Interview: Co-Writer/Director Justin Barber Discusses PHOENIX FORGOTTEN

Arriving in theaters this weekend is Phoenix Forgotten, a docu-style sci-fi film co-written and directed by Justin Barber. The film is centered around the Phoenix Lights phenomenon, a weird occurrence that happened back in 1997 which has yet to be explained over 20 years later. Barber’s project interjects a little fiction into the mix, as Phoenix Forgotten is focused on three missing teens who went out searching for the truth behind the mysterious lights that appeared, only to never be heard from again.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Barber, and after we finished geeking out over ’90s sci-fi, we chatted about his experiences working on the project with both his co-writer T.S. Nowlin and his cast (Luke Spencer Roberts, Chelsea Lopez, and Justin Matthews), how his career thus far has prepared him for his very first time helming a narrative feature, and more. Look for Phoenix Forgotten in US theaters this weekend.

So, I noticed from your IMDb résumé that you've worked in so many different facets of filmmaking over the years, but this is your first time at the helm of a feature. I'd love to hear about what made this the perfect fit for you—was it because you grew up with such a love for this type of stuff?

Justin Barber: Pretty much, yeah. I mean, it was a chance to make my own X-Files. I guess if you grew up in the ’90s and went into this field, that's kind of a dream come true. For whatever reason, these are just the types of stories that I've always wanted to escape to. Going back to that time period and X-Files, that was my escape from the mundane everyday life that you had as a kid.

How was it working on the script with T.S. [Nowlin]?

Justin Barber: In the earlier drafts, there was a really great deliberate progression, a deliberate pace that we set. The movie is meant to feel like a noose tightening around the necks of these characters. Certainly, the second half is meant to feel that way, and the way it just starts slow and gets a little more tense, and then takes off like a rollercoaster at the very end. The way the fear and the tension ratchets up over the course of the movie was really nailed in an early draft. What I brought to it was to mess it up and interject some of my own experiences in the first half of the story.

Originally, the movie was just continued as this UFO story about these three kids who'd been missing, and then we realized that we wanted it to be this documentary instead. That sort of devolved into this found footage type of project, as we realized what better way to bring some authenticity to it than to pit it against the real world events? With that in mind, just tried to bring as much authenticity to it as possible. I brought to it my experiences from documentary filmmaking, but also my own experiences as a high school kid growing up and being obsessed with this type of material. It's a little autobiographical to a certain degree in terms of Josh, the main character in this movie. Like you or I, he's just one of those kids who's inclined to this kind of material, and then it's essentially a dream come true when he films a UFO.

In terms of the characters around him, these are all sketches of people I knew. I was involved in high school journalism, and there was this girl at my school named Naomi, who read the morning announcements every day, and the character of Ashley is inspired by her to a certain degree. So, it was always a process. T.S. would do a draft. I would take a draft and break it apart, and then he would put it back together. Then, once we got on set, we opened it up to the actors, and the actors brought a lot of their own experiences to the movie as well. There are a lot of scenes in the movie that are just written by them on the fly that made it into the final cut.

You mentioned something that I was going to bring up, in regards to your background in documentary filmmaking. How well did your background serve you on this project? Were there challenges that came up along the way that maybe you hadn't anticipated as you guys were structuring how this was going to turn out visually?

Justin Barber: In terms of the documentary style, the big challenge was sometimes working with the actors. I really wanted them to appear and perform and behave the way that real people do in documentaries, which tends to be pretty underplayed. After their training to perform their intent and for those that had not been in this style of movie, it took a little while to get them to wrap their heads around it a little bit. Eventually, they were great, but just achieving those realistic performances was challenging.

Then, the other challenging part was the fact that documentaries are also somewhat written in the editing process to a certain degree, so the writing process continued all the way through the edit. We entered the shoot with literally only half a script. We had a 50-page, we called it a “scriptment,” so we were constantly trying to figure it out as we went. It was like writing and editing.

But, I'm a huge fan of Errol Morris and documentaries in general. And, although I had seen this device before in genre movies, I'm not so keen on filmmakers who use some of those techniques that these contemporary documentaries do, like the shaky camera effect from start to finish. We wanted this to feel more like a contemporary documentary and tried to avoid those things.

I think you guys really nailed that. Plus, we're also getting further and further away from these older technologies, so I was wondering if there were technical challenges that you guys had faced, because this couldn’t be shot in 1280p and have that slick HD-type of feeling to it. It all has to feel like it came out of 1997.

Justin Barber: Yeah, for sure. Really, most sections of the movie should feel like The Blair Witch Project, because this was a story that’s set around the time that Blair Witch was made. It would've been impossible to film on those very cameras. That'd be the ideal situation for us to use the same cameras, but we had to find tape stock. So we shot on a modern-day camcorder, in HD resolution, and in the end, we ran all the footage through an actual tape deck and re-ingested it, so we actually laid it to tape to give it that look.

Ultimately, this was a nightmare. I just embraced it because that's how the movie should look. So, that was the technical challenge. It's actually hard in this day and age to get it to look like it looked back then, but really that's what we came up with. I remember back to what I always heard about Citizen Kane. In Citizen Kane, there's that newsreel section in the beginning of the movie, and in film school, they tell you how they actually ran the footage through cheese cloth to essentially make it look that bad. So, I guess we kind of did our own version of that.

On the other hand, the cool thing about making a film fest movie in this day and age is that the cameras are all completely disposable. We got to destroy a number of cameras, and that would have been impossible before GoPro. So we were lucky in that regard.

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In case you missed it, check out Heather's interview with Phoenix Forgotten co-writer/producer T.S. Nowlin.