So to watch that production was just the most insane vision of a filmmaker being unrelenting in his will to create. Learning more about that was what we wanted to do. To find out how in God's name anyone could do that.

So to watch that production was just the most insane vision of a filmmaker being unrelenting in his will to create. Learning more about that was what we wanted to do. To find out how in God's name anyone could do that.

Fitzcarraldo is a mad dreamer. He's willing to sacrifice everything in order to make his vision of an opera house. That metaphor of pulling the boat over the mountain is so integral to anyone making any creative effort. It's that universal Sisyphean struggle.

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.

Because of Walter, we did it the other way around. We also worked with an awesome sound designer named Will Patterson who just worked for four years on Terrence Malick's films. He did a lot of conceptual work to make the soundscapes in the jungle have this surreal quality, to blend these two films because a lot of the images are about this parallelism between the movies. The sound was very integral to fusing everything.

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.