News - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 21:15 - 0 Comments

Documentary Film “The Unforeseen” Examines Texas Land Development

An interview by the Santa Barbara Independent, with documentary director Laura Dunn:

Documentaries take a lot of work to complete. How was it making this one?
The film took a year longer to make than I expected, in part because my child, who is three years old now, was born in the middle of the editing. I was very pregnant at the end of filming, and if you look at the footage of the interview with Robert Redford, which was done on my actual due date, you can see he’s maybe reacting to it a little bit. He’s also thinking about when he was very young, just learning to swim, so maybe that’s in there, too.

What made you choose water as something to make a film about?
The subject of water was really Terrence Malick’s idea. It was like a philosophical premise for a documentary, which was a great gift to me. There is Barton Springs as the natural resource that God gave us, and then there’s what we’re doing with it. Barton Springs is a remarkable thing to study, because it reveals a lot to look at an ecosystem over time. And even before all of this got started, Malick was already my favorite filmmaker.

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