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.
Sam PressmanFitzcarraldo 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.
Sam PressmanI 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.
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 PressmanFitzcarraldo 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.
Sam PressmanAt 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.
Sam Pressman