VII.
DOCUMENTING THE WILD
In Mato Grosso, the wildlife is not background — it’s part of the moral and spiritual architecture of the film. The animals, the birdsong, the insects — these aren’t inserts or second-unit b-roll. They are characters in their own right. The forest is not passive. It is a character in its own right.
To capture this dimension authentically, I will shoot much of the wildlife myself — alone over an extended period od time wile living in the environment and going out day after day for weeks and months on end - the same way I did when I worked as a photographer in some of the wildest corners of the world. I won’t stage scenes or manufacture behavior. I’ll go out before and during production with my camera, listening, waiting, observing — letting the land reveal itself.
The inspiration for this approach comes in part from Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout — a film that treated the natural world not as exotic backdrop, but as a living, breathing consciousness. The animals in that film feel as emotionally present as the human characters. That’s exactly what I want to evoke here: a sense of deep, uneasy coexistence between the human story and the world it unfolds within.