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one day
the storm's gonna blow
the ground's gonna sink
and the water is gonna rise up so high
ain't gonna be no bathtub
just a whole bunch of water
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who the man
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so the origins of this thing was us
hanging out in this abandoned squash
court you know 24 hours a day animating
meat and like building things out of
bones and just sort of feeling like this
was the utopia you know creating an
island populating it with your friends
you know having your life just be
this sort of process of just building
something out of nothing and
trying to create art out of whatever was
around
there's a bunch of ideas that kind of
came out of a bunch of conversations
that we had
let's just make the act of making the
films an adventure so that in the
process of making these films we
actually go and experience a life that
kind of like takes us to our limits and
puts us in really harrowing situations
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these ideas that we talked about about
doing kind of grassroots filmmaking
doing sort of this community-based
um collaborative filmmaking it didn't
start in new orleans but it really
started to work there where it wasn't
working in other in other places the
whole universe depends on everything
fitting together just right
you know when i was sort of deciding
that i was going to stay in new orleans
and move there you're like telling your
parents friends oh moving to new orleans
and you get this sort of you know why
would you go there or they shouldn't
rebuild that place it's sinking no one
should live there it's responsible to
live there and i sort of wanted to
make a film that was celebrating
that group of people that i knew and
loved down there that were rebuilding
and refusing to get pushed out of their
homes
why do people stand when you know
that the place you live in is doomed or
you know that a person you care about
very much or you're in a relationship
with is like a sinking ship i think in
the end it's like the film definitely
answers that question but i don't think
that
ben knew the answer that question at the
beginning of it you know so it's it's
usually good to kind of like
i see something in my world that doesn't
quite make sense to me but which i find
very compelling
and now i'm just gonna go spend the next
like four or five years trying to figure
out like
what the answer to that is come up with
my own answer and then try to
communicate it
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so we're in uh we're in montague
louisiana which is just about
at the end of the map um when i got here
i sort of knew um that this was
you know this was the place where that
really kind of reflected the story we
were trying to tell we set up basically
our production office was here in the
convenience store uh the convenience
store turned into you know a bunch of
computers uh basically people typing and
and uh you know and then the back the
back 16 wheeler repair shop turned into
the art department we had our wardrobe
back there i had my office in there you
know we squeezed the whole operation
into this place and it was uh
i don't know this was home
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the way that we work is you know instead
of kind of um
finishing a script and having it be this
kind of holy document that then gets
executed line by line you know the
script when we're
the script is is being written while
we're casting and finding places and you
know it's a very fluid
thing and so it gives us the ability to
you know when we find someone or a
person or a place that's that's
kind of speaks to us and feels like it
like it has the
essence of the story we were able to
incorporate that that sort of became the
method so the production model emerges
from that and i think a lot of the
stories emerge from that too this sense
of sort of
communities joining arms and going up
against something that seems impossible
is sort of an experience that we all had
making the early films and making this
one and then the stories are kind of
reflecting
that notion that as a community you can
kind of
challenge some pretty fierce odds
the day we started filming
the bp thing happened and
it was just weird because we had gone
down to you know the remote most remote
part of america that we could possibly
find okay all ready to make our movie
and then all of a sudden like it's like
the army descended you know it's like at
times it felt like making a film in the
middle of like a war zone you know
all the stuff that had inspired ben to
write the film initially about like the
erosion and the way that that part of
the country is like falling
literally into the water was real and he
had kind of made an exaggerated version
of it to kind of turn it into you know
fantasy story and then like reality
caught up with us and it was like oh my
god this is actually worse than what's
in our film
yeah so uh
this empty space right here was kind of
an important location because uh
this is where my truck blew up this one
day my sister came down uh in the truck
and it was like smoking black and we
pulled it up here and she walked out and
got about 20 feet away and we heard this
boom and the whole thing just exploded
right here in the yard
we cut the back of the truck off and
turned that into uh the boat that kind
of that they that they travel around on
in the film
we're sort of trying to live the movie
as we make it and so anything that
happens to us we're trying to kind of
incorporate that into the story and into
the way we build things and um you know
the truck was probably the best example
of that
all right
this is the high security uh
you know
you have to have a special fingerprint
in order to pull this bolt out
and uh
yeah so i think i think this is the
scenic department right here
that's where we did all our painting
uh
having the producers
in the same structure as the painters
and all that it's kind of essential to
the way that we work there's no kind of
hierarchy it's like everybody you know
when the painters need 15 people they
run in the office and all the producers
come back and throw paint on stuff and
that's kind of how things work
we wanted the film to be like an
athletic event and have to be physical
and sweaty and uh
you know to kind of get that sort of
muscle onto the screen um
and you know i don't know that's like
that's what's fun about making stuff is
is is pushing yourself uh physically
like i think i i don't think i'll ever
end up making a beach resort movie i
just am not that interested this here
is an aurochs a fierce mean creature
that walked the face of the earth back
when we all lived in the caves
you know what i told ray centauri who
was the director of the orox unit was i
don't know how you're gonna do this but
these have to be
real animals
we knew there was gonna be some really
complicated compositing but it takes
place
at the very very end and it's about
two and a half minutes of screen time
where it goes into like full beautiful
district 9 type compositing like
children of men type stuff but
like the effects start off really really
simple and kind of luddite and as the
film progresses they get
sort of gradually more sophisticated
until by the end it's like there's a
couple shots in there that you know just
took months to do and like were really
composited like with an inch of their
life
i gotta take care of mine
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uh so this is
just about the only puppet used in the
film
um
and it's only used in one shot um you
know we wanted to create one time where
where the orocks actually cross into the
physical world of the characters but
without it being
like a composite when we got up to that
scene the oil spill happened down here
and um
the booms for the like the bp booms were
actually closer in than where our sets
were and so we had to negotiate with bp
to actually get these puppets towed back
past um
the booms that were holding back the oil
and uh to allow us to shoot this scene
so it was a pretty uh
you know it's like you show up with like
these corporate executives at bp and
they're like okay you know they were
trying to be very polite because uh
they'd obviously up so badly and
so they were trying to seem like um
you know very helpful to anything that
was going on down here so so they
actually let us do it and and we we got
back there and
got the shot
going to can and like wearing the tuxedo
with all these other people that a few
months beforehand were just like covered
in
sweat and muck and meat and insects and
you just kind of i don't know it is a
thing where you look around and just
like what has happened like how did this
happen um
but it's hard to process i mean and
we're all just
you know
i think we're all very aware like at
some point like
this will be over and we'll go back uh
into our little mud pit and and and have
our have our game again
some really big scary critics who like
have kind of routinely ruined people's
careers
you know
kind of saying these things that they
got out of the movie that are
things that like me and ben like
things that me and ben were like it
would be great to make a movie that like
got this across or that function like
this
people are getting out of what we try to
try to communicate and that's that's uh
that's deeply satisfying
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you