There were the classic challenges any tourist faces, like getting lost, getting sick, losing things, getting in a fight... All these things happened numerous times. The only point of the trip that was defiantly challenging was a point that's not actually in our film.

The lessons learned on a pure practical production standpoint were immense. It instilled a faith that you can accomplish what you want if you just believe and stick together and continue to work at it. In that sense, it gives me the confidence to go into the next project with the belief that we can do it. This was an experiment in whether you can find a film without a singular conceit.

It's organic. It's like a river. One stream comes in and it meets another stream and becomes the Amazon.

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.

Fitzcarraldo is that metonymic character that's unwilling to give up on his dreams. Meeting Walter was the point in which all of these dreams coalesced into a very real person with a very real story.

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.

First, the three of us holed up in winter in a cabin and took the 500 hours down to twelve hours. Then we found an editor, Lambis Haralambidis. He took that twelve hours and brought it to five. Then we get together and started taking the ax and chopping off different parts of our film.