Oh jis boat. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater. They want cold sodas, hot popcorn in no monsters in the protection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Cut it off. The whole to me was a woitch hunt, and it was a joke. You know, it's a cliche, mind blowing, but that's what it was. I said, that's the damnedest.
Thing I've ever seen in my forest service career.
I've never seen anything like that. What in the world is.
Going on.
When you start out on any case, you don't know where you're going to wind up or if you're going to solve it.
Had to do it the mountain.
It's Mount Shasta. You can't keep anything a secret in Mount Shasta.
Dude, you're famous, famous.
Yeah.
The FBI is here, the US Pharmas Service are here. They want to talk to you about digging a hole. They kind of think you did it.
They were trying to plan something like what's going on? Like if I got myself into something, what happens when we find it?
Whoever was digging this whole, whatever reason they might have had, all of this crazy surrounding all of the theories. That's all part of it. And when people don't have, you know, any facts to work from, you know that just slaves a hole that can be filled in with anything.
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. On this episode, I'm talking with Elijah Sullivan. He is the writer, director, producer of The Whole Story That's hol E. It is a documentary about a hole, a giant hole that was found right by Mount Shasta. We talk a lot about Mount Shasta and the atmosphere around that place, as well as this whole and how he came to make a documentary his first feature length film, and had
a wonderful time watching it. I believe that you might be able to see it at the slam Dance Channel site slam Dance channel dot com. But yeah, definitely track it down and check it out. I think you will have a great time. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Tell me a little bit about you before you even got into filmmaking, or how did you decide to get into filmmaking.
Oh, I'm one of those folks who knew I wanted to do this when I was maybe fourteen something like that. I'd always been the creative create, not in a self congratulatory way, but like I was always interested in the arts, and it was more like the dabbling went in the other direction, like maybe I should try something practical, and kept getting detoured and would have to come back and be like, no, I'm not good at anything else. I
don't want to anything else. In fact, when I first heard about this specific story, my initial instinct around it, as silly as it sounds, was maybe I could turn this into a newspaper article and get a job at the paper, because at the time I was trying to do journalism. How long ago was that that you heard about this, Oh, it was twenty twelve, a little bit ago.
It was a little bit ago. It took a long time to get the I thought when I decided to make this into a documentary, I thought, this takes place literally up the street from my house. It's a community of thirty five hundred people. I know some of the people involved already. This shouldn't take too long.
Famous last words, all right, So when did you decide, Okay, I am going to make this a movie. I'm going to make this a documentary.
It was probably a couple of years later, I think, when I started digging into asking around, assuming that it would be easy to solve this mystery, and meeting some initial resistance. Then I went out, does that mean that the craziest version of this story that I heard is true? Is that why people aren't hesitant to speak about it? And it took a couple of years and then I'm not sure which year this was, I imagine it was
maybe twenty fifteen. I distinctly remember a specific day where I was lying in bed for just waking up thinking about that it was a really good story and the folks who were telling me that I should make a documentary about it were correct? And why was I hesitating to make it myself? Because when I thought about anybody else making it, I was not only a little bit jealous, but I went, they're gonna mess it up. I may not know how to make a movie yet, but I've
seen all of that. Whenever Mount Shasta turns up in media, it's always something like ancient Aliens or something like that, which is really fun, but it's one specific take on the subject. And I knew I wanted to see something that was a different take. Mount shast has been in the media and various different TV shows and books, and it has its own little niche in pop culture, and
it's usually presented in one of two ways. One is what I would call overly credulous things like ancient aliens, where every single theory is true, all the most bizarre stuff, Bigfoot is abducting and eating people, like the crazy, most sensationalistic stuff. And also just basically overcredulously repeating things that I would consider material out of like cult propaganda Pamphletskay, maybe we shouldn't promote that too loudly, because I see
where that pipeline ends. When I bump into these people on the street. I'm all her people practicing any religion they want. But I think when it comes to this specific type of cultural scenario we have in Mount Shasta, I would put a buyableware thing, a couple stuff just to be like, just see, you know these folks over here, These people are pretty nice. There's a couple of things
you might want to know about these people. And then the other end of the spectrum is the people who are maybe excessively incredulous, where they say, oh, look, people with funny hats and point and laugh, and it's low hanging fruit of laughing at people for their spiritual beliefs and not taking them seriously as human beings and just taking that one dimensional approach. Whereas I grew up around these folks, and I know that a lot of the
time is just totally regular people. I'd be working at a video store and chatting with them, and they might be somebody's parents, and you might not realize that they're into something. Lou and they're lovely folks and they don't come across as crazy, and it's not helpful to say, oh, the reason that somebody ends up in a cult is because they already like funny hats. That's not insightful, that's
not interesting, that's not humanistic at all. Growing up in that situation, I had parents who were called to the mountain quote unquote spiritually, which was something that I obviously love my parents, and I don't consider them crazy. So it's always been an open question to me, like, why
is what's going on? I'm agnostic myself, so I never understood, and so I think I've always been interested in trying to find a story to tell that would include some of these elements where it's in the background of this documentary. Is it is any of this real? And to what degree?
I'm obviously not from northern California. So what is it about this particular place? Is that the mountain itself? Is that the area itself? What is it that attracts this attention and has these groups spring up around it?
There are probably a few different answers that you could get to that question. The answer that locals would give is that it's the mountain itself is a spiritual place, has a shangri law kind of atmosphere. It's been chosen as a place of residence for spiritual beings for thousands of years, and they are actively putting their tendrils out and drawing spiritual people there to create a community. And so people feel called to the mountain and feel like
it's a spiritual place where they're meant to gather. And so even though it's a small community, there's a pretty large contingent of folks there who are there for spiritual purposes and are building a community. It's not all one spiritual group, it's it's a cluster of many similar groups with overlapping beliefs. But there's a huge amount of diversity inside of it. Answer might be because it's a destination
already for outdoor activities. It's a popular ski destination. Skiing's amazing apparently ilt ski, and it's a beautiful, a very striking mountain. You do feel a sense of awe when you're standing in front of it. It can immediately put you in a maybe a receptive state to think that maybe something special is happening here because it's so imposing visually, and I imagine that has something to do with it as well. And I think the last answer would be
because some of those things already had some traction. It gets fed a lot by the Chamber of commerce, anybody looking to drum up tourism and people. When the logging and mining industries dried up around there, people had to turn to something, so they turned to tourism and then also spiritual tourism, where it's turned into oh, you want to come meet the descended bastards who live in the mountain. I can take you to a spot where you can try to find one of the entrances to the mountain
and we'll stand there and meditate. And it's three hundred dollars. Some people are just hustling to make some money. Some can ride that line where they're doing it and keep one foot in spirituality and being an ethical person and getting permits and things like that. Some folks are pretty firebleware.
So walk me through your process when you decide, Okay, this is going to be my project. I'm going to make this documentary because you go down a lot of paths, and I just want to know, like, how do you mentally prepare for that to how do you pursue these things? Or do you say this is the path I'm going to go down. You start down that and then suddenly you start to veer off this.
Story And kind of thought about it for a little while. I realized, this is a through line, more of a through line than if I just made a documentary about the people who live here. Right then, I have no cohesion at all. I could get lost going down all the different rabbit holes. So I knew I had this mystery. We found a giant hole on Mount Shasta. It was dug by hand. Somebody was looking for something. Is this
a story of obsession? Is this something sinister with somebody looking for something specific for nefarious reasons, was this just a garden variety mining fraud thing, So that at least narrowed down the Mount Shasta, all the different colors of what was going on there down to a specific track that I could go down, or at least I narrowed down the tracks that I could go down. But then when it came to making the movie myself, I didn't have any money. I was the director, as a writer,
as a producer. I was doing the research and the editing and most of the cinematography and things like that. I honestly was going in every direction at once. And because I had never made a movie any larger than a several minute long experimental short, I did everything wrong the first time, and I probably did everything wrong the second and third, and fourth and fifth time. There are shots in that movie. A lot of the interviews are my second take at at interviewing that person, and there
are shots in that movie that took you know. I just want to get a specific lenticular cloud that looks like a UFO that appears near Mount Shast and that's one of the things that kind of ties the UFO culture into the Mount Shasta culture. I spent years waiting
for the perfect lenticular cloud. There are shots in the movie where I spent three days just making sure that I had the right lens on the camera, with the track laid in the right place, and the light the sunlight would fall right on the trail that I needed people's eyes to go to, and I just waited. And sometimes I had to wait a long time for interviews. There was one interview in the film that took seven
years to get. I just had to wait, And so in the meantime, I would I just had a long to do list, and I would go, which one of these can I do today? And I'd go all the way down the list until I ran out of things to do, phone calls, to make emails, to write, And then if there was still any daylight left, I'd be like, the light's nice, it's Karen's Malick. This in just in the last forty five minutes of each day. When the
light is nice, go get two shots. And what was it twenty four or something when I maybe shot the last footage in the fall, Oh my goodness. It was a long process.
And you're working a full time job at the same time.
I ticket, Oh, yeah, No. There were times when I was working five jobs at one point. I don't think I got very much done for about thirteen months because I was running a public access television studio. When I started, I was working at a video store for the first two years as a video store clerk, and that was actually very helpful. I actually made a lot of connections, found a lot of people through that.
I don't want to be too nerdy, but there are two shots that I want to talk about in particular, or two types of things, the Russhot test, the mirroring of things. Were you doing that in camera or was that all post Oh I.
Wish I had done that in camera. That would have been fun to have done in camera. I honestly hadn't
thought of it at first. I knew that was an element of the story, but I was dealing with it more like coming from the direction of I knew that people were already psychologically projecting onto the mountain, that people were obviously projecting a lot of positive things onto the mountain, right, spirituality, things like that, And then I thought, with the whole but it's out of balance where people mostly talk about the fun, beautiful, spiritual, groovy things about the mountain and
not the dark sides. So then we have this hole where people started projecting onto that, and it tended to be all of the darker things about the mountain that you know, like the four service people saying, ah, I think this might be mining fraud, or somebody being like, I think that this was like a cult up to something creepy, and I went, okay, so we're going to
get both by just examining this image. But then one of my friends said, with like a rorshack test you've got and I said, yeah, that came up in interviews, but I cut it and he said why did you cut it? And I said I didn't want to be too on the nose. I just wanted to let it be that he said, you got to put a scene
in there. Said okay, and I thought about it, and at some point I came up with the idea of mirroring one shot and it was pretty odd, honestly, pretty simple effect that I just dragged and dropped on it and devincu resolved. That's another thing. I edited this on a twenty thirteen Mac with Devinci Resolve fifteen the free version. I had my hands tied in a lot of ways on this project, but Luckily it had this effect on it, and I went, oh, that's cool, and then I get
a few shots that way. It probably took about forty five minutes to do that. That's one of the only scenes in the movie that maybe I did one version of it in forty five minutes and then didn't change. I went okay, And I actually still debated putting that in the movie. I still go, is this two on the nose? But everybody responds to it so well.
I totally responded to it. I thought I was great, and I don't think that you overuse it. I think it's just a nice spice that you throw in there at the right time.
That's what I tried for. Great. Thank you.
The other thing, obviously, this movie is called The Whole Story, so you're going to be thinking about that whole the whole time. Sorry for the pun, but how do you get the shots of the whole? They talk at the very beginning about the whole being filled in? So how do you get these shots? How are you doing that? Oh?
Yeah, so none of those. It's too bad. I was never able to photograph it because, as you say, it got filled in within a few weeks or months, depending on who you ask, And I was never able to photograph it myself, so everything in the film is based on a photograph that somebody took, and I had to just get creative with putting pain and zooms and things
on things. As much as I like experimental films and stuff like that, I went back to nuts and bolts ken burns, how does he get so much emotion out of an old photograph with a little bit of painting and zooming and some voiceover and some music, and just being like, I just need to keep this, keep our eye moving, keep the mesmerism going, keep the interest going. And I've gotten that note a couple of times from folks.
You didn't realize that none of those were video, and I went, oh wow, I have no objectivity left on this movie. I've been editing it so long, and of course it's hard to be objective in any situation ever anyway, if not impossible, And at this point, I'm just shocked that anybody says something like that. I still cringe when I see those.
I bought into it one hundred percent of Climb and Cinker, So yeah, I thought that was a recreation of some sort or some sort of double plane where it's here's the bottom of the hole, and here's the time that you were doing this. In some sort of weird post effect, I'm like, yeah, and I'm looking at this stuff in the hole and thinking about what the scale of it is. Because they talk about how it looked like a bucket that was actually this huge garbage can. I'm like, okay, yeah, no,
I bought into it. And I can really see your experimental film background in so much of it, like the Worshock test, but really even just those moments of quiet where you're looking at the wildflowers and talking about how long it takes for the wildflowers to come back, and just it's such a beautifully shot film.
Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I really spent a long time on it. It was a dream project in so many ways of that it really tied into something like I said that I've been deeply interested in my entire life. Even though I'm not in the film, it's a very personal movie for me, and I got to do things like what I used to do when I was a kid, would go out with a camera and
just photograph things. It was the subject of what I loved, my community and the area, I could spend so much time in nature, and I could take my time with the editing. I just had such a great time with it in so many ways. And then of course the story. Stories like this don't come along very often for me. It was like I knew I was hooked, and everybody I talked to about it immediately got hooked. Every time they had asked me, what's up with the whole of
you found any more information? Is that people actually want to see this, and nobody's ever wanted to see one of my movies before.
When you do a good job of leading us down a path and then pulling the rug out, and then leading us down another path and doing the same thing, and it was done so masterfully that I was not angry at you. I was just like, oh, he got me again. All right, now let's do another thing. And you're presenting all of these ideas like this could be true or this, and I just I love that that. Too many times Hollywood movies are just like, no, you
always need to find the truth. Maybe in the last five minutes, we'll do a little twist and show you who Kaiser show as I really was. But no, I love that I can hold different ideas in my head.
Yeah, I wasn't. I didn't want to do the usual suspects approach. But one film that I really studied, like literally shot by shot, was Picnicked Hanging Rock. It's a beautiful story about a mystery at a geological location, and I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but I really studied how much story could they create with a minimum amount of exposition and execute an ending that should theoretically really upset people, but it is really emotionally satisfying.
I love that film so much. That was probably one of the ones that was the most influenced by I. Not that I could come anywhere close to that film, but.
Obviously you don't have the same cinematographer as Peter Weird did or anything. But it's you out there with the camera alone. Rather than I would not even ask you about your crew because I imagine it's you, it was me.
Most of the time. I did have help. My brother did the score. My friend Audie Carlisle, who's a wonderful documentary filmmaker her self, helped me with a few of the interviews. I think about twenty minutes of the film is her, but it's mostly the talking head stuff. But that's great because I could delegate some of those interviews in there. Like the guy who's most of the last
thirty minutes of the film. I had to shoot that an hour and a half as he was passing through town, and all the stuff in the hotel room that was done that night, all the stuff with him up on the mountain that was in like forty five minutes after the interviews. It took twelve thirteen years to make the movie, but there's like a twenty something minute section of the movie that was shot in twenty two hours.
Was he the one that you had to wait all those years to get?
No, he found me.
Yeah.
I was about to give up on finding one of the diggers, and he popped up in my chat while I was chatting with somebody saying I think I'm about to give up, and this other chat pops up and this guy says, I have a story to tell you. And then even greater luck because he had moved away. He was passing through town like the next spring, and I had a couple hours with him. I got lucky. If so many things hadn't gone perfectly, I would not be here. I pinched myself every day.
Well, and it's just so remarkably to me that this is your first feature length film and that you're in slam Dance, and it's just it's such a compelling and beautifully shot. I'm sorry I keep saying that, but it just looks so good, and like I said, it just keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time.
Thank you so much. Yeah, I did want to make it a little bit accessible this time, and I was worried about, like you said, the rug polls, but then I went, that's what happens to each thing, even if I want, I couldn't answer those if I wanted to, so I just had to make sure that it was of a piece of where I said, this is built into the story we're gonna And people kept trying to talk me into intercutting things, and I said, the approach of getting into somebody's story and forgetting that we left
the last thing dangling and getting sucked into their story and then getting spat out the other end, going wait a minute, what and then going into the next thing, and trying to just get people into one person headspace one after the other and then hope that it added up to more than the some of his parts at the end.
Have you seen this with an audience yet?
I showed it to a local film festival in Sisku County, so they're just a handful of people in there, none of whom I think heard about this. And this is before I knew I'd gotten into slam dance. Otherwise I might have waited for him premier status. Although it was nice to show it for the first time in the county, and I don't think they knew what they were about to see, and they had a lot of questions. P I'm really curious to play it in the city of
Mount Shasta. I played it about forty five minutes away. I'm really curious to see how this will play it to an audience in Mount Shasta. Am I gonna have to what's the film? Was it a Boonwell film or win war film? Where he he was like sticking rocks in his pockets as he went in there and somebody tried to light the screen on fire. I hope it's not one of those, but there are gonna be some people who are upset. I think they might be.
Upset, but that I'm also curious to hear if you get follow up as far as people saying I know the real story and coming up to you afterwards.
Even on the day that I was as I was sitting there exporting the movie for slam Dance, somebody slimmed to my DMS and said, hey, I know the people who dug the hole and gave me a lot of information that nobody should have known unless they were an insider. But then a completely different explanation of who did it or why, And they were very much these people have guns and they're serious and you need to be careful. And she was like, I haven't shown this anybody, right,
And I'm like, I'm sporting to slam Dance. I mean, he's screaming this in LA for the Oh I hope it's not like the Russian mob or something.
Well, it's the people that were taking those dinosaur eggs out of the hole.
Right, Yeah, that's all it was. They were just some it's in or something.
I did their call John Hammond, Yeah.
Yeah, oh, I hope. So those would be the cuddliest people that actually know. I think the people who did this probably, I don't think they were a bunch of crazy Ukrainians with machine guns?
Who did it?
That was like? Or no? Checkloads of Awkians? Anyway, I've lost count of how many different versions of the story that I've heard and how many different nightmares I've had about it.
Is there a good place for people to keep up with the movie online so we can actually hear if it's going to play other places or once it comes out on streaming or Blu ray or any of that.
Yeah, you can follow me on Instagram and on Facebook and things like that. I'm not super active on social media, but I'm trying to learn.
I am so excited for you to have your premiere, and I hope that other people click with this movie as much as I did. And I really appreciate you sending this my way.
Oh really, I thank you so much for saying that. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Of course, do you have your next project picked out? Any other mysteries you're going to tackle?
Am I ever going to find another mystery like this? I'm worried that I just peaked. I do have other ideas. I do have other stuff kicking around, a couple of feature dok ideas and a couple of narrative features. I guess it's going to be a bake off, but am I ever going to find another thing that is obsessed about with this? I feel like I'm gonna go into withdrawal when this is over.
Elijah, thank you so much for your time. This is great connecting with you.
Likewise, Thank you so much. Thanks, thanks stops t E exactly