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pacity of Mel Lawrence, who was one of the directors of Woodstock, I couldn't have got
Powaqqatsi
done. Mel and I had gone around the world once before, looking for locations, while we showed
Koyaanisqatsi,
and used that as a way to find people we could work with as production crews in each of the countries where we were planning to film. We went to thirteen countries with virtually no screw-ups. We lost one piece of equipment between Peru and Brazil and that was it, and we had two and a half tons of equipment going around the world! Without his ability to organize local crews, locations, permissions, getting stock in and out of the countries for processing, dealing with customs, the film would never have happened. The other producer was Lawrence Taub; without his ability to maintain the budget and the schedule, we'd have had all kinds of problems. So I feel really well served by the producers I worked with.
MacDonald:
May I go back to a comment you made a while ago about mistakes you felt you made in the first two films? What mistakes are you referring to?
Reggio:
In the case of
Koyaanisqatsi,
I feel that the experience was perhaps too intense. At one point in the film, we were dealing with eleven polyrhythmic musical structures colliding all at once, for twenty-one minutes! That was a bit much, I can remember, having attended many public screenings of
Koyaanisqatsi,
that at the end of that sequence, you would hear an enormous sigh from the audience. Now on the one hand, that motivated me to say, "Well, we probably did the right thing," but on the other, I feel I may have battered the audience a bit too much. I also feel I could have placed more focus, albeit in a mass form, on human beings caught inside this vast machine we call modernity. The film could have had a more human focus.
In the case of
Powaqqatsi,
I tried to be very conservative, especially in terms of the possibilities of juxtaposing images. What I learned from
Koyaanisqatsi
is that you can't just do a hundred-minute montage: it won't work; you can't sustain interest. The montage form is good for a half hour to forty minutes
max
if there's a master working on it. Looking at
Powaqqatsi
now, I feel that if I could have made it a little shorter, it would be stronger. And I would like to have intercut some things to suggest other dimensions of the issues raised.
MacDonald:
Do you mean more mini-montages, like the one about religious observances?
Reggio:
That's correct. On the new film,
Naqoyqatsi,
I feel I can be more adventurous. We can diversify ourselves a bit. I don't want to repeat
Powaqqatsi
or
Koyaanisqatsi
. I want to hold to the metaphysical point of view, but I want to develop it in a different form.
MacDonald:
Did you assume from the beginning that you were going to do a trilogy?