![]() ![]() It also felt like if someone's going to trust me to direct a movie, they're not going to give me a huge budget, so let's do something more manageable. Like, it had multiple Dianas and a lot of people, and it just felt like it was bigger than what I wanted to do. At first, we talked to a writer here in LA, but his idea was very big. What happened was, we came into contact with producer Lawrence Grey, who really wanted to develop this, and I just felt very comfortable with him and his ideas. What were some early ideas that were scrapped? What made you and Eric Heisserer want to tell this story? You mentioned earlier that since the short doesn't have a story, you could take the story anywhere. Let's keep doing it." We saw Bloody Cuts guys from the UK had this online competition. We made a short before Lights Out called Cam Closer, about a phone that sees the future. I have a camera, Lotta's an actress, we can come up with something together. We figured, let's just make our own movies with no money. They've never been really interested in horror, or at least not our horror projects. It's with the grant money from the Swedish Film Institute. Lotta and I had been trying to get money from the Swedish Film Institute to make shorts, because that's how you finance shorts and features in Sweden, really. I had no idea that just a two-and-a-half minute short could get all that attention. I had to make this spreadsheet with everyone I've talked to, and what was said last just to keep track. From producers, and studios, and agents, and managers. Then, a couple of days later, I started getting all these emails from Hollywood. We didn't really know if that meant anything, or if that was going to lead to anything. Lotta and I were sitting there, refreshing the page, to see it go over a million, and it just kept going. I was like, "Oh, that's amazing." Then all of a sudden it had 70,000 views. I was like, "Oh awesome." So I went to the short, and I saw that it had, suddenly, 8,000 views. Then, a few months after that, I was on Reddit and saw someone had linked to our short. We figured that was it for that short, and let's keep making other shorts. We made the short for the contest, and I won Best Director when it made the top 6 finalists. But you can’t build a whole movie from top-to-bottom out of that alone.How did you first notice the popularity of the short film? It’s just that in Lights Out, he had a bang-on jump-scare and an inspired visual idea. So we know the man can direct the shit out of a good horror premise. ![]() When he was given meatier material to work with in Annabelle: Creation, he fucking knocked it out of the park. Doing it in reverse is hard, and this film shows us why.Īnd of course, Sandberg is a very talented horror director. Usually you come up with the story idea first, and then build the imagery around that. But the rest of the film’s parts are all working around that visual idea which was the genesis for the entire enterprise, and that’s a tough ask because it’s got the process pretty much backward. Sure, when the lights start flickering and then hit you with a jump-scare of a creepy-ass dreadlocked ghostie, it’s pretty satisfying. But it has to work to pigeon-hole that image into a functional plot and it doesn’t completely work. This is an OK horror movie, that relies heavily on a single (really scary!) visual image and trick. And it’s no surprise that when Sandberg tried to extend the really striking visual idea he had into a movie with a cast of characters and a back-story and a plot, the spooky shadow creature on its own wasn’t quite enough to carry all that weight. It’s not to say that a really clever image from a short film cannot possibly become a good feature-length film. The clip became so popular that, naturally a studio came bumbling over and commissioned it into a feature length film because clearly a 3-minute Youtube clip that leans entirely on one creepy visual image can be seamlessly lengthened into a satisfying feature.Įxcept, as the movie 9 showed us pretty unequivocally, this is not true. It’s a pretty brilliant little exercise in using silhouettes and editing to achieve maximum and visceral effect. Sandberg wrote, directed, scored, shot and gave birth to a 3-minute horror short called Lights Out. ![]()
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