Samsara
Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson have joined forces once again as director and producer on new movie Samsara.
The pair have worked together on Chronos and Baraka in the past and Samsara promises to be one of the most unique and beautiful movies that you will see on the big screen this year.
I caught up with the pair of them to chat about the film, the challenges of filming and editing and how they have found the response to the movie so far.
- Samsara is your latest movie project so can you tell me a little bit about the film?
Mark Magidson: Well it was envisaged as a non-verbal guided meditation based on the themes of birth, death and re-birth.
Ron Fricke: What Samsara is really about is the impermanence of things and that is why we open the film with the sand painting being created and at the end of the film it is destroyed. The film is about how people and places are kind of connected.
- Ron you are in the director's chair while Mark you are producer so where did this movie start for both of you - where did the idea for the movie come from?
RF: It is an evolution from out other works as did Chronos in the eighties and then we did Baraka in the early nineties and this is just an evolution of that.
These are projects that take big chunks of your life; this movie was five years and Baraka was three years, and there was some time in between them where we went through a process of trying to improve the filmmaking techniques technically and as filmmakers.
So it was an evolution really but based on a slightly different time-set but similar.
- How did you conceptualise a movie like this? Where was the starting point? And what were you looking to initially explore with this film?
MM: Well the flow and the interconnection of things and that really took place in the edit - we shot for three or three and a half years and we didn't really start the edit until the last year.
We edit with no sound and no music and in a Zen why where we go through small boxes of subject matter and we let image really dictate how we were cutting them together - we were trying to find the flow and the image. Then we would arrange the subject blocks to form the film.
- This is a movie that has been shot in dozens of countries over a long period of time so apart from it being a bit of a logistical problem what other challenges did you face during filming?
RF: We had issues location by location - they were things that we had done before but it doesn't get easier as time goes by.
There are a lot of access issues that we didn't have twenty years ago as it is harder to access locations now than it ever was. It is harder to move film spots over boarders without it being delayed.
The overarching challenge when you are doing a project for five years is really the focus and the stamina of getting it done and getting it done to a level of excellence.
- Were there any locations that you found to particularly difficult to shoot in?
MM: Well there was one that was pretty intense and it was the volcano in Indonesia as it was a sulphur mine.
We were right down in the heart of it where they were harvesting the sulphur and loading it onto the basket.
Then all of a sudden the wind changed and this gaseous cloud of sulphuric acid that blinded us and we couldn't breathe either so that was pretty intense.
- And were there any places that you wanted to shoot in but were unable to?
RF: We were really close to going to North Korea for two years we tried and we felt like we got close but we just couldn't push it over the hump.
So that was really the big one that got away for us. Most of the other ones we were able to hang in there and get access to.
- The movie was shot completely in 70mm so why was the choice made to shoot this way?
RF: Technically it is about 65mm. We are nit working with actors or dialogue or a real script it is the locations that are the real characters and we wanted a format that would really bring out the essence of those landscapes that we were shooting.
You just cannot beat 65mm or 70mm film for the quality that is there in the detail and the sharpness.
- You have talked about the editing process already but if I could just return to it. You have years of footage how did you go about making those difficult cuts?
MM: Well we had structurally put the film together as we had the structural component of the sand painting - the creating and the destruction of the sand painting as bookends. And then around that there were a number of ways that the film could have gone.
We edited blocks of linked material such as organic images, images of nature without any people in them, or manufacturing images, or food processing images and we editing those into blocks.
We then experimented by moving those blocks around until we found what we found was the optimal flow and structure for the film.
We then connected those sequences together and the goal was to make it feel seamless.
- The movie sees the pair of you reunite so how find working with him?
MM: Well we have done three films together now and we do seem to work well together.
RF: We are just fighting all of the time and beating each other up (laughs).
- How have you found the early response to the movie because it is unlike anything else that has been released so far this year?
MM: It has been very good. They can't accuse us of writing bad dialogue or anything like that. Audiences are really mesmerised by the imagery as they are not use to seeing that quality.
- And what do you hope that people take away from the film when they watch it?
RF: Well we hope that they will feel a connection to the life experiences of people around the world and realise that everyone is going through the same thing and you see that in this different countries and cultures.
- Finally what's next for you?
RF: Oh gosh there is another big world epic non-verbal guided mediation film out there as the world is just loaded with beautiful images - there are some wonderful things out there.
Samsara is released 31st August.