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.
Sam PressmanThe 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.
Sam PressmanThere 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.
Sam PressmanIt's organic. It's like a river. One stream comes in and it meets another stream and becomes the Amazon.
Sam PressmanThe 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.
Sam PressmanBecause 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.
Sam Pressman