Movies like Samsara can be a challenge for audiences. 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. 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. You know, digital’s just constantly undergoing obsolescence every 12 months or something. The digital standard was 2K at that time. But digital just wasn’t ready for us in 2007 when we started. 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. You know, this is the third time we’ve shot 70mm 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? To make it feel like you’ve been on a journey and that the journey concludes at the end of the film. 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. There are musical moments that are introduced at the beginning that are kind of expanded and developed at the end. We introduce the "Thousand Hands" performance briefly towards the beginning we pay it off at the end. There’s the sand painting which we’ve talked about. MM: There’s a lot of little elements to it that are storytelling elements. 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? We were just really relaxed about it this time. 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. 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. 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. You know, our very first shoot was New Orleans, the Katrina aftermath, which was a little more than a year after the event. How early on in the shooting did you get those sections nailed down? That theme, you know, directed us as to where we were going to go and film. It drove the location research and so forth. Mark Magidson: It’s the perfect metaphor for impermanence. It was something that we had written down and scripted. Was that something you had in mind from the very beginning when you sat down, in the outline process? And we build short blocks of subject matter, and then these blocks started to come together and form the overall arc of the film.īut once we had the opening and closing of the film, the sand mandala, we knew we were in good shape to follow the film’s really bigger theme or arc, which is impermanence. It was kind of like a zen thing we did, where we cut just to the image and let the image kind of really guide us on that concept of flow. We did it without any music or sound effects this time. Ron Fricke: Well, maybe a way to answer that is how we edited the film. What’s the creative process behind building a project like this? Samsara isn’t a film with a conventional narrative, but it conveys a very emotional story on a gut level. I spoke with Fricke (director and cinematographer) and Magidson (producer) about the creative process behind Samsara, and the benefits of using 70mm in a digital world. Shot over five years in 25 different countries, it’s a surprisingly affecting film - not just for the glorious images it presents, but for the darkness and hope it exudes as well. Instead, it uses striking visuals and music to take viewers on an emotional exploration of the world around us - and of the oft-unseen cause and effect behind things we usually take for granted (see our review below). Now filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson have created a new film shot entirely on the format: Samsara.Ī follow-up to 1992’s Baraka, the film eschews dialogue and traditional narrative techniques.
Hollywood’s own high-resolution alternative to 35mm film, the format was used to shoot the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey. With blockbusters focusing on CG spectacle, and high-profile filmmakers rushing towards the latest digital innovations, one cinematic option often gets left behind: the grandeur of 70mm.