With The Bay, he enters new territory focusing on Chesapeake Bay where an unusual ecological outbreak takes place. The story is told from various perspectives, utilizing Skype, camera phones and more. The Cabin in the Woods‘ Kristen Connolly co-stars.
Head inside for our interview in which Levinson discusses the films origins and more.
Watch Ed Douglas’ video interview with Levinson right here.
Shock Till You Drop: I’ve heard this initially didn’t start as a genre film…
Barry Levinson: I come from Baltimore and I was asked about doing a documentary about Chesapeake Bay because, as you know, it’s 40% dead. I was starting to do research and there have been documentaries done, there’s been a really good one. I don’t know if I can improve it and I was thinking about all of this scary stuff about it, the science, and I thought, Gee, what if you put it into a storytelling device. Put 85% of this factual information [about Chesapeake Bay] in there and that’s how it evolved. You get this sci-fi movie and this factual information but make it scarier, spooky and creepy.
Shock: Was there anything about the process – the faux documentary/found footage device – that surprised you while doing it?
Shock: Out of the stories you tell, which one was your favorite to document or dip back into?
Levinson: I had fun with all of it. I loved it. I had fun doing the CDC because we hooked them all up so everyone is talking to one another simultaneously. We actually did it that way, we had them all interconnected and that’s why you hear them talking over one another. I tried to make this thing as real as I could make it and make it feel like it wasn’t staged.
Levinson: Absolutely. We were using this locals in Georgetown, South Carolina – they’re the most amazing group of people I’ve ever come across. I used these day players for major sequences and they were stunning. There’s that woman in [that scene] with the blisters and dunking in the water, going down the street and carrying on [about something being wrong with her] and she was just amazing. She lived in that town. There’s the iPhone girl, 15-years-old, and we sent her into a room with her iPhone to talk by herself. It was very intriguing and it was a style that I liked working in. I was comfortable, I was challenged by it, it was exasperating a bit because I couldn’t see the video playback right away, I had to wait and look at it afterward.
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