We recently had the chance to chat with Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam) about making the leap to horror with his found footage movie The Bay, now available on Blu-ray and DVD. Here's what he had to say about the movie:
IGN Movies: One of the things that struck me about this film was that it asks a lot of you to basically trust in your cast in a way that I don’t think any other director probably quite has to this point. Can you talk about that challenge? Did you view it as an opportunity?
Barry Levinson: Well, as we’ve evolved in terms of life, everybody holds cameras nowadays. The mystery of the camera is pretty much over, and everybody videos. So you figure, they’re gonna shoot as they shoot. They have a certain understanding of it, and part of the imperfection of it is actually good for the film. Sometimes, in some takes, there’d be a mistake and instead of hitting the “on” button, they did something where we literally didn’t have something, on occasion. But for the most part, it served the purpose of the movie.
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IGN: Were there any days or moments where you were like, “Oh, man. I’d really kill for a good old 35mm right now”?
Levinson: [Laughs] No, because once you make the commitment to this is what you’re going to do, you’re looking for the imperfection. You’re looking for that which is in a sense the non-professional look -- even though a lot of times we were actually filming it ourselves, we had to create the same reality that they might bring to it. But that becomes part of the fabric of the film.
IGN: That’s an interesting challenge for not only you but your cinematographer and the rest of the crew as well. You essentially have to unlearn everything. Your entire career is made to be professional and polished, and now it’s like, “Yeah, just pretend like you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Levinson: Basically, you know. Sometimes we’d do a take and say, “That’s just too good.”
IGN: [Laughs] You don’t hear that often in Hollywood, do you?
Levinson: I know, I know.
IGN: Let’s talk about the casting because what I found interesting was a couple of the people who were pretty much unknown I’m sure at the time you were making the movie have now popped up in a couple of big movies. Christopher Denham was in Argo, and the young lady in your film, Kristen Connolly, was in Cabin in the Woods and --
Levinson: Yeah, House of Cards.
IGN: Yeah, so that’s got to be kind of interesting for you. You’ve engineered a whole film so that it’s fresh faces, but now a lot of people who are going to discover it now will be like, “Oh, that’s so-and-so from that thing!”
Levinson: That’s right. Well, that’s inevitable. I hope the people are good enough that they get some recognition in their career. At the time, you try to go with nameless a cast as you can put together.
IGN: I was struck by the fact that everybody who was cast in the movie looked like they really were somebody off the street. There wasn’t anybody that was that kind of conspicuous looking, like, “Hey, I could be an actor” -- the deputy that’s too good looking, you know what I mean?
Levinson: Yeah, well that’s good. I’m glad. That’s what we tried to do.
Read Our Review of The Bay
IGN: Well, let’s talk about the reality or the sort of ecological truth behind the horror in the film. Can you tell me a little bit about that, because I do understand that you were developing this initially as a documentary, right?
Levinson: Yes, I was approached about doing a documentary about the Chesapeake Bay and the level of pollution. As I began to collect the facts, I realized there had been a couple documentaries about the Bay that were very well done. I was beginning to think, “Well, what is it that I can bring to this that’s going to be better than that documentary?” Then I thought, “Wait a minute, I’m a storyteller. Why don’t I take those factual things and we’ll weave it into our own story, and not a documentary?”
IGN: What was the most surprising thing that you discovered about your own skill set while making this film?
Levinson: I think what happens is, it’s part of the process. There are two ways to approach a career. One is to establish yourself in a certain place, and you stay in that place. The other direction is that you may have established yourself that way, but you don’t want to be bound by that. You want to continue to take risks and explore other ways of doing things. So that’s what intrigued me. In some ways, if I would look and say, “So where does The Bay come from?” -- it’s kind of like when I did Homicide for television, and I established that handheld ragged camera with jump cuts, this is sort of like the next generation of going in that direction in terms of storytelling.
IGN: Horror is probably a genre that many folks maybe didn’t expect to see you tackle. Was it always something in the back of your mind like, “Hey, I’d like to try my hand at a horror picture someday”?
Levinson: No, it wasn’t, because I don’t think of genre in terms of what I want to do. I know that that’s a popular way to go, but I never think in terms of genre. It just so happened that it evolved: I’m approached about a documentary about the Chesapeake Bay, I decide not to do the documentary, we bring in a writer, we begin to lay it out, the next thing it becomes this kind of horror/suspense piece.
Source : ign[dot]com
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