They're Watching Us: An Interview with Micah Wright and Jay Lender

Though they are more known for their works on the graphic novels "Duster" and "Get Lucky", Micah Wright and Jay Lender are now lending their hands to the independent horror film scene. Both of these filmmakers and visual enthusiasts met straight out of college working on animated shows such as Spongebob Squarepants and Hey Arnold! Their combined credits also include work on over fifty video games including the massive Call of Duty franchise, six graphic novels, and Virtual Reality work for Samsung where they have won two awards. 

However, that is their history, and what they will soon be unleashing on audiences worldwide on March 25th is no children's show. THEY'RE WATCHING is the upcoming first person POV horror film directed by Micah and Jay. Based around an American home improvement show going to a remote Eastern European village to follow up on a woman who bought a house in the woods, the young team behind the cameras manage to upset the quiet, small village. You might be guessing the end of the film even now, but the twist is eye-popping and quite crazy. 

However, before the film even releases, it is always good to learn a thing or two about the directors behind the camera. Below you'll find the trailer for the film, followed by an in depth chat with the directors as to why they chose the found footage route, as well as improvisation in the film. 


The found footage genre has been heavily criticized. Why did you choose the found footage route for They're Watching? 

Jay: We like to think we chose the first person thriller route. It's not like our footage was found in a camera in a gully on the side of the road by the police and they're trying to figure out what happened to these people on film. Our movie is about a professional film crew. They go, they have their crazy experience, and we have a survivor. Our survivor, a professional film maker, has theoretically crafted this film for the audience. Does that make sense?

That does make sense. You know, throughout the film I noticed that it didn't do the whole constant shaky cam that make so many people nauseous. 

Micah: Yea, well, they're also professional cameramen so they wouldn't be shaking the camera.  

Jay: Everyone who is making this movie are all very experienced filmmakers who worked on many, many European and American productions. We were absolutely knowing of that down to the point where we were creating the story specifically to be about professionals so that we could side step all of those issues. One of the great benefits it got us was we were able to also get outside of some of the other scriptures that formed what's around your movie. Such as we have a score, because our survivor has absolutely no problem exploring the death of their friends. 

You said you had it in mind that you would be working with experienced people. Prior to filming They're Watching, did you already have people signed onto the film before you started writing it? 

Micah: Before we started writing it? No, we pitched the idea to our producer and our producer said that we'd make enough money to make that and to go write a script, and we went and wrote a script. To help the producer understand and help him sell the investors on the idea we had a comic book artist that we worked with do a series of illustrations of the ending sequence. It would get everyone's excitement up. Not everyone knows how to read a film script and understand what it's going to look like on film. So, we did the next best thing and illustrated it. Once we had raised the money then we began casting and then once we had cast we started looking for a foreign co-producer. We were lucky enough to get a recommendation from a friend of Alien Film in Romania. We met with them a couple of times and we thought they were really smart, really squared away people. Six or seven months later we were shooting the movie over there. 

Is They're Watching your debut feature length film?

Micah: It's the first that we've directed, yes. 

You guys are more known for your work with graphic novels. I would imagine writing a graphic novel is much different from writing a script. How did your experience writing graphic novels help shape this film? 

Jay: I think any time you're working in a supervisual medium like graphic novels or animation, where we both worked for years, or video games, it's always going to help with making a movie. It is a visual medium and it is about putting images on screen to communicate something. So, yes, it was very helpful but they're definitely different mediums. We've written screenplays which have been adapted to graphic novels. We have one called 'Duster', which you can get on amazon right now, whose life started as a screenplay. We figured we could make it into a graphic novel so we could use that as a sales tool to sell the movie. But, the screenplay needed to be completely re-written because it's easy to say to yourself in the screenplay, 'The plane crashes.' But, what does that look like in a comic book page and how many panels are you willing to devote to it? They're different, they're complimentary, and we don't consider one of them to be the final medium. The goal is always to make it into a movie. Sometimes some things are better in one medium, other times they're better in another. 


Did you have any other films in mind when creating They're Watching? Any that helped influence the creation of your movie? 

Micah: Oh, absolutely. We watched Straw Dogs, the original Wicker Man-

Jay:Prince of Darkness.

Micah: Yea, Prince of Darkness, the John Carpenter film. There were a number of movies we watched, not because we were like, "Oh, let's steal this scene," but, "This movie achieved a very creepy testability, how did they do it? What sort of techniques and skills can we learn from these other films that did this?" 

Jay: We watched Troll Hunter and a couple of other movies like that. It's kind of important to understand what the other guys are doing so you can see where they fell down, where they succeeded, what the tropes of the genre are so if you're going to subvert them you're doing it right. 

Micah: We watched every single found footage movie that was out at the time that we wrote this movie. Some of those were just a slog. 

Jay: It's part of the job.

Micah: Others were great. [Rec] and [Rec] 2 were a joy to watch. There were other ones where we were sitting there screaming at the television like, "Get on with it!". And there's some where people turn on a camera and wander around and we deliberately sort of avoided that in our movie. 

I was really shocked when watching They're Watching because all the actors in the film didn't feel like actors. They felt like they were just people having a good time. Did you guys direct them to act that way or did they just know what to do automatically? 

Micah: Both. 

Jay: The vibe of the movie is that you're watching a workplace comedy at least for the first half of the movie. And we wanted them to feel like a crew feels: at ease around each other, having fun, goofing off, making jokes at each other's expense like people who work together do. We wrote for them a very tight script. We encouraged all of our actors to improvise around that structure. Before we would direct any scene we would tell them what was important that had to come out. After that, they were allowed to play so long as they could keep it snappy and get the scene done in a reasonable amount of time. And, they improvised and they delivered some amazing stuff. And, we think you're right. It does feel really fresh and real and comfortable. It doesn't feel like they're reading Hollywood dialogue. 

Micah: And part of that is just the way we write; we write together in a room and read the dialogue back and forth to one another in a variety of different ways. We can be sure that human beings can actually say these lines. I can't count how many times I've been either on a set or in a recording booth and the actors are stumbling over the dialogue because it's just not possible to say out loud. That's because a writer wrote it by himself in a dark room and thought, "That's it! That's perfect! That's done!" And then they got on set and people were like, "Uhhhh..." And, you know, we didn't wanna be in that position. 

If you could each choose any one improvised scene or line in They're Watching as your favorite, which would it be? 

Jay: 'Eat your goat dick and shut up!' is a fan favorite I think! 

Micah: Yea, that one's good. There's a scene where our heroes are creeping through the woods and we actually shot it at night with night vision cameras. It was dark as the dickens and one of the actors is carrying a dulled knife, but its still got a point on it so if somebody falls over and lands on the knife there's going to be some trouble. The other actor is carrying a fireplace poker and one of the actors said to the other one - and I don't think he even meant it in character - "Watch where you're swinging that fireplace poker cause if you poke me in the eye with it I'm gonna beat you to death!" I kind of suspect that maybe the actor actually was talking to the other actor, but it comes off in character and I love it. 

Jay: I'm gonna add something to that, because it's not just lines that were improvised. In that same scene, when all of our characters get where they're going and see something horrifying - and I won't discuss what that thing is - we had written for them to stand around and emotionally deal with what they had just seen. But, at the time we filmed it, Kris Lemche, who plays our goofball character Alex, saw what everyone else saw and just took off and screamed, "I'm going back to the house!" Micah and I were watching this live on the monitor and saying, "What's going on? That's not what you're supposed to do?" But when we stopped and thought about it, it felt so right for the character that we left it in the movie, and it's one of the greatest moments and biggest laughs in the entire movie. It was not only improvised, but improvised in contradiction to what we had written. But part of the fun we have in this process was recognizing those moments when our actors knew our characters better than we did. 

Micah: I think everyone who sees that moment in the film, everyone laughs because that's how we all feel in every horror movie where people venture out into the night and discover something disgusting and stand around talking about it, or screaming about it, or complaining about it. He was just like, "Nope! I'm out!", and then takes off running out of the scene. And everyone laughs when they see it because it is so true, it's such a human moment. When we recognized that, we thought it was fantastic. 


For about the first hour of the film, I'd say it had a lot of tension, but it was very calm and smooth for a horror film even though it had an explosive ending. Did you ever have a different draft of the script that called for more action throughout the film? 

Micah: Our goal was not to make technically a horror film but more of a thriller that devolved into a horror film. With a thriller you don't generally have constant action and constant explosions and murders and people catching fire and exploding. 

Jay: We wanted to ratchet up that tension. As we said earlier, the Wicker Man is slow by modern standards, but that old 1970s Wicker Man is a creepy, creepy movie. The more you watch it, the more you think, "Edward Woodward just needs to get out that damn town! People are going to do something horrible to him!" And in the end they do something horrible to him, and we wanted that feeling. We wanted the creeping dread and the knowledge on the audience's part that this cannot end well for our characters. 

Micah: What's interesting about the comparison between the Wicker Man and our movie is that in the Wicker Man, Edward Woodward's character knows from the second he gets there that something is wrong. He's come to the island looking for a missing little girl, but our characters are idiots. They never figure out that anything weird is happening around them. They're always way behind the curve on that kind of thing. So it creates an interesting kind of tension. There's a reason why the beginning of the film is the way it is. A lot of horror films kind of feel like it's they're job to be the delivery medium for blood and gore and boo scares and that kind of thing. We felt like what we wanted to do was make a movie that's about people. When you watch your average horror movie a lot of people sit around and ask, "How is he gonna die? I can't wait to see how she's going to die!" But when you watch this movie, we think the audience is sitting there saying, "Oh God, I hope he isn't going to die! I hope she doesn't die!" The people who watch our movie will fall in love with these characters. By the time it's over, you'll know all of their names, and I think that's a pretty unusual claim for a movie like ours. 

The final question, the big question that I would like to ask is that do you like the end result of the film and would you go back and improve on anything if you could? 

Micah: We do like the movie. It's a very solid movie. There are a few things that we would do. We have had a lot of discussion about if we do shoot a sequel to the film if we're lucky enough and the movie makes some money and we return on our investments from our investors and they say, "Hey, let's make another one of these!", we have designed a new shooting style that would allow us to have more coverage and still be a first person thriller. That would allow us to speed up some editing. 

Jay: Coverage meaning alternate camera angles. 

Micah: Yea, different camera angles in the same scene and we would like to do the sequel we have in mind. It is a similar sort of idea but it's a much bigger show than House Hunters International that we would be spoofing. We would be doing crane shots, tracking shots. We want to be much more vicious with camera angles in the second film. But, I think that with this movie none of that would have made sense because it is what it is, and when you start with House Hunters you're constrained by the limits of where you begin. 

Jay: There's some effects we would probably touch up a little bit, but not too much. At a certain point with computer effects none of it ever really looks real to me. Making it look realer and spending millions and millions of dollars on making it look realer - it's still not real. Everyone knows lightning and stuff doesn't come out of people's hands. So you can make it look as real as you want, but people still go, "Hey, look at that, a CGI effect!" We tried to do as much as we could practical. '

Alright, well, since you guys gotta get going I'd like to thank you for your time and I wish you good luck!

Micah and Jay: Thank you very much! 

THEY'RE WATCHING comes out on March 25th in theaters and On Demand. Be sure to follow the film on Facebook and Twitter for all updates, news, and announcements.