WHAT LIES WITHIN

On behalf of the cast and crew of What Lies Within, I'm grateful for the opportunity to share, at last, our labor of love with you. It's been a long hard road and many iterations to get this picture where I wanted it, which is the version you are about to see. As a filmmaker, I have, since the start of my journey, been obsessed with preserving the garage aesthetic of the passionate amateur. You see, that’s what excited and inspired me as a kid growing up in the 90s when I discovered underground cinema. The reason it excited and inspired me is it taught me that anyone can make a movie. Suddenly, it seemed possible in a way that the polished, big budget blockbusters never made readily apparent. All of a sudden, filmmaking, perhaps the most alchemical of the arts, wasn’t reserved for some moneyed creator class in a remote and magical city far from the semi-rural Georgia suburbs where I grew up. Film is for anyone with the gumption to pick up whatever camera they can get their hands on and go for it. You don’t need a million dollars; you don’t even need a buck. All you need is the fearlessness to do it. (Well, and a camera. A camera certainly helps.)

It is my hope that What Lies Within reminds you of that, too.

In keeping with our goals, there were ground rules we strived to adhere to. No budget; the only money spent was out of my own pocket specifically to feed the cast and crew. All equipment had to be cobbled together through networking and hustle. Other than a handful of minutes where cellphone cameras were utilized for narrative reasons that will become evident as you watch the film, we used a Rebel Ti on its last legs with sensor issues and no audio hookups, an old Fostex tape deck with unreliable phantom power, one boom mic, and we relied on practical lighting. The script was written around what we had available: an apartment with its lease ending in less than thirty days. I dressed it and immersed myself in it for about two weeks, walking its rooms and writing the script into a tape recorder, acting it all out on my own first like a one-man play. Then my talented collaborators brought those characters to life with a constant awareness of the aesthetic and tone we hoped to achieve. I can’t imagine having wrangled together a better team to work with than this one, and everybody involved put so much into it that even thinking about it makes me feel both immensely humbled and immeasurably proud. Most of the shooting had to be done just a few hours each night in between other gigs and obligations, with that lease-end deadline ever looming.

And what a memorable night of shooting that last one was, in which we had to nail the film’s coup de grace: a harrowing and emotionally tumultuous climax the whole slow burn of a film builds to, the key sequence of which is a nearly ten-minute long, one-take, un-cut shot.

The memories we made together, Cameron, Alex, Rebekah, Amanda, Travis, Matthew, Cody, and I, making a movie just for the camaraderie and the adrenaline and the hell of it, sharing that very human experience of artistic synergy, with bare-bones equipment, little-to-no rehearsal time, and new sides being shoved into hands often minutes before we had to shoot them, are some of the most cherished memories in my whole life as an artist.

Which means whatever you think of our film, whatever choice you end up thinking is best for your festival, we’ve already won.

So don’t sweat it. Don’t stress it. Just sit back, remember where and how it all started for you — and enjoy it.

Best Wishes,
Cliff Hensley