CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 10/05/07

Black Magic and Independent Movie Making:
Witches' Night's Paul Traynor

By jason davis

Four years after entering Creative Screenwriting's annual Expo screenwriting contest, filmmaker Paul Traynor is hitting the festivals with the film version of his supernatural thriller Witches' Night. Here, he tells CS Weekly how he turned his contest entry into a feature-length film.

Witches Night follows Jim (Gil McKinney), who, after being jilted by his bride, heads off on a camping trip with his brother (Jeff Christian) and three friends to help put the pain behind him. Unfortunately, a coven of witches has other plans for the four young men. Inspired by horror films of the '70s and encouraged by Creative Screenwriting contributing editor-turned-producer Michael Lent, writer-director Paul Traynor pursued his vision into the wilderness of Wisconsin and emerged with his first feature-length film.

You submitted Witches' Night to Screenwriting Expo's script competition in 2003 and finished the film earlier this year. How did it all start?
It was still called Devil's Horn at that point. I'd always had an eye to make it myself because, living in the Midwest, I know that it's virtually impossible to get going in Hollywood—the inability to take meetings and get onto people's radars. So, it was something I thought about producing from the beginning, not really knowing it would come together. Doing well in a screenwriting competition and having a chance to sell it would be great, so I submitted it to Creative Screenwriting.

I got through a couple of rounds, but I wasn't a finalist. When I got my Dear John form letter saying that I didn't make it on to the next round, Jim Mercurio wrote in the margin, by hand, "Your script was fun." I thought that was great —a nice affirmation, even though it was a rejection. So, I e-mailed Jim saying, "Thanks for your note in the margin, that makes a big difference, and I'll keep plugging away." He e-mailed me back in probably less than a half-hour and said, "You're very welcome, but the true champion of your script was Michael Lent." So, I sent him an e-mail saying, "Thanks, I'm a fan of your work, etc." Again, I got an e-mail back from him very quickly. Within an hour of being rejected from the screenwriting competition, I was in personal touch with two of the writers there. That was very encouraging. Michael and I traded e-mail and he had a lot of great suggestions and was a big help. We struck up a relationship that way over an ensuing year or two.

Trying to make the project myself, it crashed and burned a couple of times before I found the right mix of people and budget and game plan. When we finally got everything going in January or February of 2006, I got an e-mail from Michael—who I hadn't heard from in a few months—[asking if I would be] interested in packaging Witches' Night with another script that he was submitting to another producer. I wrote him back saying that we were going to be shooting. Then began a quick series of e-mails where he offered to read the new draft of the script and made fantastic story notes. Within a month or two, he signed on to produce it, even though he and his wife were having their second baby weeks before we shot. He showed up in Wisconsin, and we met for the first time on the first day of pre-production.

What was the initial idea behind Witches' Night?
I've always been afraid of witches and felt there was an opportunity to have a scary movie with the classic witch-in-the-woods image. The very first idea I had was of a guy driving cross country who has his car break down in this remote gas station in the middle of nowhere and meets these freaky women in a gas station and he, just because it's his nature, starts idly flirting. When his car's broken down, they take him back to their place and end up torturing him and this hideous coven of witches is unleashed. That was the very first idea. I started it and couldn't make it happen. It worked as a short story, but I couldn't see it as a feature.

Ultimately, I went on a canoe trip eight years ago with some buddies of mine, and we were on the Wisconsin River—which is where we ended up shooting. It was so pristine, but so remote and so far removed from everything. I realized that if those women showed up here, there would be real trouble.

The characters are not the stock victims one finds in most modern horror pictures. How did you set about crafting unique characters for the story?
It was a huge concern. I've always been a fan of the '70s classic horror films where they really did take time to develop characters. I'm not a big slasher fan, per se, and I don't like kind of torture porn stuff out these days. They don't speak to me because there's no real way to empathize with the people that are involved. I knew that in order to set up the stuff with the witches, we couldn't really have a death until later in the movie. We had to empathize with these guys. I always felt that if someone was killed in a movie and [the audience] said, "Finally, a dead body!" we'd failed miserably. But if they said, "Oh my God! They killed Bill!" or "They killed Ted!" we would have succeeded. So, I hope we achieved that.

The remote setting of the story reminds me very much of The Hills Have Eyes or Evil Dead -- what films influence your approach to the story?
Both the ones you site are big for me. Because I was dealing with witchcraft, I looked at Rosemary's Baby again. My favorite horror movie is Halloween. When you watch that movie now, there's a murder right away to get the story on the tracks, but then it's suspense for most of the movie. It's got a really low body count, and people don't really start dying until pretty late into it. But I think the Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) character is relatable and those teenagers seem real. Their world seems real. It made it that much creepier when that guy started hacking them up. Obviously, that became the prototype for a lot of really bad movies that followed, but I think the original Halloween is pretty much the gold standard for modern horror.

Witches' Night has a similar structure, with an air of menace pervading until the witches finally appear half way in.
That's something we really wanted to do. I had this notion of a pot on the stove that you're slowly simmering until you bring it up to a boil. That sense of dread is working on you subconsciously even though the early part of the movie has a lot of humor and funny scenes. By the time you get into act two and the stakes really do escalate, hopefully people are even more freaked out than they are aware of.

There's a battle-of-the-sexes theme running throughout the screenplay. Did you set out to reverse the typical arrangement of men as predators and women as victims by having your witches hunt the guys?
Absolutely. The classic horror trope is the hot young girl who takes off her shirt and goes screaming into the wilderness, followed by the 40-year-old axe murderer with the beer belly. We thought, let's flip it around a little bit and have some fun with that. There's the campfire scene with the four women and the four guys, which I think is really fun. This is a storybook fantasy -- it's not based in reality. These guys are not in a good place in terms of their relationship to women when we start, but because of that, that really sets up this cartoony nature of women that are stalking them. Within that, there's some fun banter and interesting things about how do men and women interact? Only one person said to me, when they read the script, this is kind of misogynistic with these guys angry at women and the women attacking them. Honestly, I was blindsided by it a little, because I've always felt the opposite was true. These are guys starting out from a bad place, with their slightly twisted filter on the world. Our main character has been jilted at the altar that day. One of his buddies is a total male pig that runs a strip club. That was a given that you would see these are not perfect guys. To me, I thought it was empowering that we'd have these strong women who show up and take them down a peg. Obviously, the fact that someone had that opinion shows that there's room for discussion in it, and that's fine with me.

What was the hardest part of writing the script?
Tailoring it to the reality of our situation. We had earlier drafts that were longer and more detailed. There were more set-piece types of action sequences. The toughest thing was writing a script that we knew we could shoot in 18 days, outside, at night, with very little money. That was the trickiest thing—not lowering expectations, but tailoring expectations to fit the logistics of our situation.

Did you find that wearing the director's hat changed your perception of the material?
I didn't have any experience as a director. I had no experience in production at all. Three years ago, I shot a short trailer for [Witches' Night] just to do that and see what it would be like. We shot it for two days in Illinois. The weather went against us. We hadn't done enough pre-planning. I didn't have the experience to know what I was doing. It was simultaneously the greatest experience I've ever had and the most daunting. The cool thing about it was that it allowed me to walk onto my own set as a director and live and die by my own decisions. I don't care if you have four years of film school and all the theory in the world, you can't really replicate the experience of walking onto your own set with the clock ticking. I found that, even in these insane working conditions, when we were shooting eight pages a day sometimes and trying to beat the sunrise, there was a lot of time for creative discussion, and having a group of actors who can dial in and know where they are in the story at all times not only made it infinitely easier, but made it creatively rewarding for me.

What advice would you offer to would-be filmmakers who are now in the position you were in five years ago?
First of all, be patient with yourself and don't ever quit. You have to put in the time. There's no other way around it. You can do it for a very small amount of money, but you have to put in the time. Know that if it takes you as long as it took me—four years from beginning to finished film—there are going to be several times when the urge to quit is overwhelming. It's going to seem like the only wise solution. If you're going to bite the bullet, do it.

Stubbornness is a good thing. It's such a delicate thing to share your work and get feedback and hope that someone likes it enough to make it into a movie. When you're doing it all on your own, you have to listen to everybody and get their feedback, but at the end of the day, you have to have the ability to say this is good and I don't care. A lot of people hated the script. A lot of people loved it. You can learn something from everyone you talk to—even the ones who are rude and nasty or who are totally pessimistic. But you have to be able to sift through to find the value in what everybody is saying. You have to be hugely stubborn, completely dogged, or it won't happen.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Witches' Night courtesy Hay Moon

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