Over the weekend I spoke with two filmmakers who have recently been heavily discussed in the online world, Matthew Peterman and William Brent Bell. These two are the ones responsible for the recent found film footage hit, ‘The Devil Inside’. In this interview, we discuss how Found Footage Films have become such a profitable style of filmmaking, and why the boys are proud of their film’s rather abrupt (and now infamous) ending. Enjoy!
(Editor’s Note: At times it was hard to distinguish who was speaking so I have combined their comments.)
MakingOf: So, Found Footage Films seem to be, you know, all the rage over the last couple of years, pulling in a lot of money on such a small budget. Why do you think it’s so strangely addicting to go out and see the style of film?
Devil Inside boys: I think maybe one of the biggest reasons is that in the last decade or whatever, television has become so much more reality based. When ‘Blair Witch’ came out or even when 24 came out, it was groundbreaking for the camera to be handheld and all of that. And now I think people are really used to less scripted and more raw styles of filmmaking, and it kind of plays itself best in the horror genre really because it makes the experience that more realistic and that much more scarier.
What do you both think the most important aspect of found footage films is? Like, the scares, the story, the dialogue, the ending – what do you think the most important part of it is?
I think a little of authenticity, you know, if you want the audience to believe what they’re watching is real…you can’t take them out of that world, so I think a level of authenticity is one of the biggest things. And that means to us, there are almost a lot of rules that you have to abide to, to keep it authentic.
I totally agree – that’s a great answer. So, regarding the film, when doing your research on exorcisms, you know, how to make them appear as real as possible with going too much overboard. How difficult, if at all, when discussing with priests and the like who take this sort of thing serious?
Well…we are able to talk to a lot of priests and exorcists…we wanted to put them on camera because in the film and in the cutting room floor we have a lot of real experts, police, and religious people that went on camera – priests and exorcists would not go on camera so we were able to get the information, and here’s the story, it’s really cool and inspired us and it was a bummer that we couldn’t get their cooperation fully.
Alright. I want to talk about the ending and the interactive part of it. You know, it ties in interactively with a website, making it one of the first of its kind. Was that the idea from the beginning and did you ever storyboard completely different endings?
The interactivity was not the idea from the beginning. I think you’re referring to the website [during the credits]. That was an idea [we] came up with which was pretty ballsy and pretty original. We thought it would be a cool thing if people had a polarizing reaction to that…we did like the abrupt ending that we chose, we thought it was kind of a non-Hollywood ending. The one thing we can look back to is realism, and in real life it doesn’t always follow a perfect structure – if things don’t always end when and how you expect them to, so everyone involved with the film thought the kind of ending we have where not everything is completely tied up and things are left unsolved was pretty unique… you never know in this day and age what’s gonna click film-goers and people that like entertainment in general as far as interactivity and things like that.
Absolutely. As far as listening to audience reactions, do you think the audience reactions to this film will impact future projects you guys work on?
Sure! One of our favorite things to do is to be in a theater and listen to the audiences react to the movie. Now that we’ve had so many audiences, we’ve seen the movie so many times and we’ve always been able to kind of gauge through the Internet, some of their responses, it totally informs how we are as filmmakers and at the end of the day it’s just really fun. It’s fun to get people invested in something and see their passion, no matter what the passion’s for based on something you have created.
So the film has made over $36 million and counting on a $1 million dollar budget [$800,000 to be exact]. So clearly it’s a box office success. I know there’s talk online that you have another project in the works but with this being such a huge success, do you have any plans to make a sequel to it?
You know, we’ve all talked about it and I think we’re waiting a little longer to focus [on the international roll-out], and also, if we did it, we need to make sure that it’s a story that we all agree on or otherwise we wouldn’t want to do it but it’s definitely been up for discussion.
