How early on in the shooting did you get those sections nailed down?

MM: I think that was pretty early on. You know, our very first shoot was New Orleans, the Katrina aftermath, which was a little more than a year after the event. I think then we went over there to India fairly early on, and like Ron said it really took a lot of pressure off having that. And having been through the Baraka experience where you’re basically making the film in the editing process a lot, you don’t have a detailed shooting script or layout of a scene-to-scene in the film at all, there’s nothing like that. It’s just trusting that you’re going to find a way to make it work though building these sequences up that are all movable, and finding the way that they can fit together in the edit. We were just really relaxed about it this time.

Given how intuitive the shooting process is, what is your approach in the editing room? How do you bridge the gap from raw footage to story?

MM: There’s a lot of little elements to it that are storytelling elements. There’s the sand painting which we’ve talked about. We introduce the "Thousand Hands" performance briefly towards the beginning; we pay it off at the end. There are musical moments that are introduced at the beginning that are kind of expanded and developed at the end. They’re really storytelling elements that maybe you see them in different ways in feature films, you know with dialogue or story components, but that’s what you do in a non-verbal film. To make it feel like you’ve been on a journey and that the journey concludes at the end of the film.

What were the logistics of shooting 70mm, going into all these different countries? How do you get your film processed — were you seeing footage right away?

MM: Yeah, there’s no rushes. [laughs] We’ve done this a while. You know, this is the third time we’ve shot 70mm film [Baraka and 1985’s Chronos also used the format]. I can say without hesitation that it’s never been more difficult moving film stock in and out, across borders, in and out of locations then it is now. It’s really hard to do it. Digital would be much easier. But digital just wasn’t ready for us in 2007 when we started. The digital standard was 2K at that time. You know, digital’s just constantly undergoing obsolescence every 12 months or something. I mean it is at a point now where it’s a level of quality that would really make you think twice before saying no, but here we are. We did it in 70mm. You have to bring back the imagery in a format that’s gonna really stand up over time, and there’s just nothing like 65mm negative to do that. [70mm projects shoot on 65mm-wide negative stock, while the finished product is traditionally projected on 70mm film.]