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Creating a film that looks like The Forbidden Room (2015) takes a lot of forward-thinking. Almost everything that defines the film is crafted in post-production, from the worn-out look that gives the footage the decaying feeling of 80 year-old film to the incredible editing that pieces thousands of tiny shots and scenes together in a cinematic menagerie.

A few years ago, Maddin created an art installation called “Hauntings,” recreating scenes from lost films with the help of some prominent arthouse actors. Furthering that, he began discovering films that were entirely lost over the years (or were conceived but never made) and decided to make them according to his re-imagination. This process spawned The Forbidden Room.

Shooting The Forbidden Room didn’t provide the opportunity for many effects to be captured while shooting. Much of the project was shot in public places (the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Centre PHI in Montreal) as part of art installation and related media project “Seances,” recorded in front of live audiences of onlookers. They could utilize some rear-projection techniques and in-camera effects, but that was all. It was the very first film director Guy Maddin shot entirely on digital, and he told CinemaScope, “The raw video looked hideous. I really did not have my mojo when shooting.”

As they continued, his dispiritedness grew. The film is about texture, light, shadow, and disorientation. Nothing resembling of the film’s final product existed on the raw footage, and his confidence that it could be turned into something useful waned. Fortunately, that’s where co-director Evan Johnson came in.

Johnson is a former student of Maddin’s, and the two have been collaborating for 15 years. After studying Technicolor (specifically, the way it decays) and learning about the ways color fades in various film stocks, they textured and colored the rushes for everything they shot. But as for how they did specific effects, Johnson is secretive: “That year in cinema, 1927, when talkies started to arrive, that in-between period. There was a proper transition between silent film and talking pictures, and it feels like the transition between analogue film and digital has been confused, not in an exciting way. I guess there was agony back then as well. We wanted to aestheticize this transitional moment, I guess. I won’t tell you how I did it, I really won’t. I discovered it by accident, and I’d never seen it done. The technique is similar to data moshing, which people know how to do, by removing frames, but it’s annoying…but yeah, it’s an Adobe After Effects series of techniques that I accidentally put together.”

The result is something believably grimy and ancient-looking, filmed with modern technology. This is the digital age—filmmakers can make anything look any way they want with the right tools and skills.

The filmmakers further discussed how they shot with sound, despite being in a public setting full of endless human vocal noise. This brought about loud, obnoxious recordings and required a lot of work on the sound editor’s part. A festival was taking place one day, and a section of the film’s dialogue was recorded with Dire Strait’s “Sultans of Swing” playing loudly in the background. It was mostly removed in post, but still audible if you know where to look. Fortunately, within the pool of insanity that is The Forbidden Room, it’s likely nobody would notice.

Serious chops on the part of editor John Gurdebeke were required to fabricate the final result. Gurdebeke had worked with Maddin on numerous features and shorts over the past 15 years, and the two mesh artistically. All these filmmaking efforts involved turned apparently lackluster original footage into something remarkable. As Way Too Indie notes, the team “put the bulk of their efforts into the post-production process, taking the digitally shot footage and dousing it with every possible imperfection or antiquated method from both analog and digital eras: two-strip Technicolor, warped stock, burn marks, title cards, data moshing, colour dyes, and whatever else they could pull out from this cinematic stew they conjured up.”

Maddin gives all props to Johnson for the film’s visual effects, claiming he doesn’t understand how most of them were made himself. If that’s true, the student has become the teacher, and this unique directorial collaboration likely won’t be the last we see.