Grade: A

Verdict: You may never go camping again.

By BOB LONGINO
Cox News Service

They are alive and kicking.

Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, the stars of the independent horror thriller "The Blair Witch Project," might have mysteriously disappeared in the Maryland woods in their movie's creepy tale of witchcraft, murders and ghost sightings. But in real life the three actors, who each lent their real names to their movie characters, are ready to talk about the experience.

After all, "Blair Witch" is just a movie, even if it doesn't look or feel that way as you watch the characters slowly but surely come apart psychologically amid the escalating terror inflicted on them by the film's creative team. Many moviegoers have been taken in by the ingenious publicity that presents this fictional tale as fact. It's a gimmick, not even a necessary one to appreciate the movie's power, but one that apparently is helping stoke public interest.

In case you haven't heard, "Blair Witch" is a film industry phenomenon. The low-budget movie, shot in eight days for a mere $30,000 to $35,000 with a post-filming cost of about $350,000, a pittance by Hollywood standards, has repeatedly sold out its showings at theaters across the country since it debuted July 16. So far, it has grossed more than $5 million.

We recently caught up with all three actors.

Donahue lives in Los Angeles and has been auditioning for new roles. Leonard, who also lives in L.A. and is on location in San Francisco shooting a low-budget film, recently landed a part in the upcoming Hollywood mainsream movie "Navy Divers" with Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. And Williams, who's currently living in Thornwood, N.Y., is getting married in September, will honeymoon in Aruba and then move to Los Angeles to continue pursuing his acting career.

The trio beat out 2,000 other unknown actors who auditioned for "Blair Witch" two years ago. Because the movie is basically improvisational, auditions also required seat-of-the-pants acting. (The actors were given a 16mm camera, a video camera, sound equipment, camping gear and a mere outline of the movie and sent into the Maryland woods to document their harrowing search for the witch tale.) As each actor entered the audition room, he was told to improvise a scene in which he was a prisoner up for parole.

"Josh blew us away," says "Witch" co-director Eduardo Sanchez. "He excited us like nobody else."

With Leonard a shoo-in, Donahue and Williams got their roles based on how they would work with him.

"With Heather, there was something in her eyes," Sanchez explains. "We had Josh be real obnoxious and Heather was the only one to realistically stand up to him. She was cool. And there were those eyes of hers --- something kind of crazy."

Williams and another actor were finalists for the third role. "Mike was a little more the next-door type," Sanchez says. But hair color really tipped the scales in Williams' favor.

The other actor was blond. "He looked too much like Josh," Sanchez says.

HEATHER DONAHUE
In "Blair Witch": She plays Heather, the leader of the students documenting the witch tale.

Age: 24.

Residence: Los Angeles.

Family: Father is a printer, mother is an office manager for a gynecologist. She has a 22-year-old brother and a 14-year-old sister; all live in or near Philadelphia.

Experience: Stage work at the Soho Theatre Company and Battersea Arts Centre; former member of the Red Shag Improv Comedy group and the experimental Collision Theory Theater Company in New York.

Scariest movie she's seen: "The Shining." "I've never been a big fan of horror movies,'' she says. ''I know that seems strange."

Q: In "Blair Witch," Heather has a strong personality. Does the off-screen Heather like the on-screen Heather?

A: I watch the movie now and I am like, "Oh, shut up." You know? Maybe she should have been better organized. Still, I do think people are hard on her. If it were a male character I just know it would be different. People would react differently to a guy being just like that. I grew up in a liberal household and thought those attitudes don't happen anymore. But they do.

Q: Any post-"Blair" dreams?

A: Nothing beyond the normal. I do think I feel loss because it's over and relieved at the same time. Kind of a postpartum thing. ... It also felt kind of crazy to come out of the woods. You don't realize the effect of the sounds of hearing rustling leaves all the time. The world away from all that is really sort of silent.

Q: Do you go camping?

A: I'm quite an avid camper now. Hard to believe, huh? I go about once a month. All over California. It's usually for a long weekend. Doesn't bother me at all.

Q: Your video confession scene is a high point in the film. How did you get into that?

A: Basically, the directors left me a note, telling me to confess. I was to do my best to make amends for the complete disaster. Over a period of days when you are working on your character -- she was always repressing, repressing -- then you're finally getting the opportunity to let that go. You finally get to release it. And it pours out. It's all good.

Q: What has surprised you most about this movie?

A: The audience reaction. It's stunning. A lot of people love it. And some are completely repulsed by it. The balance could have gone either way. You have to accept that this film doesn't look like other films. ... You can't go in expecting anything like a normal movie. ... It's the aesthetic. It's grainy. It's raw. It's indie, man.

JOSHUA LEONARD
In 'Blair Witch": He plays Joshua, the main cameraman.

Age: 24.

Residence: Los Angeles.

Family: Father teaches theater at Pennsylvania State University; mother is having her first book published; has one younger brother, who is studying Eastern philosophy in Boulder, Colo.

Experience: Stage work at The Living Theatre and the Seattle Fringe Festival. Several low-budget independent films. Is shooting low-budget vigilante film "City of Bars" in San Francisco: "I play a womanizing rock-and-roll guitar player." Will also star with Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. in the upcoming "Navy Divers."

Scariest movie he's seen: "16 Candles." "Yeah, the one with Molly Ringwald. I've never been a big horror movie fan. I know 'Children of the Corn' scared me when I was a kid."

Q: Why would you put yourself through this experience -- you know, being stuck out in the woods, having the directors terrorize you late at night, having food rations depleted just to watch you break down psychologically?

A: Actors a couple of times in their lifetime, if they are lucky, are able to help mold a project to this extent. You just don't get directors out there who have big enough (guts) to cast their actors and then let them improvise the script. So I knew going in it was the type of project that was an experiment. ... The only reason to go out and do this was to see if it could be pulled off.

Q: Hollywood throws a lot of money at its movies like "Wild Wild West" to pull it off. You appear to have made something special, an inherently scary movie without any special effects.

A: With technique and technology you can make anything cool. But to make anything that lasts, you have to strip away all that technology and see if you've got anything at all left. If you don't have a story that connects, if you don't have that base element, you don't have much.

Q: One scene that contributed to that base element was when you use the camera to confront Heather. You push it right in her face and taunt her with the line, "What's your motivation?"

A: That was my instinctual reaction to being frustrated, being way beyond comfort and having this girl always sticking the camera in my face. That was the breaking point for me and Heather. I wasn't able to keep my cool anymore. Ultimately, it helped you understand why she can't put the camera down. It was her link to sanity. The second she puts it down, the whole situation becomes too real. After that scene was one of the first times we had to break character as actors, because it crossed the boundary. We had to say, "This is not you, this is not me. We are doing a film here and are you all right?"

Q: When did you know that "Blair Witch" might be something more than just a bunch of guys tripping out in the woods? That the public was going to really take to it?

A: We were at a premiere in New York, and we were standing there and it just felt like something out of the movies. MTV was there. And CNN. And there was all this flash, flash, flash from photographers. Mike (Williams) just looked at me and said, "We made a film on video in Maryland." At that moment it was just the absurdity of the whole thing. Yes, man, we did. It's a beautiful thing.

MICHAEL WILLIAMS
In "Blair Witch": He plays Mike, the sound man.

Age: 26.

Residence: Thornwood, N.Y, near White Plains. Plans to move to Los Angeles after he gets married in September.

Family: Mother is a homemaker in Thornwood; father, who worked for Exxon Corp. before the Alaska oil spill, died when Michael was 16. He is the eighth of nine children: five girls and four boys.

Experience: Studied acting at the State University of New York. Appeared in low-budget independent films "Sally" and "Nasty."

Scariest movie he's seen: "The Exorcist." "I can't even describe how scary that is to me. I also like 'Halloween.' The first one. It's a classic."

Q: The first time you really got to meet Heather and Joshua was on a train heading to Maryland for the shoot. What did you talk about?

A: We talked about what our actor training had been. And all our side jobs. At that time I was scooping ice cream in a restaurant on weekends and doing production assistant work. And pumping gas, cutting stone in a quarry, and I'm still moving furniture. I took today off for this interview.

Q: After making the movie, what had you learned from Heather and Joshua about acting? What did you take from the experience?

A: I really learned to trust. You always have to trust your scene partner. With Josh and Heather, we had to trust each other right away if the film was going to work. It's improvisation. And we were portraying people who were going crazy. You have to trust that somebody's not going to break your face open, not going to hurt you. I felt perfectly safe with them.

Q: Your bio says you played for three years on the New York Yankees farm club.

A: Uh. I wrote that as a goof and now it's all over the place. ... Who knew all this amazing stuff would happen with this movie? They thrust paper at me and told me to write out my biography.