When 20 year old Kelly is startled awake late at night during a violent hurricane, she discovers she's not alone; a ravenous tiger is stalking her through the halls of her home. Trapped inside with every door and window boarded up, her stepfather is nowhere to be found, Kelly fights frantically to save her life and her younger brother Tom from the killer beast.

BD: When did you come on as director? Before filming, or during?

CB: I came on before any casting or scouting had been started. I had just premiered my first film, QUID PRO QUO, at Sundance, when I was fortunate to be sent the script to BURNING BRIGHT. It came attached to an email from my manager. All she said was, “There’s a tiger...” I had to pitch to get the job.

BD: What happened, how did you come aboard?

CB: Originally James Marsh was attached to direct. He had fallen out, I think he had a mini-series he wanted to do in London, and our producer, David Higgins, had seen QUID and sent my manager the script. I remember being so excited by the visual potentials alone. And it was a page turner. I thought it was incredibly ambitious but because the script riveted me, I knew it would ultimately work. That’s a testament to the writers, Christine Coyle Johnson & Julie Prendiville Roux. And David, who originated the story.

BD: Did you add anything to the existing script?

CB: Before we started shooting we had two or three script meetings. I added some ideas, but nothing structurally significant. At least I wouldn’t call anything I added significant. All the big set pieces were already envisioned. When we started shooting we learned quickly that the tiger will rewrite your script. In one scene he was supposed to put his front paws on the kitchen island and raise himself up to peer around the room. I called action and suddenly the tiger was leaping onto the stove and crashing into the hanging pots. We went with the tiger’s version.

BD: Was it hard mixing the two elements of a hurricane and a tiger into one suspenseful film?

CB: Not once I realized the two are really the same idea -- just unbridled Nature. Suddenly then you’re not talking about good and evil. It’s actually more fearsome than that. Because you can’t read it. I think that’s why the hockey mask is such a classic horror image -- that total absence of emotional cues -- it’s just a force coming at you with a Benihana knife. You start to sense that the hockey mask itself has an intelligence that you can’t read. And that really creeps me out. I hooked into this story when I understood that tigers and hurricanes are just masks for the same merciless Nature. When you first encounter the premise of this movie, it can seem preposterous -- to be trapped in a house with a tiger during a hurricane -- but the hurricane is integral to explaining how that happened. In fact, I think my job is to take your hand and lead you in and show you how it happened, how it’s real, and if I do everything right, and you say, “Okay, now I get it,” then at some point it feels real enough for me to let go, and sort of say, “Okay, you’re on your own from here on.” And at that point, as my editor Miklos Wright likes to say, the movie takes over.

BD: What was the hardest part in filming BURNING BRIGHT?

CB: All of it. It was incredibly ambitious for the budget. You can’t drop the ball on any element -- casting, location, music, sound design -- especially the tiger itself. Making a movie is always unpredictable, but this was especially so. As the trainer, Brian McMillan, liked to remind me, he himself had no idea what the tiger was going to do in any given situation. I would say, “What will happen if I trap the tiger between a hall of mirrors?” (which we did) -- and he’d tell me straight up he had no idea. There is no predicting what a tiger will do. There were a couple times the tiger got loose on the set. But the crew was prepared for that. There’s a lot of preparation and experience there. Brian is the best. But the point is it’s all challenging.

BD: How big of a role does the autistic brother have?

CB: There are only three main characters, so you can imagine the brother’s role is very important. I would argue his autism is not what ultimately defines him, though. You certainly have to introduce his condition, as you would, say, a character who only spoke French. But as in life, autism is not the sum of a person. I watched a few movies -- TV movies -- that portrayed autism very poorly, I thought. In our movie, the brother is played by Charlie Tahan, a very gifted actor we saw on a tape sent to us in Florida, from New York. He got the part because of what he was doing when the casting director was talking to him off-camera. He was just listening. You couldn’t take your eyes off his face. That quality gets closer to what I thought was actually important to that character.

BD: How was it working with the tiger? Did the tiger ever work WITH any of the actors on set?

CB: The tigers -- there were three, Katie, Sheka and Kizmet -- did not work with the actors, due to the aggressive nature of the performances we were trying to get. We shot on a sound stage in Florida, next to the Universal theme park. Sometimes we were shooting the tiger on green screen and the actors on the set, and sometimes it was the reverse. But never the same days. We shot on a two story house built inside a sound stage, but that’s a pretty confined place to be moving around with three very large tigers. It was a locked set and some of our crew chose to leave the building before the tigers were let onto the set for a shot, and not return until the shot was over and they were back in their enclosure. And I understood why. Others, like our camera crew, worked face-to-face with the tigers for every shot because we had to get those shots. And again, you just can’t predict what’s going to happen. The trainers always want to do the crazy aggressive stuff last (in the shoot) because once a cat gets juiced up, you can’t really work with them again for awhile. For me the scariest moment was actually hearing the tiger’s warning growl when it feels you’re about to take it’s meal -- that’s its most scary sound. When you hear it your body records it forever in the balls of your feet. Thankfully nobody ever got hurt, including the tigers.

BD: How much post work needs to be done, was there a lot of CG?

CB: There is virtually no CG in this movie -- all of it is composite. The only CG we did involved sweetening the tiger’s natural salivation. Other than that, it’s all 2D and composite work. I’m actually very proud of the fact that our tiger is 100% real -- we did this old school. I don’t believe an audience ever truly buys a CGI performance. They will buy CGI sets, incidental props, etc. -- yes. But not a CGI performance. I think the human eye knows when it is seeing something that never existed in real space. And I can assure you what you see happening in the movie very much happened in real space.

BD: How bloody and violent is it?

CB: This is a thriller -- with horror underpinnings, perhaps, but it’s not a horror movie, strictly speaking -- so there is some but not a lot of gore until the end. When it does happen, it’s fairly gory. We’re still not sure if the ratings board is going to let us get away with what we have. And the funny thing is, at first I thought the gore we shot was not realistic enough. But at our first test screening I couldn’t believe how virtually everybody was totally repulsed by it! They wanted it to stop. I think it’s because even though we had used prosthetics, the tiger was still -- again -- 100% real. And therefore what happens very much comes off as disturbing. By the time the gag happens (so to speak) you haven’t been lulled into that CG complacency. My visual effects supervisor, Dan Schmit, actually promoted the concept of shooting as much “in-camera” as we could -- even though it lessened his CG work. And it benefited the movie enormously. I think that’s the mark of good VFX. While it’s surprisingly easy to use gags and gore to get people squirming, it’s much better when you get them genuinely filled with dread first.

BD: I’ve heard Briana is great to work with, and she tells me BURNING is her favorite film she’s worked on, how was your experience with her?

CB: Briana was pitch perfect, on camera and off. She’s an extremely gifted actor. And we just trusted each other, I think. We had a rehearsal period, which helped us develop a shorthand very quickly -- when we were shooting I could say a single word to her and she would know exactly where I was thinking of going, and why -- so it was a very successful collaboration. She also happens to be an accomplished dancer (obvious to anyone who saw STEP UP 2). She turned her struggle with the tiger -- the whole second and third act -- into something that’s both savage and surprisingly nimble -- exactly what you’d think going fifteen rounds with a tiger would be. There is a scene where she attempts to escape the tiger by climbing up a fifteen foot laundry chute and except for the work she did on wires, she probably only moved no more than twelve inches (in reality). But she makes you believe it, and she takes you up and down that sweaty laundry chute with the tiger trying to get her. It’s terrifying to watch.

BD: Is there any talk of a sequel?

CB: So far none. What would it be?

BD: How did the test screenings go, did you have to do any additional shooting?

CB: Test screenings are very instructive. Especially at this point in my career, I become a chemistry student -- I sit there and ask why is the audience reacting this way in this moment? what is that moment doing for them? what if we cut three more frames? It’s all very instructive. Our first test screening told us the audience was much more interested in the tiger’s back story than we had anticipated. So we were able to shoot a scene with Meatloaf doing a cameo that turned out very well. That was an additional scene, but there was no reshoot of anything previously filmed. That said, I will go on record and say that reshoots ought to be line items in film budgets. In fact, for Woody Allen I think they are. But what we did to improve our odds of getting what we needed out of the gates was we did not attempt to complete the tigers during principal photography. Instead, we set aside our green screen tiger days so that we could edit the film for awhile and discover exactly what was needed to complete it. It was a very successful strategy.

BD: Whats the release plans as of right now?

CB: Lionsgate has first crack, so we’ll let you know their release plans when they see the finished film. As it happens I’m off in about fifteen minutes to lay in the final end credit design.

BD: What’s next for you? More horror?

CB: Horror is very interesting to me -- though as I say, I don’t call this last one a horror movie. But it pointed me in that direction, and my writing is now focused there. I have a project I’ve developed and we’re about to take that script out to studios. We’re also looking for good horror scripts. The thing I ask myself is where can the genre go that’s new and exciting? What can I add? In this last movie David Higgins saw an image of a tiger on a kitchen island -- and that was new, and it was compelling. You take a risk by trying something that hasn’t quite been seen before, but isn’t that the important thing?