Donna Haraway paraphrases Marilyn Strathern when she suggests that “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with” (2016). If an interview is a method (or matter) that we use when filming humans, what would occur if that method is applied to the non-human? This film results from an exploration of what an audio-visual interview with a tree could be like.
Once I settled on the format of using the written questions to evoke the method of the interview, I found that this changed the way I cut the material together. Now the images needed to ‘answer’ rather than ‘be’. I went back to shoot new material because the ‘coverage’ I need for an interview differs from that of observational material. For instance, I shot new images of the sky, the nearby creek and the nearby road, as these were important parts of answering the question about place that I asked the tree. In an observational version of the edit these shots would form distractions from the central theme of the tree, and would never make the cut.