The Cinema Lounge

Five Days of War: Q&A with Director Renny Harlin

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

Five Days of War tells the story of the Russian-Georgian conflict which took place three years ago, in August 2008. Shot on actual locations and with real military equipment, the film is told from the viewpoint of foreign journalists played by Rupert Friend, Val Kilmer and Richard Coyle. Andy Garcia plays Georgia's president at the time, Mikheil Saakashvili. After a screening of Five Days of War at Landmark's E Street Cinema on August 15, director Renny Harlin discussed his film and took questions. DC Film Society director Michael Kyrioglou moderated.

Michael Kyrioglou: How did you get involved in telling this story?
Renny Harlin: I don't know if you know an old 1930s Billy Wilder movie called Ninotchka where a group of Russians go to Paris. [Ninotchka (1939) directed by Ernst Lubitsch]. A group of Georgians decided that they wanted their story to be told in a movie and they traveled to Hollywood without knowing anybody and just showed up there. They ran into an American producer who became their partner and he ended up having a breakfast meeting with my agent. I had just written my agent that, "If you don't find some good material for me I'll leave you because I can't take this Hollywood crap anymore." So they arranged a meeting for me with the Georgians and the minute I met with them I was hooked and thought it was a great chance for me to do something that would be meaningful. I brought in a screenwriter, Mikko Alanne, who has worked with great filmmakers like Oliver Stone. He wrote a movie called Pinkville which hasn't been made yet but is about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He wrote that for Oliver Stone and other really interesting and serious dramas for other directors as well. Together we got into the research and developed a script.

Michael Kyrioglou: Were any of the characters inspired by real people?
Renny Harlin: All of the journalists are inspired by real people that we met in Georgia; we became very close friends with them and heard their stories. A lot of the individual incidents in the story--for example the old lady being shot in the knees and thrown in the river--that's all based on first witness accounts of journalists who saw this happen. The character of Zoe who finds out that everything is easier in a miniskirt is based on a French journalist who was there during the war and had great success in getting through all the front lines in the heat of the action because she always wore a miniskirt. She just figured that the soldiers would be happy to have her around and that was her fearless method of getting the story. In terms of the timeline of the war and the main events and what we witness with the president--actually the president and his people were not originally part of the story but we felt that instead of just staying with our journalists in the field, we needed to ground the events in a timeline that would be relatable and understandable for the audience. So we wrote that part in. Those things are based on our research that we did and on UN and Human Watch reports that are available on the internet.

Michael Kyrioglou: You filmed the whole thing in Georgia and had cooperation from the government and the military for helicopters and tanks. Was it difficult to film there and what challenges did you have?
Renny Harlin: The whole thing was shot in Georgia and a lot of it on authentic locations where these events really took place. It was an incredibly emotional experience for all of us. And in terms of technicalities, it was very challenging because Georgia, at least three years ago, wasn't a big movie country, so we had to bring in all the equipment and most of the crew from other countries around Europe. We had 17 different languages spoken on the set and an army of translators. We did get support. We were able to lease the Georgian military equipment for a good price. I don't know of any war movie in the last 50 years that has had this kind of hardware. Because nowadays it's done digitally. But all the tanks, planes and helicopters--everything you saw--was there for real. For me as a director it was very exciting and also challenging to be standing there with the head of the air force and the head of the ground force and the tank troops and they all have three radios in their hands and I have three translators and everybody's speaking different languages. Somehow I have to figure out in a scene--how long does it take for the fighter jets to show up and how long does it take for the tanks to come over the hill. Logistically it was insane but somehow it all worked out.

Question: How would you respond to people who might accuse you of making a movie that is anti-Russian propaganda?
Renny Harlin: We knew making the movie that many people would say this is Georgian propaganda, this is anti-Russian. We decided to take a point of view in the story that was based on the facts that we could find in different reports and eyewitnesses as well. I'm the first to confess that when I went to Georgia I was completely confused as to what really happened. Who shot first and why and what caused it? I had to do a lot of research to figure out for myself what the real story was, as I believe it. And our screenplay was never sanctioned by the government, never read by the government, we actually had some conflicts with the Georgians who were either financing us or the government troops, the commanders. For example in the scene toward the end where the soldiers surrender to the Russian troops in front of the tanks--we had a real problem because the soldiers who are playing extras in the scene are real soldiers and they refused to do the scene. I had to call the commanders and it became a huge problem. Finally we finished the scene but everyone was really frustrated by it and angry at us saying, "Georgians would never surrender to Russians." I said, "This is a movie, this is not a documentary." I didn't want to paint a picture where I say, "Russians are bad people, Russian soldiers are monsters." My message would be that many countries have leaders who make bad decisions and then people follow orders. I tried to humanize the Russian soldier by the decision that the colonel makes there, not crushing the people, letting them go.

Michael Kyrioglou: How did you find balanace between taking a documentary view versus making a feature film?
Renny Harlin: I wanted it to be a feature film; I wanted it to be entertaining. It's a hard thing to say when you are dealing with these kinds of serious issues but I want people to have fun in the theater. That's why people go to the movies. They go to be entertained whether it's suspense or action or drama or love or comedy. Ultimately you aren't going to pay your money to go to the theater to watch a history lesson. So you have to find a balance. Certainly there were moments when I thought my action director side took over a little too much, or I made something more dramatic than it had to be. There were also scenes where I couldn't really show the truth--for example the scenes at the Gori military hospital. That's the exact location where the people--civilians and soldiers and children were being brought in when the war started. There was someone who worked at the hospital who videotaped part of that day. They showed me the videotape; no one else had seen it. It was unbelievably horrid. I just couldn't imagine anything like that--people missing limbs and having giant holes in them. And dead people everywhere, total chaos, people piled up in stacks of bodies. I couldn't put it in the movie. What I have in the movie is 30% of what I saw. But I knew that the audience would walk out if they saw that. So I couldn't show the horrors. When cluster bombs are dropped in civilian areas, there is no defense against that. It's just something that should never happen.

Question: Who were the Georgians who financed the film? Were they affiliated with the Georgian government?
Renny Harlin: It was a group of private citizens. Humorously I have said that this may be the only movie financed by a gold mine. One of the main financiers has a mining business in Georgia and one of his mines is a gold mine. So I'm glad that we had a gold mine where we could just keep digging gold money. It sounds easy but it wasn't that easy. Some of the producers are members of the parliament. So they did have the interest of the country in their mind when they were putting this movie together. But they had no control in terms of script. Part of the financing from the American company that was doing pre-sales for the movie.

Question: Why did you decide to make the protagonists foreign journalists? Did you consider having a Georgian main character?
Renny Harlin: I felt like we did that with Rezo the Georgian soldier and the character that Emmanuelle Chriqui plays, the Georgian young lady. So I felt that we were able to bring the Georgian angle into it. I felt that to see the country and the people and the culture from a foreigner's point of view is what I experienced when I went there. I feel very strongly that over the years the audience at large has grown jaded about these wars that go on whether in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Their eyes get glossed over when they hear about these things. Part of the problem sometimes is that the country feels so different--the culture, the customs, the religion, the way people dress. All these things seem so foreign, especially for Americans, that I tried to emphasize that these are people just like you and me. It's a beautiful country, not some sandy wasteland. It's a beautiful country and these are regular people; I tried to make that real for people so that it would be relatable.

Michael Kyrioglou: Your director of photography [Checco Varese] has worked in a lot of conflicts and done a lot of news reporting, TV and film work too. What kind of perspectives did he bring having been in many of these situations?
Renny Harlin: I chose him especially because he had spent 15 years covering wars everywhere from South America to Africa to Asia and Europe. He was like those war veterans who don't really talk much about their experience. He helped the actors--just technicalities like telling them that when you are a war cameraman you sleep with your camera--you actually cradle it in your arms because you never know when something will happen and you have to get up. You sleep with your clothes on, with your boots next to your bed, and cradling your camera. He was able to help the actors with those kinds of details. When we were shooting the scene where Sebastian the cameraman is badly injured and has to be left behind, I glanced at my cameraman and saw tears rolling down his cheeks while he was shooting the scene. After the scene I asked him what happened and he said he had this very similar experience when he was in Kosovo shooting in an area called Snipers Alley. As he was shooting, he noticed that his battery was going dead and he told his assistant, "I need a new battery." No answer. "I need a new battery." Still no answer. Finally he looks over and the guy has a huge hole in his head; he's been shot dead by a sniper. He said that for the first time after all those years it brought home so freshly for him what he had been through.

Question: Was working in the film emotional for the people involved?
Renny Harlin: Yes. We were there less than a year after the events, and it was very emotional. Mostly people were coming up to us just thanking us for telling the story. They didn't know what the script was like, or how we were telling it. Just to get their voices out there. The Georgians' generosity is amazing. We could be in a little village where people live in very modest conditions. They would see us scouting locations for the movie and people would invite us to their house, start baking a cake and bring us home-made wine and treat us like guests. It was very touching. An anecdote that was almost tragic: We were in Gori, the town where the Stalin statue was, we were shooting our scenes there with tanks rolling into the square and explosions. There was an older man who had lived there during the war. He was so traumatized by the war, he left to live in a different part of the country. After a year went by, finally he returned and he was living by the town square. He celebrated his return with friends, they went out drinking, and he passed out. Completely hung over, in the morning he woke up to this rumbling, went to his window, saw 40 tanks rolling into the square and fighter jets flying over it and probably had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital. He survived but it was us doing it--and just a day after he moved back. It was tragic but it ended well. It was an amazing experience being with the people there, something I will never experience again. It was very unique to be there, only a year after the events. In the evacuation scenes when you see those people and the expressions on their faces--as a director, you spend a lot of time telling your extras how to feel and how to look and they look kind of fake. But in this case I just said it was an evacuation scene and they all were living exactly what they had felt. There were many days when you would look around and see people in tears watching us.

Question: Was film shot digitally or on film?
Renny Harlin: The film was all shot digitally on the RED system. That was a real eye-opener for me; it was the first time I was not shooting film. It was so versatile and so amazing to shoot with this system that I'll never use film again, sadly, because there is a sort of romantic aspect about film. But I think film is history. There is so much you can do in post-production, changing the look of the movie.

Question: At the end of film you added witness testimonials. Will you have them on the DVD and will you add more witnesses?
Renny Harlin: We will add more testimonials. The idea came to me after I met with one of the refugees and listened to their stories and felt like I should somehow include them in the movie. That was the last shooting day and we just had them come to the studio and shot them. None of us know what they are saying because they are speaking Georgian. We are just shooting it and translating later on and then pick the pieces we want to use in the film. But just watching the people talk and seeing their expressions, everybody in the studio was in tears. That was our last day so it was a powerful way of ending it. So we will be including more of those in the DVD, and also deleted scenes and other material.

Question: Could you explain Stalin statue in Gori?
Renny Harlin: A lot of ex-Soviet Union countries still have some of these monuments of Lenin and Stalin. It's interesting when you get to a certain point--when these things become part of your history, not bad reminders of bad times anymore and you want to restore them to remind you of what went on. In this case, Gori is the birthplace of Stalin. I visited the house where he grew up. It's stunning to go to the museum; there's a ginormous Stalin museum, obviously built during the Soviet era. And it's been restored. Now it's not a museum of those times, no longer a Stalin museum. It's a museum of how those days used to be. There's no mention of Stalin ever doing anything wrong. It would be like a town in Germany with a Hitler museum--it just couldn't happen. But maybe we should have explained the statue. We were doing scouting for the movie and I went to Gori for the first time. I was just stunned by the statue. I said that we have to shoot there, because it was a real location. Only a week before we were supposed to shoot there, all of a sudden we heard they were going to take down the statue. There were huge political movements fighting over this for years. They finally agreed to take it down because they hated it so much. We said, "You can't take it down. It was there when the events happened. And has to be there. Don't take it down." Finally the message got to the mayor that we didn't want to take it down. They said, "Okay, we'll delay by two weeks." This caused a huge political storm. And the other side says, "It's been going on for years and finally we agreed to take it down and now you're not taking it down. Is this some secret plot and it's going to stay there forever?" They're rioting over the statue. We said, "No, we're from Hollywood. We just want it for a scene." So we got to shoot it and literally the next day they blew the statue up. The museum is still there but the statue is gone.

Question: You said when you went to the hospital you saw footage of what happened. Are you going to include that footage on the DVD?
Renny Harlin: I'm going to talk to my distributor because I think that's a great idea. I don't know why I didn't think about it at all. Literally it was a private person at the hospital who shot the footage. And of course there's other footage that other people shot in other situations. I should interview the journalist that I was talking to and doing with my research with and hear them tell some of the stories that actually are in the movie. That would open another angle to the reality of it.

Question: How did you assemble the cast for the film?
Renny Harlin: For the lead, Anders, I didn't want a really famous person who would bring a lot of baggage with them that pulls you away from the reality. So I liked the idea of Rupert Friend because he's not a nobody, but he's not a superstar. As for Heather Graham I wanted to have somebody well known, to keep the audience guessing, surprise the audience a little. Like any director, I try to find good actors for the parts. Some actors like Val Kilmer are friends of mine so I like bringing them in. With actors like Val Kilmer, even if the role is not giant, they always bring something special into the party. Some people find them difficult to work with. But I find them very creative and very intelligent so they bring a little more. As an example, the scene where he's in the bathtub in the beginning--that was his idea. It was scripted to take place in a hotel room--he is sitting by his desk and doing a Skype call. With Val, you have to be very careful because he has crazy ideas and you have to separate crazy from creative. That morning, he came to me and said, "Renny, I was thinking I should do this call from a bubble bath. And I think, "Is this crazy or is this good?" I think it's really good. I talked to my assistant director. The assistant director called the prop man who is at the hotel, ready to shoot, gathering his stuff; he is in charge of weapons, and all the props. And the first AD says, "Hey, we are in 107 and ready to shoot but we need some bubble bath." I hear him on the radio. "What?" "Yes, we need some bubble bath urgently." "This morning when I woke up I was making a war movie with a lot of weapons and now you are asking for bubble bath." Somehow, I don't know how, ten minutes later we had Val Kilmer in a bubble bath. To me that shows the brilliance of that kind of actor, because in that very brief scene, he becomes a special character without being over the top. So I put together different actors from different walks of life. And of course we could not pay top dollar, so we had to try to find good people for the right price. Andy Garcia looks very much like the real president. He was the first and only actor we went to. And he happened to be the favorite actor of the president. It's a surreal thing--you're the president of Georgia, a country that people have barely heard of and you have a war and a year later you have a Hollywood star playing you. I have to tell you a quick story because it was so crazy. We did get help from the government--for example, the scenes shot in the president's office. That is the real president's office; it's like the oval office of Georgia. We just ask and shoot there because these scenes happen in the president's office so we should obviously be in the president's office. They said "makes sense". So we went there and literally all the presidents papers are all over the desk; none of it is props and he has the "red phone" there. He says, "Okay I'm going to do something else, I'll be with the parliament while you are shooting this." In the middle of the scene we are shooting the "red phone" rings. Andy just picks up the phone and says, "Not now, we're shooting." We will never know if that was Putin calling, or someone from America or Europe. That sort of thing would only happen in Georgia.

Michael Kyrioglou: Will this be shown in Russia?
Renny Harlin: There was a rumor when we were shooting that it was already banned in Russia. Some distribution companies in Russia are trying to figure out how to show it there but I don't think it's going to happen. Just a glimpse of world politics--it looks like the movie is also banned in Ukraine which is kind of alarming. We have not been able to get distribution in Ukraine. Just looking at it from the public's point of view you would think that it would be very relatable for them. But considering what has been happening politically in Ukraine, it's just not going to be shown there. Considering Ukraine is a completely independent country, it's kind of alarming to me.

Five Days of War opens August 19 at Landmark's E Street Cinema.

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Another Earth:: Q&A with Director Mike Cahill and Actress Brit Marling

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

Another Earth, Mike Cahill's first feature film, was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on themes of science and technology and also the Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Feature. Both Mike Cahill and Brit Marling have unusual backgrounds--both had been economic majors at Georgetown University although at different times, and Brit even did a stint as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.

This Q&A took place at the Loew's Georgetown Theater on July 10. Mike Cahill and Brit Marling answered questions; DC Film Society Director Michael Kyrioglou moderated the discussion.

Mike Cahill: It's very nice to be here in Washington, DC. Thank you so much for coming to the screening. We went to school just three blocks from here.

Michael Kyrioglou: I have to ask first--economics. Has the economics been part of the process at all? Have you used it in your life?
Brit Marling: I guess maybe the opportunity cost of not making movies. Otherwise I'm not sure how it would be useful.

Michael Kyrioglou: You both studied economics, but at different times. Do you want to talk about that?

Mike Cahill: I graduated in 2001 and Brit graduated in 2005. What is interesting about economics is that it teaches you about efficiency. I think there's a parallel to storytelling in the sense that sometimes a single image can say a lot more. And that's the most profound thing I'm going to say all night. (everyone laughs).

Michael Kyrioglou: How did you two end up connecting?
Brit Marling: I saw a film when Georgetown had its first-ever film festival. Mike and a friend had made a short together. And I saw the short and I was just blown away by it. It was so beautiful and rhythmic and colorful and the story was interesting and complicated. It was not like student filmmaking. So I basically stalked them afterwards until they would let me be in one of their movies.

Michael Kyrioglou: What initiated this story?
Mike Cahill: The idea for the film came from a very simple concept. What it would be like to meet yourself. We all have relationships with our family and friends and yet we have this really intense relationship with ourself but it's internal. It's a running monologue we have when you wake up in the morning and brush your teeth. "Why did I do that, what am I going to do." And we thought, what if we externalized that? What if we took that person outside and objectively observe that person. What would you feel? Would you like that person, would you dislike that person, and in this film, would you be able to forgive that person if they had done something pretty tragic? Then we extrapolated that and said what if all 6.3 billion of us could feel the same thing. So in some ways the spectacle allows everyone to imagine that thing for themselves and yet go along with the story of Rhoda.

Michael Kyrioglou: You both wrote the film. What kind of writing process did you have? Did it start with one of you, did you work on it together, pass it back and forth?
Mike Cahill: It was a very organic process. We were both living in LA, although I live in New York now. We had the concept. We had the larger, big-picture idea. We were trying to think about what's the best story to tell with this conceit. We thought a girl seeking redemption was pretty potent and from the very outset we knew that Brit was going to play the lead. We would sit down and take all these inputs in, different sources, watch lots of movies, listen to audiotapes about the cosmos and then we would throw ideas out and some things would stick to the wall. We did a beat sheet, broke down how the story would unfold. Our professor from Georgetown taught us the fundamentals, key story structure, protagonist and certain beats that have to follow.
Brit Marling: It was really when we came up with the ending that we knew we had a film. It was funny because this was part of three sci-fi shorts that were to make a feature. And the more we kept working on this one, the more it was obvious that the other ones just weren't as good and they fell away. When we came up with the ending for this we ran around the apartment screaming at the top of our lungs. We were just so excited. You always feel that a film is so much about its ending. It's all about what sort of insight it offers in its final moments, the climax, and the denoument. We felt we had something and then we worked backwards to figure out what leads up to this moment.

Michael Kyrioglou: You put a ton of thought into this. It's almost kind of background to the story you're telling. But you need to think about and talk about all that. You don't need to see it.
Mike Cahill: It's more the setting. It could be set in DC or Hawaii or a world where there is another earth in the background. The idea is that of the exterior world that looms and is meant to inform the interior world that we go through.

Michael Kyrioglou: While you were developing the character you were finding it silently before you had written much of the script if at all to find out who Rhoda was.
Brit Marling: Her experience is so outside of my own. I spent a lot of time just watching prison documentaries and reading poetry from women who had been in prison and essays that they had written and daydreaming on that experience, what it would be like the first hour you're in a jail cell, and then the second hour and the third hour and the fourth. How does time pass in that space and what does it smell like? You spend a lot of time just trying to make it real to yourself so that you can show up on set and let all that homework go and just live there for a while in this illusion you've created and hopefully convince other people to believe in it too.
Mike Cahill: One of the amazing things about Brit as an actor is that if you asked her what Rhoda Williams was doing on her seventh birthday, she could answer that. She goes from birth all the way up to the first frame of the film and lives that experience as she does the homework for it. You feel like it's a tea kettle that just cracked a little bit and the vapors come out. She goes through that whole process. The writing was six months so it was a pretty intensive period for her to go there. And another crazy about her, to pour on more compliments--there's about twenty minutes of the film that plays just on her face, just silently with no dialogue. What's so brilliant is that all the beat shifts, all the movements of the story are told in her eyes and her gestures.

Question: Can you talk about the ending? What made you decide to show it but cut it off right before. She sees her and reacts and is about to move toward and talk with her and then that's it. Why did you make that choice?
Mike Cahill: Why did we choose to cut at that exact moment? There's so much thought that goes into it. If we cut it a second earlier, I don't think it would be right; and if we had them have a conversation I don't think would be right. It's subtle but when she turns we see the other one, we don't cut to a reverse shot. We don't see this Rhoda's face. Because that is our faces, in that moment, what is happening to us. If we have gone along with the journey of the protagonist, it's with us. It just felt right, I guess.

Question: Was the cleaning aspect intentional or coincidental? Was it supposed to be cathartic for her, washing away all the pain?
Brit Marling: I think we thought from the beginning, that there was this idea that she's so ambitious at the beginning of the story and so intelligent. When she gets out she could pick up on that trajectory maybe. But she doesn't want to. She loves the idea of manual labor, not having to think anymore, the bliss of tuning out of your own thoughts and losing yourself in a monastic discipline or meditation of cleaning, which as you said is a cleansing of the soul. Incidentally Phaedon Papadopoulos who was the associate producer is an amazing cook. He would cook meals for the twelve of us as we worked on the movie and we would all eat around the firehouse table in the morning. And then the crew and cast would just leave the dishes and I would spend all day cleaning up as Rhoda. Our cheap production. It was just practical too.

Question: There's a moment when Rhoda leaves and we see another girl approach the house. Are we meant to know who that is?
Mike Cahill: It's a bit of a red herring, but the idea is that it's a call girl. The idea is to show that this man John has not lost his virility. He needs sex but he doesn't have the ability for human interaction or to build a relationship. She's there for sex.

Question: Does the janitor blinding himself also go with the theme of cleansing? And what was the point of having his character?
Mike Cahill: The janitor is played by Kumar Pallana who's in all the Wes Anderson movies, and usually plays funny roles. His role in this film was meant to be a character who had a similar past. We didn't want to give too much information because it's too tangential but we wanted to give a suggestion that he had something similar in his past or felt the same kind of guilt for whatever he's done. And in some ways that formed a connection between her and him. And yet for him the bleaching of the eyes or the thing with the ears is a literal eradication of the senses. We start to learn that there's another one of us. He can't go through what Rhoda goes through. He can't confront the self. In some ways he's trying to eliminate that as a possibility. There's a scene early on when she first comes into the house that's half based on Ratatouille, and half based on The Double Life of Veronique where she goes into the house under false pretenses to clean. And she thinks, "what am I doing here?" Like the rat who wants to get into the kitchen really badly, but once he's there he thinks it's really dangerous and wants to get out. So he's trying to get out and when he's about to get out the window, he turns around and comes back in to cook. She climbs through the house and sneakily gets away and she's at the side door about to escape (and this is where Double Life of Vernoique comes in) when she gets a glance at her reflection. And the idea is that if she goes through that door she needs to confront herself. And so she has to make a choice; she decides to go back in and try clean this man's life up and make it better.

Question: What did she spell on Kumar's hand?
Mike Cahill: "Forgive."

Michael Kyrioglou: In putting the project together you both did multiple roles. There is a reference to a producer-artist public domain that's a nonprofit.
Brit Marling: [Artists Public Domain]. Hunter Gray is here, the producer who made this film possible. And Liang is here (assistant director). He was there from the very beginning when there was just four of us.

Michael Kyrioglou: How difficult was it to put the project together and how did this production company help with that?
Mike Cahill: We started out with a Sony EX3 camera and we had the workings of our script. We had myself, Brit, Liang and her sister and we started to make this film. That's my mom's house, that's her high school where she teaches. A friend of mine is a police officer and he helped close off a street for us. A lot of hustling. We started off and shot about eight days together and then I met Hunter through a mutual friend of ours. Hunter runs a company called Artists Public Domain and they have this mission to help artists bring their works--more difficult films or films that have an interesting sensibility--and helps them make the films. We met Hunter and showed him what we made for those eight days and he really liked it and his producing partners Paul Mezey and Tyler Brodie said "let's make this film" and then it became a real production.

Michael Kyrioglou: Was the whole process easier than you expected or more difficult?
Brit Marling: I think it was only possible because it was a small tribe of people who wanted to make this movie. We were shooting in different seasons. The car crash was supposed to be in winter and there was no snow. So Hunter went to an ice rink and was literally getting snow out of the back of the shavings of the ice rink and was putting it around the accident. Those stories go on and on with this movie. Later on there was no snow and someone figured out that we could rip up diapers and add water and mix them together and that looks like snow. And there were vats of diaper water being distributed all over the lawns. It was that kind of hand-made style film making that made something this ambitous possible on a very small budget.

Question: Why did you use the musical saw?
Mike Cahill: The musical saw we used for a few reasons. I saw a woman playing a saw in the subway in New York. It had an ethereal sound like an angel dying. And yet beautiful also and a hat tip to old sci-fi films. It sounds like a theremin. We wanted to modernize it. For Rhoda her passion is the cosmos and space and for John it's music, he's a composer. When he starts to awaken to life, he plays her this song, he starts to compose again. I liked the idea that it was both beautiful and haunting but also aggressive like Saw I, Saw II... (everyone laughs). So it was a bridge of all those ideas that made us use the saw.

Question: What movies or directors inspire you?
Mike Cahill: Ratatouille, Double Life of Veronique, Krzysztof Kieslowski, a brilliant filmmaker who made the "three colors" trilogy. He deals with the metaphysics, big existential questions in a backdrop of realism. I was always moved by those.

Michael Kyrioglou: When did you film this?
Mike Cahill: We filmed it over the course of a year, December... May... September...
Brit Marling: We don't really remember.

Michael Kyrioglou: The music was a fascinating mix. What can you tell us about it?
Mike Cahill: The score was done by an amazing band called Fall on Your Sword. They are two Brits that live in Brooklyn, Phil Mossman and Will Bates. One of our executive producers, Tyler Brodie, turned me on to them and sent me a piece that they did for a video art installation. They had this sound that was both electronic, pulsating and cool and yet warm, organic, classical, textured. I thought it bridged the science and the human story. It felt like the right vibe. Rhoda has a cello, and she has a melody that follows her. It's very subtle, I don't know if any one noticed it. John has a certain piano and a certain melody. In the love scene it's the first time those instruments come together; they're discordant but yet they're making music together. I'm really proud of the score, I feel really lucky to have it.
Michael Kyrioglou: The sound effects mixed into the music was really interesting. It had a scientific flare to it, a little unsettling, but very fitting for the scenes.

Another Earth opened in the DC area on July 29.

A Better Life: Q&A with Director Chris Weitz

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