Screamfest LA 2013 Exclusive: Filmmaker Josh Stewart Talks the LA Premiere of The Hunted
Steve Barton
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With writer/director Josh Stewart’s horror survival feature The Hunted set for its Los Angeles premiere Thursday, October 10, at 9:30pm at the Screamfest Film Festival, read on for our exclusive chat with the filmmaker along with the film’s trailer and some stills!
Produced by Brett Forbes, Patrick Rizzotti and Josh Stewart from a script by the latter, The Hunted stars Stewart, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Nikki Deloach and Skipp Sudduth. It revolves around the characters of Jake (Stewart) and Stevie (Blevins), a duo who, in chasing their dream of landing on a television hunting show, head to the dense, secluded mountains of West Virginia. Equipped with only their bow and camera, they have just three days to kill a monster buck big enough to grab the attention of the producers, and they’ve found him. But the sun has set, and they realize they’re not alone. Have the hunters become the hunted?
Chatting with filmmaker, actor and outdoorsman Stewart, who’s familiar to genre audiences for his starring turns in the Marcus Dunstan-directed features The Collector and The Collection as well as to the mainstream for The Dark Knight Rises, stated of his inspiration for The Hunted, “After filming Batman, I wanted to do something small, something that could be done in ten days with fifteen to twenty people, and the story itself was my story. The ghost story is mine. It happened to me.”
Added producer Forbes of the actual events which inspired The Hunted, “We almost didn’t believe Josh when he told us what he and his roommate experienced back in West Virginia. I don’t scare easily, but when I saw the fear in his face as he recounted the story, I knew it was one we had to help him tell.”
“I think the key to anything being scary, or having the potential to be scary, lies in the tension,” stated Stewart of his approach to The Hunted. “If you can generate enough of a build, then it becomes like a tea kettle that can blow at any time.”
As for his experience directing the film, “It’s a whole new beast,” stated the filmmaker, “but it’s something that I have to do now. Your scope of storytelling expands greatly by the whole, which is very fulfilling.”
Concluding, Stewart riffed on the premiere, “Any time you can be recognized by a festival like Screamfest, you get the sense that you did something right, which is a relief first and foremost, but then thrilling as well. I’m just happy to be among this group of filmmakers and part of a festival with the history that Screamfest carries.”
For more on Screamfest, which runs October 8th to the 17th at the Laemmle NoHo 7 (5240 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601), visit Screamfest’s website, “like” Screamfest on Facebook, and follow Screamfest on Twitter.
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