Cinematographer Nancy Schreiber, ASC and long-time collaborator and director, Joe Berlinger team up for an astonishing sequel BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2.
By now, chances are good that you’ve seen the work of Nancy Schreiber, ASC, perhaps without even knowing it. Film buffs have most likely seen her photography in the documentaries Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography or A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. Rock Ôn’ roll fans have probably caught the 1990 Amnesty International concert film, for which she followed Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel and other performers to countries such as Zimbabwe, Greece, India and Brazil. Art-house aficionados might recall her impressionistic images in Temistocles Lopez’s Chain of Desire (1993) or her startlingly forlorn tableaux in Neil LaBute’s Your Friends & Neighbors (1998; see AC Sept. Ô98). And tourists tripping down Hollywood Boulevard can see her work in Forever Hollywood, an hour-long tribute to Tinseltown that plays regularly at the Egyptian Theatre.
This month, you can also go to a local multiplex in any civilized area of the world and find Schreiber’s name on at least one screen, thanks to her recent assignment in a small but infamous patch of Maryland woods.
Schreiber traveled to the Baltimore area last winter to shoot Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, the highly anticipated sequel to last year’s runaway hit The Blair Witch Project (see AC April Ô99). The production reunited Schreiber with director Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills), whom she first met in the mid-1980s at Maysles Films in New York; Schreiber was working on her own documentary, Possum Living, and Berlinger was an executive producer at the company. Schreiber later photographed several commercials for Berlinger and his partner, Bruce Sinofsky, and they also asked her to do additional photography on their Emmy-nominated documentary Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (1999).
Berlinger, who was making his first fictional feature with Book of Shadows, felt that Schreiber’s diverse skills behind the camera would be invaluable on the $10 million production, not only because the project’s visual concept was totally up in the air when he began working on it, but also because of its tight shooting schedule. "Nancy was my first thought," Berlinger attests. "She would have been my first choice no matter what, but in this case it was particularly because her skills run the gamut from 16mm documentaries to high-end 35mm productions, and I love her lighting. When I began talking to her, I didn’t have a visual concept or a finalized script; we could have gone in any direction, and she has a broad base of skills. I was expected to start shooting about two months after I was hired a ridiculous timetable, particularly for a sequel to the most successful independent movie of all time."
Details about the film’s plot were top secret at press time, but Schreiber and Berlinger confirm that Book of Shadows departs from almost all of the conventions established in its shot-on-the-fly predecessor visually as well as narratively. "We wanted to do everything against expectation, so I tried to figure out what people were expecting," Berlinger offers. "I’m known as a cinéma vérité documentarian, so people might be expecting that kind of film. But what they’re getting is a richly photographed, dark and mysterious, beautifully lit movie. Blair Witch was quite brilliant with the ’found footage’ conceit, and we saw no need to duplicate that." He adds that the only convention the sequel borrows from the first film is its use of relatively undiscovered actors who use their own names in the film; this, too, played to one of Schreiber’s strengths. "Nancy is a very calm, very nurturing presence on the set," Berlinger says. "We had such a tight schedule, and it was my first movie; I knew she would be good for my own sanity, as well as the sanity of [inexperienced] actors."
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