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.

Malick is so far on the other side of the spectrum in terms of his character. Malick is a complete recluse, and not at all driven by ego or championing who he is as an individual. It's all about the art. Whereas Herzog is constantly placing himself into the engine. Malick is such a gentle poet.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.