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Rated: 4.89/5 | Votes: 9 | Views: 280 |Submitted: 12/18/07

Interview with David Benullo, Director of Hallowed Ground

By Heather Wixson

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with director David Benullo, whose debut film, Hallowed Ground, has performed extremely well on DVD and is set to debut on December 22nd on the Sci-Fi Channel at 9/8 CT.

Benullo’s love for film began at age 7 when he began making movies on his family’s home movie camera.  At age 14, Benullo began to write his first screenplays and after he completed film school at NYU, he wrote the script for Hallowed Ground and worked hard to get the script made into a film.

According to Benullo, he spent a lot of time making cold-calls from the East Coast (where he hails from) to various production companies based in California and submitted Hallowed Ground to whoever would read it.

“It got a really good response and when I finally moved to LA, a producer who was interested in it called me into a meeting for another movie they were making,” said Benullo.  “I was told ‘It's February.  We have this movie idea and it has to be out on video next February, which means we have to be shooting in June.  Want the job?’ It was a dream come true, but also a great challenge.”

For those who haven’t had the opportunity to check out Hallowed Ground, its a story of a young woman who becomes stranded in a small, middle-American town while driving cross-country, discovers that her arrival there was foretold a century before by the town's founding preacher and that she is an integral part of his impending - and terrifying - rebirth.

The challenges Benullo faced on Hallowed Ground included an extremely tight shooting schedule of 15 days and a budget of under $1 million.

“Honestly, when you're making a movie in 15 days and for the limited resources we had, everything is a challenge,” said Benullo.  “I basically did everything you weren't supposed to on your first feature, especially one that's low budget: kids, fire, animals, special effects, night shoot, pyrotechnics.”

With having a limited budget, Benullo and his crew had to get creative.  For example, the movie uses crows in the movie but trying to get the amount of birds he needed would have busted the first-time director’s budget.  So, Benullo ended up using two very talented birds for the gig and just shot them in a lot of various locations and paired that footage up with some stock crow footage, which gives the audience the illusion of many live birds.

Benullo also faced the challenge of having to create a movie with a lot of dialogue that didn’t fall flat on screen.

“You especially want to make sure the movie never feels visually stagnant,” said Benullo.  “What I didn't expect was needing to get all the coverage on the townspeople who have speaking roles in any particular scene.”

“You have not only your few leads, but 5-7 supporting characters, all of whom have dialogue that incorporates into the scene and moves the plot forward.  I had always planned on putting several "locals" in the same shot to give them a sense of community, but it was a getting all that covered that was a real time killer.  And there's no way to cover it all in a master, which I hate anyway.  On nights like that, I jokingly swore my next movie would be two people in a room.”

That is very unlikely though as Benullo is keeping himself extremely busy on different projects these days.  He’s currently working on developing his horror short Shadow Man into a full-length feature film.  The short is based on one of Benullo’s earlier scripts and played the horror festival circuit including the Los Angeles ScreamFest, the New York City Horror Film Festival, the Sitges International Festival of Fantasy Film, Scotland's Dead by Dawn Festival and the Chicago REEL Shorts Fest.

According to Benullo, he is also working on two very different projects: one is a kids/family Halloween-themed movie in the vein of The Monster Squad, and the other is low-budget horror script that's inspired by the urban legend that Jeffrey Dahmer was chained down during his autopsy.

Benullo also recently co-wrote a script with Jessica Doyle called The Narrows, a modern-day take on the myth of the ancient sirens that takes place at a Lake Havasu-like Spring Break hotspot.

“The script was building a lot of momentum until the Writer's Guild Strike hit, so now it's on hold,” added Benullo.

For those aspiring horror writers/directors out there, Benullo offers some advice.

“You need to believe in the material -- make it as good as you can, of course -- but believe in it.  Good scripts circulate and don't die.  They can always get made.  I don't write things so they can sit on a shelf - I write them with the intent of getting them produced,” said Benullo.

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