PHOenix fOrgOtten
Director Justin Barber dishes on his Ridley Scott-produced close encounter...
IT’S BASED ON REAL EVENTS
In 1997, thousands of people reported seeing mysterious lights above Phoenix, Arizona. Despite officials saying they were nothing more than military flares, some residents swear they were attached to a giant ship silently floating above their homes. “I was a high school kid at that time in the late ’90s,” recalls Justin Barber, director of Phoenix Forgotten. “X-Files was the biggest show on TV so I was steeped in that world. I remember seeing the news reports that night and writing an article for my high school newspaper about it. Seeing that printed as the first thing I ever put out into the world is quite ironic now.”
IT’S A (KINDA) DOCUMENTARY...
Coming from a documentary background, Barber was keen to make his pseudo-doc as believable as possible. “It was originally conceived as a story about three kids who go on this UFO adventure,” Barber tells Red Alert. “Style-wise, it was meant to be a documentary that goes off the rails and becomes a found-footage movie,” he adds. “I love true-crime documentaries – work from Errol Morris and Werner Herzog – so in thinking of ways to make this cinematic I looked to those filmmakers. I wanted it to feel like Errol Morris unravelling a mystery.”
...WITH A FOUND-FOOTAGE TWIST
The “found footage” genre may be ten-a-penny these days but by rooting Phoenix Forgotten in a ’90s aesthetic, Barber takes us back to an analogue era. “A pet peeve of mine is when you see found-footage movies that look amazing and obviously it’s a cameraman with a RED camera rather than a kid with a camera phone,” he admits. “I shot some stuff on actual ’90s camcorders. Also the desert landscape is really interesting to me. We wanted to make an iconic desert UFO movie and Phoenix, Arizona lent us that.”
IT HAS A FAMOUS PRODUCER
“I really hit the jackpot,” says Barber about having the Alien and Blade Runner director in the producer’s chair. “I think his company Scott Free had been wanting to play in the space of smaller, low-budget horror movies for a while and also Ridley is invested in supporting young filmmakers,” he explains. As for Ridley’s advice? “It was all about making it more tense and exciting,” Barber reveals. “It was a great motivator too because knowing he was going to watch it made us want to make something he’d approve of in quality.”
IT’S FOOLED EXPERTS
By carefully mixing real stock footage with incredibly detailed re-enactments, scenes from Phoenix Forgotten have already made UFO fantatics do a double-take. “When we started making the movie we thought, ‘What if it just got out there and people thought it was a real documentary?’” says Barber. “Many people have made that comment to me. I do sometimes look at the comments that people are leaving on the movie’s Instagram page and so many people are like, ‘Is this real?’ It’s the age we live in I guess!” Phoenix Forgotten is out on Blu-ray and DVD on 18 September.