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| Though she may never eat a Powerbar again, Heather Donahue claims she would "do it again in a heartbeat", subject herself to the guerilla filmmaking methods of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, co-directors of the surprise blockbuster "The Blair Witch Project" (1999). Chosen for her improvisational ability following five call-back auditions, she found herself, along with fellow actors Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, smack in the middle of a conceptual piece, filming the raw footage that would become "Blair Witch" after a two-day crash course on how to load and operate both 16mm and Hi-8 video cameras. Equipping their charges with Global Positioning System (GPS) headsets, the directors deposited them in the Maryland woods and led them to predetermined sites where the exercise in first-person terror would play out. The shoot covered eight days, and the actors really roughed it, camping out and sometimes having their sleep interrupted by the production team creating drama for them to capture. Donahue and the others played students (their characters used their own names) filming a documentary about the 200-year-old legend of the Blair Witch for a college project. The movie seen in theaters purported to be an edited version of the film and tape recordings the trio made before disappearing in 1994, and the brilliant back story provided by the Blair Witch Web site coupled with the mockumentary "Curse of the Blair Witch" (1999) that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel preceding its wide release blurred the line so well that many believed the movie to be the real footage of lost student filmmakers. Receiving money comparable to a couple of weeks work as an office temp, Donahue created Heather's "confession", a fearless piece of acting and the movie's emotional centerpiece, which helped her land subsequent movie roles as a socially inept engineering student in Robert Iscove's "Boys and Girls" (2000) and as one of a group of upper-class twentysomethings spending a weekend together in a house on New York's Fisher Island in Derek Simonds comedy-drama "Seven and a Match" (lensed 1999), filmed in digital video. |
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