The biggest lesson we took was when Werner [Herzog] said in a meeting with us that the mother of all challenges is to get your film seen in theater. To finally share this film has been so gratifying. The way audiences have responded, too.

I worked on "Tree of Life." It was just magical. It was like a little family. A fleeting, beautiful alliance to forge something meaningful. It was amazing, like a transcendental experience to be on the set.

It was Herzog, the man himself. He was so welcoming and kind and not at all the persona you'd seen in a magazine, or in "Burden of Dreams" for that matter. I'd shot the behind-the-scenes for "Bad Lieutenant." It was a very normal production. Nothing like "Burden of Dreams."

What we definitely agree with Walter on is that filmmaking is teamwork. It's one of the only arts that is truly based in the work of a team. Anyway, Werner he told us a lot of practical things. How to hang a hammock. He'd circle a map and give us a notebook with directions to get to certain places that were out of the way. He told us to drink the river water and not use purifications tactics that only "New Age assholes" used. He said that if we saw piranhas, we should jump in and swim with them. We did all of this. We took his word as gospel.

The biggest lesson we took was when Werner [Herzog] said in a meeting with us that the mother of all challenges is to get your film seen in theater. To finally share this film has been so gratifying. The way audiences have responded, too.

At one point, we were stuck at the border of Peru and Colombia and met this large Haitian population that was stranded there without passports and couldn't move. We had this revelation that, as tourists, we were so free to move, and here was this other population who couldn't cross borders.

Herzog and Malick both have this very unique naturalist intentionality to their process. It's about creating the mood, creating the focus and having discipline, but not prescribing what the performance was supposed to be. Neither of them are really directing their actors into a performance.