Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 3, 2011, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
—
If you’re thinking of going on a pleasant hike through the woods this weekend, be sure you don’t follow the Yellowbrickroad. The debut feature by writer/directors Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton centers on the mystery of Friar, New Hampshire, a small town whose entire population walked into the surrounding forest one morning in 1940, never to be seen alive again. The incident has passed into legend, and in the present day, an expedition heads up the trail to unravel the mystery—and its members begin to descend into madness, spurred by old songs and music mysteriously emanating from an unknown source.
How did this project get off the ground?
ANDY MITTON: We’d been working in theater for a long time, and we’d always intended to break into film. We also work in postproduction—Jesse’s a graphics artist, and I’m a sound guy. We were looking to make that transition, and we knew we wanted to do it in horror; we’ve loved horror movies for a long time. And we saw an opening; we’ll go see Saw or Hostel, but we also thought there’s an audience who maybe can’t quite stomach some of what’s out there now, and might be pining, like part of us is, for the old days of story- and character-driven mindf**k horror movies. So we took our sensibilities and thought, “What would scare us?” We felt a woodsy horror movie was a great idea, ‘cause we knew we could get out there and do it ourselves on a small budget.
We’re big fans of the uncanny—the thing that should not be there but is—so the music-as-ghost scenario became very interesting to us. And from there, we built an ensemble piece that is largely about the pitfalls of ambition. It was never something we were going to try and sell to a studio, and miraculously, we were able to do it without ever getting notes from anyone. This is a true—
JESSE HOLLAND: Purely independent movie.
MITTON: Yeah. So that was the goal. With many hurdles and near-deaths and everything else you can imagine along the way [laughs].
Where was the movie filmed?
HOLLAND: Crazily, it was actually filmed where it’s set, in northern New Hampshire right on the border, about 15 miles from Canada. We both went to school at Middlebury College in Vermont, so we were familiar with the general area, and we used Middlebury as a sort of staging ground; that’s where we flew the actors into, and where we rehearsed. The idea was that it’s such a remote area that we would be able to not have a locations manager and be able to film wherever we wanted to. And that plan almost worked [Mitton laughs]; we did still end up getting kicked off a location once…
The remoteness added to the commitment level that everyone ended up bringing to it, because it was like summer camp. Everyone was really up there, all we had was each other and it ended up working out great. But there really was no cell reception, there was very little Internet. That was great for us as directors—because we never had, like, a shot blown by a cell phone going off—but it was probably a little harder on the line producer and the first AD, people whose job it was to organize and get people to set. We wanted to make a movie like those from the ’70s, and we actually got to.
MITTON: It was a strange combination of 1975 and 2010, because we didn’t have cell phones or Internet, but we had the RED camera [laughs].
How about casting? Were they all people you knew from school, or did you have auditions?
HOLLAND: For the most part, we knew them from school and working in theater. Anessa Ramsey we saw in The Signal, and we sought her out because of that, and Laura Heisler we auditioned separately. But everyone else was someone who we’d worked with in one capacity or another.
MITTON: We got lucky that Cassidy Freeman was a good friend of ours—everyone’s looking for some name, something to sell, and Cassidy had already done Smallville for a couple of years. I’m in a band with Cassidy and [her brother] Clark, and we went to school with her. So that was fortunate, that they could come in—and not only act, but Clark and Cassidy both were executive producers and really guided this process.
Why did you call the movie, and the trail, Yellowbrickroad—giving it the Wizard of Oz connection?
HOLLAND: Well, we saw a parallel between the America of 1939 and the America of today that we thought was interesting. 1939 [when Oz was released] was a golden year in American cinema, when all Americans were desperately escaping into the movies—coming out of the Depression, with war impending. And both the economic side of that situation in America and the idea of escape, kind of going off the grid, was at the center of this. We were interested in that parallel, and it also seemed like Yellow Brick Road squished into one word was kind of cool [laughs].
Was the backstory of the town and the population disappearing based on any local legends?
HOLLAND: That was something we came up with on our own, but then in doing research, we found there were actual occurrences of this happening. So it was a happy thing.
MITTON: There was an Eskimo village—not in New Hampshire—that we read about, where everyone disappeared. No one ever resolved why or where any of those people went.
HOLLAND: We also looked at Jonestown and other examples of communal insanity, where it’s not just one or two people going crazy, but somehow an entire collective, all together. There are many horrible examples of that actually happening, and that’s what really got us going.
The idea of, as you said, “music as ghosts” is very intriguing. How did you arrive at that? Were the songs all public-domain, or did you come up with some of your own?
MITTON: In my dreams they were public domain—before we shot the movie, being a little bit green. We gave our cast these CDs and had a whole plan mapped out for where the songs would go.
HOLLAND: When we sent the script out originally, we would send the CD with all the songs to listen to while reading it.
MITTON: Then we found out how hard it is, that it takes 100 years for something to be in the public domain, and that most of these songs were written by two, three different people who were impossible for our music supervisor to track down. Universal has definitely been good to us—we have authentic Bing Crosby in the movie, we have authentic Andrews Sisters—but beyond that, we had to start writing original music. Thankfully, I have a good friend, Brad Swanson, who’s a composer, and I’m one myself. We wrote four, five songs between us that we recorded, specifically to sound like authentic 1930s music. We just tried to fill in the blanks and keep a very consistent tone. The real magic came in post when our sound designer, Dan Brennan, put the music through this crazy processing. It really made it sound like it’s coming from the environment.
Did you play any of the songs on set while you were shooting, or did the cast have to imagine it when doing their scenes?
MITTON: Most of the time, to get clean dialogue, we couldn’t play it. But there are a few scenes—like when Teddy’s dancing, and you see his shadow cast on the trees behind him—the song we played, we didn’t end up getting, so now there’s a different song in there that he’s dancing to [laughs].
Did you shoot in chronological order?
HOLLAND: As much as we could, though there were exceptions. But that was something we knew we wanted early on, to get the feeling of people degenerating, and the best way to do that would be to film chronologically. But the first scene, we shot last…there were things we had to do out of order.
MITTON: The actors became very good at that. I think they came in thinking we would be pretty strict about it, and then when the reality set in, they were great about being able to jump forward and play a later stage of their breakdown earlier than they expected.
Were you inspired at all by The Blair Witch Project and other recent films of this type?
HOLLAND: Sure, yeah—we love all those movies. We were actually going to do this as a found-footage movie before we wrote it, when we just had the outline. Then we realized, this was going to be our first movie as directors, and as auteurs, we should have an omniscient eye, because then we could move the camera the way we wanted. We were feeling very confined. But we certainly drew from what works about those movies.
MITTON: And then we subverted it in places. We knew people—a lot of people—who couldn’t watch Blair Witch Project just because of motion-sickness issues. Everyone expects the handheld in independent movies, so we found an amazing cinematographer, Michael Hardwick, who’s also a Steadicam operator, and he really understood what we were going for, to kind of subvert that expectation, like, “Hey, let’s float through these woods, the way you float through the hallways in The Shining. Let’s try for something where we can show our style, and introduce ourselves and this environment and this story properly to the audience.”
