I had a chance to sit down with Jacob Gentry, Dan Bush and David Bruckner - the three directors of Magnolia Pictures' THE SIGNAL, which opens this weekend in theaters. What you might be surprised to find out is that these guys are all goofballs, yet the film is truly scary. We talked about sequels, DVD extras and just what exactly "the signal" is. NOTE: I had a hard time telling the voices apart when I transcribed the interview, so we will just pretend that there is only one guy talking, even though it was actually three.

BD: How does it work with three directors, who decides who does what?

Straws, no it was a knife fight "Beat It" style. We actually just decided from the beginning what section we would each grab, and then we were all responsible for the over all arc of the story. Kind of tag-team directors at any given point I may be directing Dan might be shooting and Jacob is in the other room prepping some blood FX or working with an actor setting up for the next thing. It was like Three Man and a Baby, except a lot funnier, but no Guttenberg.

BD: When you break down the three parts, the first is like a f**ked up love story, The second is like a dark and dirty sitcom, and the third is like a all out mind f*ck. Collectively it all makes perfect sense in its order. Was it hard to make it flow so well?

You have to just kind of dive in and hope that there is water. You go with your gut and try to make the scariest most rockin movie possible. We didn’t set out to go in different directions. It was more out of discussions of where certain beats need to be hit and not. If you take The Signal and write it out in a short story form, and you take it down to that level its going to make sense and it has a coherent vibe that feels like you watched one movie, then everything else is just a stylistic take on what’s going down, and what’s happening with the perspective of each character.

BD: The characters are real people dealing with a bad bad situation, how did you guys approach keeping them so grounded, when the world is falling apart around them?

In the main three characters one is the innocent, then the lunatic, and the guy who is predisposed to see through it. We thought Ambiguity on these three across the board. The one thing that we never would allow ourselves to do was to push anybody in to a place of judgment. There are very few people in this movie who look into The Signal and turn around and kill somebody.

Sometimes what they are doing is reacting to another person watching The Signal by killing them. Is that an action of The Signal or not? That is kind of the ambiguity of how real violence occurs, when you really have to defend yourself.

It’s happening to everyone in different ways and I think that it connects the audience with identifying with the ones they would most react like. It opens it up and makes it a more wide spread fear that everyone can relate to. Hopefully everyone is represented fairly. They are doing crazy stuff but you can kind of understand why they would be doing it. And that is making me the audience member question my own judgment in what I would do. It throws it back on the audience in a more participatory experience

BD: Where did the story come from?

I think the conceit of The Signal is inspired by the world around us. We are totally surrounded by media at all times, I have TV on my phone for crying out loud! There is so much sh*t that influence the way we are supposed think and feel and be. The Signal is exactly that, not good or bad, its just everywhere and in everyone’s lives. It’s up to the person to decide to pay attention or not. It’s a much grander story than this film allows.

BD: Does that mean we can expect a sequel?

We have been exploring the world of The Signal in many different ways. This movie is just three “transmissions”, and we have all kinds of them that we can deal with. We maybe have already even shot to film some others (hint hint) because there are millions. Some we have on paper some through a paint brush. The Signal pushes you in a direction that preys upon your fears and desire. It doesn’t have a personality; we don’t know what its agenda is, so we have talked about what we could do on a sequel with a bigger budget.

The this movie is a very personal story, and what the world starts to look like at the beginning. But how will the people start to organize under this pervasive signal is a few weeks later. How does society restructure itself, when the rules have changed in the world? That is where we would like to go.

BD: Did you guys anticipate such a strong studio push behind this small film when you were making it?

We didn’t shoot it with that in mind, but we got a pretty hefty love slap from Sundance. But I have heard many actors say that if they had any idea what this would become I may have made some different creative choices in the acting. The lesson is take risks and get crazy.

BD: There are some similarities with Steven King’s novel The Cell is it true that you were working on this before his?

We were officially in production of The Signal when his book came out. We didn’t have any knowledge about it and the King Fans have been sh*tting all over us on message boards. They are adamant that his came first and we ripped him off. We actually got a call from our music guy who had picked up the book and told us, its kind of like what you are doing!

BD: Last question for you, what went into the VFX and the design of The Signal itself that comes out of the TV

A guy we work with named Michael McReynolds designed it. He is really interested in patterns and frequencies. Mandelbrot is one that he really focused on, he just got obsessed with these facts. Like what flicker rates cause epileptic seizures, and such. He started to build a monster of sorts with images, some very violent. When you see the reds in there, those are real photographs of blood.

You never know what you are going to find in it, every single time I look at it I see different things. One of the things I would really love to do on the DVD is build a loop of The Signal. Go sit in your room, flip all the lights out and stare into it for 20 minutes. When you turn the light back on you are going to be in a completely different mental state. It even messed with our heads! The other half is the sound design, it’s monstrous!