Wendy — or more specifically the story of Peter Pan — has been one you’ve been wanting to tell for a really long time. How does it feel now that it’s completed and about to be released into the world?

[laughs] It’s a huge relief, and, you know, it’s really surreal. We — me and my sister, Eliza, our cast, and our crew — really stepped out of the world in the most epic way to tell this story. We really entered into the story as we were making it. And, so, coming back to the real world, and sorta letting people into this adventure that’s been the last seven years of my life is… I don’t know, it’s pretty beautiful honestly. It’s really great to see how much of our experience is coming through the film and connecting with people.

On that topic, the production of the film seems just as adventurous as the one that plays out on screen. In some ways, maybe due to the production’s length and some of its challenges, I can’t help but think of those infamous shoots like Apocalypse Now or Fitzcarraldo. Did you have anyone there documenting the process as it happened?

Kind of. But also not really. I was very adamant that that be the case.

We invite a lot of chaos into our process. We work with a lot of unpredictable elements. When you’re working in nature, with kids, with water, with an active volcano, it’s an athletic event. You show up on set every day and your opponent slugs you in the face, and then you improvise and recover and try to figure out how to survive. And my experience is that the movies are about those films are so amazing — they’re some of my favorite movies, like Burden of Dreams. I never wanted that to happen because the moment you start to fetishize something going wrong on set, you stop focusing on the film that you’re trying to make.

We very easily could’ve gotten really lost in just how spectacularly difficult it was to make this movie. I always felt like that would’ve distracted us from putting 100% of our energy — as we needed to — into actually finishing the film and getting it right.

Wendy certainly presented some new challenges, but a few of them you traversed with Beasts of the Southern Wild. Were there any ways in which Beasts prepared you for this shoot?

I thought it would have, but I was wrong. I was totally wrong.

I think probably the biggest thing, obviously, is working with children, which I’ve done on a lot of films. But the children on this film were a particular breed of kid. You know, we wanted to find kinds who would actually run away with Peter Pan. Those aren’t kids who necessary do what you tell them to, and they were very free spirited, very wild, very spontaneous, and if they weren’t having fun, there was absolutely nothing you could do to get them to act in your scene. Also, just exponentially, not just having one kid, but having seven kids on set at the same time, on the volcano, on the water.

It was an unreal challenge to get that to work. The thing I’ve learned is that every kid, every actor is their own universe. There’s really very few precedents of [a certain] method that can be applied between multiple people. You have to sort of get to know each individual and learn how to bring the best out of them.

You co-wrote the script with your sister, Eliza, who you mentioned earlier. You’ve worked with her in different capacities on your short Glory at Sea and your first feature Beasts of the Southern Wild, but Wendy marks the first official team-up as writers. What was it like collaborating with her as a writer, and what unique edge did Eliza bring to the story?

The story very much emerged from the two of us — and I think it was even more precious to her in many ways. Eliza, even more than me, really personifies living by her own rules. Her pack of Lost Boys is a pack of 15 dogs, and she lives a very unique lifestyle that she’s very principled about and believes in. She has an incredible relationship with and admiration for nature, and she has a really good understanding of it.

Early on, in the conception, how we were going to express this movie had a lot to do with taking what was fairy magic and and fantasy magic in the original text and turning that into real magic, into real natural events that happen and places that are miraculous and blow your mind. The collaboration was on every little element of the film, but certainly her perspective on how nature can be just as magical and awe-inspiring as pixie dust or mermaids or flying was something that she brought to the table that always blew my mind.

On the topic of magic, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about your work is how you always include a bit of mythology and mythological creatures into your features. And with Wendy, one of the unique aspects that really sets it apart from other Pan tellings, is the creature “The Mother.” How did that formulate and what was the process to creating this beautiful creature?

Well, also going back to my sister, that was very much her baby, and for me and for her, we don’t want to synthesize anything. We didn’t want to build an adventure in a computer. We wanted to shoot real things. This creature, we got to know to through writing the film, and we wanted her to exist. We had this relationship with her, and so we tried to physically build the actual animal at the scale it would be, which was thirty to forty feet.

We wanted to shoot her in the ocean, and we wanted her to be operated by live divers, you know, not like by a robot that you control with a video game controller. We wanted there to be physical people on air or underwater operating the lights, operating her. We really wanted to push the limits of what could be done, and it was a massive massive undertaking — and it ended up taking multiple forms.

We made the creature, but we also made a miniature to shoot more of the locomotion of the creature because [laughs] we found out very quickly that you can’t move a thirty-five foot sea creature unless you have thirty-five foot sea creature muscles. So, we really wanted to make a creature that called back to the mythic creatures of our childhood, like The Neverending Story or Willow, these films where you know you’re looking at something real and you know it was created by an artist and not just made in a digital world. We really wanted to callback to those films to bring her to life.

Visually, I can see a lot of early Malick and Herzog in your style, vision, and quest to explore poetic truths. Were there any films or filmmakers that you used as inspiration for this particular project?

Yeah, I think there were two very radically different worlds that we drew a lot from. One, like I was saying, had to do with the VHS collection that was in my basement as a kid, you know. So looking at, honestly, a lot of Spielberg films. E.T. was a huge influence. Jaws just for the adventure of the filmmaking. And, like I mentioned, some of these fantasy stories that were kinda important to us as kids.

A lot of influences are documentary filmmakers, especially Les Blank. He’s a huge filmmaker for me. He actually made the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, but his early documentaries in Louisiana, the aesthetic and the camerawork and the sort of warmth and the feeling that he brings to his subjects, and the realism of that. I’m also a huge disciple of Cassavetes in terms of what he did with performance, and his methods of trying to get a real feeling of a reality and organic acting.

With this film, we were always trying to make those two worlds touch. In some ways, that’s very very hard because the easiest way to get real performances and a sense of organic reality is to have very few people around, just it be you and the actors and not let the weather be a factor. So we really pushed ourselves to try to see if we could kind of create this sense of realism in the framework of this epic story and spectacular locations. That kind of became the challenge of the film.

You’ve shot all your films in 16mm. What is it about that film stock in particular that captures that quality and that magic you’re looking for?

Well, you know, film is magic to me. How light shines on this chemical substance and then burns into it is very magical. The way that it tricks your eye is very magical. I think for me, aside from just the beauty and the magic of film, I find there to be real advantages to it, in terms of how I shoot locations. When you’re shooting very difficult, inaccessible locations where you have no ability to control light when you’re on the water, or if you have very bright direct sunlight blasting at your characters, there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s something to shooting on film, especially on 16 where the camera is very agile; it’s a great medium to take into hostile environments and still be able to capture beautiful images because you don’t need to bring as much lighting equipment to try to maintain control over that. You also don’t have the terror of a hard drive around an ocean, because, you know, if a drop of water hits that, what’s going to happen? It’s how I’ve always shot, and I love the medium. I love the way that it dictates the process on set, and also just how resilient it is under difficult circumstances.

I know the film is just about to come out, and it’s been so long that you probably want a breather, but do you have anything else lined up next or a new story you’re excited to tell?

Always, always. The list of films I have to make in my life will never be finished — especially if I’m taking this long to make them — but, yeah, I know what I want to do next. It’s not something I can put into words really. It’s similar to how I set out on this one; it’s very different and not quite as epic. I like approaching a film like it’s an exploration of an unknown continent. So, I kind of know why I want to do it and who I want to do it with and where it begins, and then the journey to the end will be one that’s just as surprising to me as anybody else. And so, yeah, I can’t wait until the next adventure.