This film was a secret for a really long time. How did you get involved in the first place?

Simon Barrett: Lionsgate had bought our film You’re Next, and during the window between them acquiring it and releasing it, they set up this top-secret meeting for Adam and me at their studios in Santa Monica. We weren’t quite sure what it was about; we just hoped it wasn’t that they were postponing our release any further, honestly. And they told us, "We own the rights to The Blair Witch Project and we’re talking about doing another one. It’s top secret, even here at the company." No one outside that circle knew about it, and they wanted to know if that was anything we’d be interested in, I think partially because they were also fans of the two VHS films that Adam and I worked on.

That was February 2013, and that was really the beginning. We’ve been offered a lot of remakes and sequels over the course of our careers, especially after You’re Next was a success, and none of them were creatively exciting to us. Blair Witch was the first one where it was like, "Absolutely, that’s something we really want."

What was it about the property that changed your minds?

"There were all these lesser found footage movies that everybody just seemed to hate."

Adam Wingard: Found footage has really gone through so many different facets over the years, it felt like it was time to return to what originally started it all. We had just met Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale, the original creators of The Blair Witch Project, only a few weeks before at Sundance, and I was picking Eduardo’s brain endlessly about Blair Witch Project on a long van ride to Salt Lake City. I remember asking him, "When do you think you’re going to make a Blair Witch sequel? Because it feels like it’s the right time." There were all these lesser found footage horror films coming out, that were doing well at the box office, but that everybody just seemed to kind of hate, honestly.

SB: I think something that creatively excited me about it was that there’s no obvious kind of version of what a Blair Witch sequel is. It was kind of a blank slate, because the first film really has a very complex mythology, but it hints at it very obliquely. So it was a chance to do something really fun and creative and different, because no one really has any preconceived expectations of what a Blair Witch film in 2016 would be.

AW: One of the questions we get asked a lot is, "Were you afraid of competing with the legacy of the first film?" My answer to that is always that the legacy of the first film had basically been completely tarnished by how bad the sequel was and how off the rails it went. I think it took a lot of people a while to take the first movie seriously again. Only in the last five years or so has it resurfaced and come out on top as a horror classic.

You can see how things went south on it becoming a franchise right away. If you go back in time and look at all of the marketing materials that came out after the first film, they just tried to bleed that thing immediately. Bad video games, bad adaptations, book adaptations. All this stuff that they just immediately did without trying to actually set up the franchise. Being a fan of the original film, it was very transparent that there was all this cash-in stuff, and that sucked the life out of it right away.

SB: People probably forget that Book of Shadows came out 15 months after the original. "Here’s your fucking sequel. Give us more money." That’s not how you make a film properly. This one took us three and a half years pretty much, from script to its first screening.

I was telling a colleague after the screening this felt a little like The Force Awakens for Blair Witch, in that both films are all about telling the audience, "Hey, remember? This is why you loved this thing!" As part of that, were you laying down hooks for possible future installments? I’m sure Lionsgate would love for this to become a healthy franchise.

SB: Well, I think I can say in all confidence that our film is going to outgross The Force Awakens. [laughs] Like Adam said, for us as fans and as filmmakers, the challenge of this project was getting the franchise back on track, and that means building something new and creating something that can go in different directions. I don’t want to ever jinx anything and assume that you’re going to have a sequel to complete a story, because that’s hubris and that will almost always backfire. So we told a complete film that reminds people what the Blair Witch legend is, and reminds them what they loved about the original film. But we also set things up so that if this is a success — if this is a story that either we’re able to continue, or someone else is able to continue, hopefully with our guidance — there’s some really new and exciting and possibly more experimental places they can take it.

AW: The Force Awakens is a really great example. I think everybody’s in that same nostalgic headspace now. Blair Witch and Phantom Menace both came out in ‘99, and now we’re in this new cycle where everybody’s saying, "Okay, we need to get back to the things that we loved about these things."

Hopefully Eduardo and those guys will be able to do the [Blair Witch] prequel that they’ve talked about. I really want to see that, but to get that [you have to] convince audiences that they want to see it. You have to get them back into the horror headspace, and you have to keep it in that found footage world, and then you can kind of re-explore the mythology. It’s about setting up the franchise and setting up that world so you can go outside of it. You couldn’t have done A New Hope and then done Rogue One and all those kind of things right away. You have to get the series out there, and then you can explore the universe once it’s set up. But it really depends on people watching it.