Director Randy Moore was worried that his new psychological horror film, Escape from Tomorrow, might run into serious legal troubles with Disney for having been secretly shot within its theme parks without permission, but the movie managed to make it out to viewers over the weekend without trouble. Yet despite all the attention his film is receiving, Moore admits in a behind-the-scenes interview with Vice that the movie grew into something far bigger than he had initially intended. He had wanted to shoot the picture quickly with a few friends, but he says that it quickly “snowballed into this kind of gargantuan effort.” Though Moore may have been asking for trouble, he seems to have largely avoided it. There’s been no outcry from Disney, and even while shooting at the theme parks, Moore’s crew never had a major problem. “We were hiding in plain sight,” Roy Abramsohn, the film’s lead actor, tells Vice. “No one was looking for a movie shoot.” Because they didn’t bring in anything that obviously looked like filming gear and stuck to common cameras and hidden microphones, Disney’s security team never saw anything an ordinary park visitor might bring, even when checking through their bags.
In its behind-the-scenes look at the film, Vice also speaks with artists Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy and writer Jonathan Lethem about their thoughts on the film. Lethem calls Moore’s invasion of Disney’s parks a “very, very important and radical gesture.” Moore’s actual thoughts on Disney appear to be mixed, and not quite as negative as one might guess: he says that he has fond memories of the parks from childhood, but he’s now curious about the fanfare that surrounds them. “There’s no other place like it in America,” Moore says of the parks. “I just wanted to really explore that feeling people have and that mania … almost like they’re going off the cliff together.”
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