Markian Tarasiuk is not a widely known player in the entertainment industry, but he’s getting there. The Canadian-born writer, actor, and director has grown an impressive resume of steady TV and movie gigs. He’s been in several rom-coms, horror, mysteries, and action projects and isn’t slowing down. His charm and good looks can guarantee him as a leading man star for years; however, he’s looking for something more. Tarasiuk holds inside of him a creative mind aching to showcase what he’s capable of as a writer and filmmaker. That’s why he has decided to put his untapped talent into his directorial feature debut, Hunting Matthew Nichols.
The film, directed by Tarasiuk, was written by the filmmaking alongside Sean Harris Oliver. It’s a refreshing look at the Found Footage genre that the Blair Witch Project started in 1999. In documentary style, Hunting Matthew Nichols follows Tara Nichols, played by Miranda MacDougall. Tara and Markian, played by the director, are searching to discover what happened to her brother Matthew (James Ross) and his friend Jordan (Issiah Bullbear). What starts as a simple disappearance story later evolves into supernatural elements that come off as authentic and frightening as some of the best True Crime documentaries around.
Tarasiuk premiered Hunting Matthew Nichols at this year’s Newport Beach Film Festival, and the film has already gained much buzz. I got a chance to talk to the young filmmaker about Hunting Matthew Nichols’s inception, his inspirations in telling such a compelling story, the world-building process, and what’s in store for this proposed franchise starter.
You started as an actor doing television, making made-for-TV movies, and stage acting. What was the one thing that pushed you to direct and write?
Markian Tarasiuk: I mean, I think everybody or every artist wants some form of control in their lives. Being an actor, you’re always at the beckoning call of somebody else’s vision of somebody else’s project. I see being an actor as exactly a tool to be used by the director to make their vision come true. When I was creating work as a teenager, even in theater school, we were the ones creating it in control all the time. That’s why I fell in love with just this art form, with movies, with theater, and just acting in general. That’s how I was really introduced and found the most fun doing it. So, developing Hunting Matthew Nichols was part of a huge effort of collaboration, having fun, getting back to my roots, and finding out why I got into this business in the first place. I really do see cinema as a director’s medium, where it is a vision that you get to collaborate, hire people, and come to life.
I totally agree with you on that.
Markian Tarasiuk: And so that’s why I really wanted to transition: to get into that lane again in my career where everything is based on what I love and what I love doing. This movie is definitely a reflection of that.
Speaking of Hunting Matthew Nichols, tell me about the inception of this movie.
Markian Tarasiuk: I’m a huge fan of True Crime documentaries, huge fan. I watch everyone that comes out on Netflix, and there’s always a new one in the top 10 these days. It’s incredibly popular, it’s crazy. So, I’m just a fan of that genre to begin with. I’m a huge fan of horror. When I was growing up, and still to this day, horror movies have stuck with me the most psychologically. I don’t know; something about it taps into something in my psyche that is everlasting.
Yeah, you can do jump scares and everything, but that’s temporary.
Markian Tarasiuk: It is temporary.
In psychological horror, you really get in the head of the characters and the monster.
Markian Tarasiuk: Everybody can see when watching this movie that the influences are definitely there. I used a lot of things that I love in terms of imagery and devices in this movie that I just love. So, having those two things of a horror fan, a True Crime Documentary fan, and as a teenager, I also made mockumentaries.
Those are things I would very much like to see.
Markian Tarasiuk: If you could find ’em on YouTube deep, deep, deep down somewhere when I was a teenager. So that all came from, “Okay, this is what I love doing, and these are things I love. So let’s develop something that I think is exciting for audiences.” That kind of blends that. I was watching a True Crime Doc; I forgot which one, and I shouldn’t name it if I did know where the interviewees were. I Googled it, and it was crazy. The subject matter of it was crazy. I said, “Oh my gosh, this case is insane.” I started Googling it while watching it, which I think many people will do.
Oh, I’ve done this several times.
Markian Tarasiuk: However, the interviewees and a lot of the subjects came out saying that they were edited out of context. They were mismatched, and they didn’t like how it was presented. The documentarians presented a different movie and documentary than the interviewees, or anybody else thought this case was, and a lot of it was made up. I thought, “If I never Googled this, I never would’ve known.”
Yeah, you just went off and took everything at face value.
Markian Tarasiuk: Totally. And I was like, “Well, that’s interesting. What if we build one from the ground up?” So that was also the part of the inception of this: “Let’s build this.” Because to me, those Netflix True Crime docs are so cliche at this point, and “You hit this at Mark 15, hit this at Mark—they’re all the same.
There will always be that one picture of everything was great, and then it wasn’t. “Negative shot.”
Markian Tarasiuk: Totally. And, “Sad sister, sad mom, we go home.” So, at the beginning of our movie, I see Hunting Matthew Nichols—a lot of people won’t see it this way—I see it as a satire to some degree.
Yeah, because some of the critical points at the movie’s beginning had the formula of, “Here’s a picture of the family as they’re walking in and talking about the place. I thought, “Is this kind of a comedy, or Where are we taking this?”
Markian Tarasiuk: Yeah, I mean, because to me, when I watched those True Crime docs, it was cliched at this point. I think that’s what I want to do with Hunting Matthew Nichols, which is with the audience members too—you lull themselves into a sense of security with those True Crime docs because people watch them as comfort food now.
I’ve been guilty of that as well.
Markian Tarasiuk: Which is a crazy thing, “Murdering and mayhem makes me calm. I love it on a Friday night with a glass of wine.
Or a warm glass of milk before going to bed.
[WE SHARED A COLLECTIVE LAUGH.]
Markian Tarasiuk: Exactly. So, I hope that’s what happens when this makes it out to hopefully a streamer. You have a glass of wine and some popcorn, and you’re like, “Oh, I know this story. I’ve seen it a hundred times.” Then we start shifting the whole thing on its head a little bit, and we start going somewhere different. That’s when, hopefully, the audience perks up, puts their phone down, and says, “Wait a minute,” with this movie.
So I read that you’re Ukrainian Canadian, is that correct?
Markian Tarasiuk: Yeah.
Was there anything in your past, maybe traditional lore or stories you heard from your family, that influenced how the mystery evolved into this supernatural element?
Markian Tarasiuk: Totally. I mean, we talk about it a little in the movie, where we go over the forest creatures—in researching and developing this movie, noticing that around the world, there is the same myth everywhere: a forest creature. We talk about it. It was created in the day to keep kids from running away into the forest and getting lost. That was the device that those stories were created by. But for me, as a Ukrainian, we, of course, have Baba Yaga, so that was the one I was told growing up. But I think further from that, I went to a Ukrainian Orthodox camp growing up, and again, you want to talk about formative years or things that were formative going to the Ukrainian camp. We had our own legend: this one of Crazy Pete, a guy with a rusty knife in the forest.
I might’ve heard of that one somewhere.
Markian Tarasiuk: Maybe. We heard it from somewhere else, but it was terrifying. I was terrified, and we didn’t go in. There was a crazy cabin in the woods, Pete’s cabin, and “Don’t go in there.” And it terrified me as a kid. And again, building the legend we discuss in this movie is just based on childhood stories like that. So when I talked to Sean [Harris Oliver], our writer, about it, I told him the story of Crazy Pete, and “I said, this is Roy McKenzie.” It’s like this nebulous can be any type of legend that everywhere seems to have. Why do we have that? It’s fun if those things are maybe real.
Speaking of the influence, obviously, there’s the Blair Witch Project namedrop that the kids who disappear are fans of. I feel like I got some Evil Dead with the cabin and then with the book they found in the library. It was very Necronomicon-esque. Were there any other influences from other projects?
Markian Tarasiuk: Yeah, Blair Witch is a big one. When I talk about formative movies, to me, that was a huge one. The same thing happened with Paranormal Activity, which was massive for me. I wasn’t around for the marketing of Blair Witch so much as I was for Paranormal Activity, but I was around for that as a teenager. There was that whole thing of, “Is it real? Is it not?” That really affected me, and I went to the theater to see it. I almost hoped it was real, even though I knew it wasn’t. That added to the excitement of my whole experience of that film, and that’s what I wanted to create with Hunting Matthew Nichols. I think to me another big one was The Ring. So, in the middle of our movie, we have a tape-watching scene.
I know exactly which one you’re talking about.
Markian Tarasiuk: And that really is that influence right there because it’s the point of no return once they watch that videotape. That’s what kind of summons and takes us forward through the rest of the movie.
Yeah, it changes it from, “What happened to these kids,” to, “There might be something supernatural and completely unexplainable.
Markian Tarasiuk: And it has to do with a videotape. I think why I love those projects so much and what I tried to tap into here is also a great sense of nostalgia. So, with the home videotapes, kind of these references to movies from the late 90s, early 2000s, and mid-2000s, that brings me a sense of nostalgia. This is fun to watch, but it also puts my frame of mind back to that day because it happened 22 years or 23 years ago. That’s where I want people’s minds to be, though. So it also feels personal in that.
So tell me about your process in directing this movie. What did you go through to give the film its creepy, atmospheric feel and to keep the mystery intriguing?
Markian Tarasiuk: I think that comes in our technical elements. So, when talking to Justin Sebastian, our cinematographer, I was really clear with him, and we did camera tests. We picked our LUTs [Look-Up Tables] before we set up the look of the film really early on because we wanted it to be very, very specific. Where it’s a little darker, it’s a little more cinematic in many ways than just picking up a digital camera and going. Which a lot of mockumentaries do or find footage of.
Some of those films give it this kind of crummy look.
Markian Tarasiuk: And I didn’t want it to be crummy. I wanted it to be cinematic, nice to watch, and haunting and foreboding. That was also our choice when picking the time of year we filmed. We went forward in December on Vancouver Island because it was gray, raining, and dark, and there was that sense of dread and feeling trapped. When you go to Vancouver Island, that’s what you feel; it gets intense during winter. So there are sometimes 60-plus days of no sun. That was always a character to me, and that was the film’s feeling and look. The forest is heavy and dark. So that was always paramount when we started visually into the project.
From that, I think it’s also in our score. I gave a lot of references to my composers, which are some of my favorite scores in film that have this foreboding sense. So I wanted that to always be present in the movie. I think that’s what gives us a sense of dread or foreboding or darkness. Those elements right away are those that I think audiences, visually and audio-wise, will really tap into.
Since this is your first film, it’s a psychological horror drama documentary-type deal.
Markian Tarasiuk: [Proudly] Yes. A lot of things. Thank you.
Are you planning on staying within this genre, or do you want to explore other genres? And if that’s the case, is there a core franchise you wish to tackle? A Freddy Krueger movie, a Jason movie, a Hellraiser movie, or anything like that?
Markian Tarasiuk: I mean, I would love to. When you’re a first-time filmmaker, everyone says, “Oh, this is your calling card. This now sets you up.” As an actor, I’ve done every genre, and I love the diversity of the work that I’ve done, from Rom-coms, TV movies, horror movies, dramas, and all over the place. That’s what’s exciting to me as an actor. It’s also exciting to me as a director; we’re trying to build out this “Hunting World,” which we call it. We have plans for two more films that use kind of the model that we’ve built out. So we’re trying to develop that.
And if Hunting Matthews Nichols is successful and hopefully people watch it, we can do that. We have many more stories to tell that take it even further when we have more money and resources. I want to focus on this because, again, like I said, I love the Mockumentary style. It’s so raw and visceral to me. But from that, I have one more horror romance project out right now, and the script’s finished. I think to answer your question, I love genre-bending. I love it. My movies are a lot of things because one of my favorite movies in the last five years is Barbarian.
That’s a great movie.
Markian Tarasiuk: It shifts three times, and I loved it. It was fun, it was exciting, and it made me guess what was coming next. I don’t know. I think that’s an exciting way to enter a movie, and that’s what excites me. And I hope that my stamp on anything will be you don’t know what to expect.
