{"id":6242,"date":"2013-02-19T11:22:43","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T17:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=6242"},"modified":"2013-02-19T15:13:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-19T21:13:09","slug":"five-quick-questions-with-maria-kennedy-mazzotta-the-picco-incident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=6242","title":{"rendered":"Five Quick Questions with Maria Kennedy Mazzotta – “The Picco Incident”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Due out late 2013 filmmakers Maria Kennedy Mazzotta and Ben Mazzotta bring us the highly anticipated found\u00a0footage film \u2018The Picco Incident\u2019.\u00a0 The movie is about a UFO that crashes on a family\u2019s farm and the family captures the survivor.\u00a0 \u00a0There will be lots of guessing and excitement as the family has life or death dilemmas and no matter what their decisions are there will be consequences.<\/p>\n

Maria was very kind to share the filming experience and additional information about the movie with B-Movie Nation.<\/p>\n

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5 Quick Questions with Maria Kennedy Mazzotta \u2013 \u201cThe Picco Incident\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

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What triggered the idea to do a found footage style film?<\/b><\/p>\n

Frankly, it was a budgetary thing.\u00a0 I\u2019m a producer \u2013 after the story, budget is what I think about.\u00a0 $100 million dollar movies with insane special effects and A-list actors are bombing at the box office — and scary little movies made for $20 by a kid with a cell phone are blowing audiences away.\u00a0 We (the filmmakers Ben Mazzotta, co-scribe Brad Abraham,\u00a0and I) thought about Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, Troll Hunter, and other found footage movies, and how they connected with a huge audience.\u00a0 Story is king.\u00a0 The Picco Incident is a powerful story because it\u2019s so believable.\u00a0 We built in the found footage style from concept stage to make it even more true-to-life. We didn\u2019t have to rent an expensive camera, and dolly and rigs and the rest of it.<\/p>\n

And Hollywood is paying attention too – every studio has opened a micro-budget division, and their acquisitions people are attending the genre film festivals and the Midnight Madness screenings at the top tier festivals like TIFF and Sundance.\u00a0 They\u2019re looking for that next film that\u2019s going to connect with the audience or scare the shit out of them or whatever.\u00a0 We knew we could effectively make a low-budget but incredible story if we employed found footage-style, so that\u2019s what we did.<\/p>\n

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What will we experience in \u2018The Picco Incident\u2019 that will stand above other footage films?<\/b><\/p>\n

The Picco Incident plays with the found footage genre in a very unconventional way. I don\u2019t want to give away any details because there are spoilers involved.\u00a0 But I can safely say I haven\u2019t seen any film do what we\u2019ve done with the found footage genre.\u00a0 Even though it\u2019s micro-budget, the visual effects in the film are phenomenal, thanks to Ben and our VFX god Andrew Emslie.<\/p>\n

What makes us different from your typical found footage? For one, you\u2019re getting more than a simple fear-based run and hide story.\u00a0 PICCO goes much deeper than that. There\u2019s still the \u201cWhat\u2019s under the bed\u201d, \u201cWhat\u2019s behind the tree\u201d presentation, but there\u2019s also a richness in character development that you don\u2019t typically find in found footage style movies.\u00a0 You really do care for these people, and what they\u2019re going through.\u00a0 And it\u2019s also not a far stretch for the average person to watch PICCO and stop and ask him or herself \u2013 Yeah, what WOULD I do if I came in contact with a real live alien? Would my family and I do what the Picco family did?<\/p>\n

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