
Where does soil come from? It comes from the largest organism on the planet. I realized if plants are critical for our survival, the only solar collectors that can turn light energy into food and fuel and medicine, what do they need? They need soil. I call it ‘a love story that feeds the earth’. It’s a film that Disney Nature released, with Meryl Streep telling the story from the POV of a flower making love with bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies. At that time, I was working on my film Wings of Life, which is about pollination.

LOUIE: I met Paul 13 years ago at Bioneers at one of his earliest talks. STEPHANIE: How long have you known Paul Stamets and how did you meet him? This networking pattern is an archetype that exists throughout the universe, and the fact that it lives underground in the shared, gorgeous, communal internet that enables trees to communicate with each other, to share nutrients, to foster ecosystems to flourish, for me that’s like nature’s operating instructions. It looks like the galaxies in the cosmos. It looks like the neurological pathways in your brain. The underground mycelium network is a network, and we see that pattern in the circulatory system and nervous system of our bodies. LOUIE: Visually what inspired me to shoot the mycelium is because it’s a network. STEPHANIE: What were the visual aspects of the world of mycelium and fungi that inspired you to embark on this film? I think when they asked Albert Einstein his definition of God, it’s a sense of wonder. I just love making the invisible visible. So now that I’m shooting digitally and money isn’t a constraint of shooting film, time is the most precious commodity. It’s just a way to see things that humans really can’t see. I’m shooting plants, flowers, mushrooms, things decomposing. There are grow lights that go on and off, photo lights come on during the exposure. For the last 10 years, I’ve been shooting in 3D.

There are computers triggering the camera to frame a film. Every day I shoot about a second worth of screen time in a 24-hour period. I’ve had cameras rolling in my studio 24 hours a day, seven days a week, nonstop for 40 years. STEPHANIE: Is it true that you are currently filming 24 hours a day? Then you look at the time span of a fruit fly, which might be a day or two. One extreme would be geological time, millions of years, billions of years. Being able to see that light move at different scales of time. There are all kinds of reality based on, in a sense, different metabolic rates of different animals and critters, because we all move at different frame rates. Looking at things at “24 frames per second” is a narrow window of reality. Then you realize how looking at things through a human point of view is really limiting.

How does a redwood tree look in life? How does a hummingbird look in life, which is the opposite scale of shooting in slow motion? Those rhythms and patterns touched the deepest part of my soul, and I just wanted to keep broadening my horizons and perspective by seeing things through different scales of time. It’s hard to imagine what a flower looks like as it opens and closes, or for clouds to morph in front of your eyes. But most importantly it fed my sense of wonder. It took me a month to shoot a roll of film. I started to chase the light, shooting time-lapse clouds, sunsets, and fog rolling in and out. A friend of mine who made electric guitars for the Grateful Dead helped me build a motor that ran on batteries, so I was able to take a camera outdoors.
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So I retrofitted old Mitchell cameras that were built in the ’30s and figured out how to adapt a still-camera lens to the front of it. I wanted to shoot high-quality resolution film, but didn’t have the money. LOUIE: When I graduated from UCLA, I moved up to Northern California.
