Film critic Roger Ebert has called The Blair Witch Project summer's third most anticipated movie (preceded only by Star Wars and Eyes Wide Shut), and if their grueling press schedule is any indication, he appears to be correct. As reporters ask the creators of the year's most frightening film questions like "Is there any kind of scary movie you can make after Scream?" one can begin to see where Sanchez and Myrick would feel, well, Blaired out. But their enthusiasm becomes evident when they discuss the Blair Witch cast, in particular, film-within-a-film director Heather Donahue.

"The original plan was for three guys. But once we started working on the script, we thought we should put a woman in the lead character, just to make it a little more interesting," recalls Sanchez. "And Heather has that strength that we didn't see in any other actor." Donahue's work has in fact become legendary even prior to release due to the film's heart-wrenching trailer, which features her tear-ridden apology to the mothers of fellow filmmakers Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams. "During the callbacks there was something in her eyes that told us that this woman was going to take us somewhere that had never be seen on film or hasn't been seen in a long time."

"Heather just had this really driven look in her eyes," agrees Myrick. "We had to have a good reason why this camera was continuing to run. You have these dreadful situations that are taking place, and you almost had to have someone who is a cross between Geraldo Rivera and Joan of Arc. You have to have someone who's strong, but also narcissistic enough to want to keep the camera in her friend's face when they're saying 'No!'" They also had to have actors who could be completely trusted to handle the script's most difficult aspect: its complete absence of dialogue. While the faux-documentary set-up has been done before (and not nearly as well) in horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust, Blair's entirely improvised dialogue is radically different from anything that has come before. It also led way to three of the best performances of the year.

"They were really good actors to go to that emotional level, that place where actors go to for performance," says Myrick. "All we did was reduce the stimuli of standard, typical production. The distraction of a set and lights and co-anchors running around and 'Action!' and 'Cut!' -- get rid of all that stuff and allow them to reign free creatively as actors." Sanchez found the results of this technique to be beyond his expectations: "It was amazing that we left these actors alone 95% of the time, and they hit every single one of the plot points," he says. "Those are three amazing performances there."

However, some have questioned how much of a performance was really given, and how exactly the actors were treated in what had to be a grueling environment. Yet Myrick and Sanchez settled for nothing less than absolute realism. "At the end, Heather looks like she's lost a little bit of weight," notes Sanchez. "That's because she was living that -- they were living that. They were hiking several miles a day every day with really heavy backpacks on. And we were cutting off their food." Myrick recounts a more specific instance: "The scene with Josh, the first night he's in the tent...in his voice, you can tell that he just woke up, and that's because he just woke up. They would wake up and turn the camera on."

Sanchez continues: "They knew we were going to do this to them. We told them: 'We're going to put you through the wringer. We're not going to hurt you permanently, but we're going to try to affect you, we're going to try to scare you, and we're going to try to break you down.'" The final night was in many ways a relief for the exhausted and famished cast. "We took them to Denny's," Myrick recalls. "And they're like, 'My God, we're eating a real meal!' It was pretty weird. They were in one sense more than happy to get it over with, but in another sense we had really bonded because it was such a collaborative thing to go through. It's like surviving a boat ride on a raft."

"It's like surviving a war," says Sanchez.