movie, when we were shooting the night vision
stuff there was only one way of shooting that and that is putting all the
lights off and shooting it in the dark. They were kind of acting in the dark.
They experience a lot more. It's a lot less mediated in a way because with 35mm
there is such a palaver in setting it up especially if you're going to get into
any action sequences or special effects and this really was the opposite of
that it was very fast and the script was being written on the last day. I must
say that the Americans really responded to that well. One of them said that
they liked the whole system of getting new pages every day, plus we didn't
rehearse much because we wanted it to be loose in that sense.
Q. How did the digital format
effect the film?
A. Tim - The technology was really basic - you could buy all the stuff at
Dixons - and we edited on a Mac. I think that was part of the background of the
horror: that anybody could do it.
A. Marc - We were able to spend a disproportionate amount of this budget that
we had on building this house because we knew that the house was a character
and we had to be there for seven weeks. Basically we built this two-storey
house inside a disused tennis court in Nova Scotia. Again, you wouldn't really
be able to do that conventionally because you would have to reinforce the
floorboards to put tracks on and you would need all these massive lighting
rigs. It was like being in an overgrown doll's house in an interior that we
designed from an exterior that we found.
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