How did Malick approach you?

It was just: Would you be interested in working without a script? I said sure. A little more than a year later, he asked me to come out to Austin. They were doing some kind of preliminary shooting at one of the music fests out there. The idea was that he wanted to try to cause what he called “collisions” between a narrative film and this music scene in Austin, to take these scenes into real environments that you couldn’t control and see what happened.

How did you talk about the film?

There were these themes of love and betrayal he was discussing a lot with us. It seemed to me that what he was trying to do with this unique process of shooting was to sort of take a sledgehammer to those themes and break them into smaller pieces so he could reassemble them into a different form that would give the audience an opportunity to see them from a different perspective — maybe his perspective. It was more like pointillism or something where you’re creating fleeting moments that he can later assemble into a bigger picture.

What was the atmosphere like while shooting in Austin during a festival?

My job was to try to encourage passers-by on the street — nonactors, musicians, people in the crowd — to come into the world of the movie and take the scene where they wanted to take it and to try to keep in the world in the movie. To try to keep them from looking into the camera, to try to make them address me as not an actor but as a fellow concertgoer

It sounds like a challenging process, but you, Fassbender and Mara often exude such joyfulness in the movie. We would basically travel in a van together with a small group of people. You would just hop out and play out the general idea of the scene in a certain location, and then hop in a van and look for another location to do the scene in. We spent most of our days that way. A lot of days you felt like you weren’t able to get something that Terry was looking for, because he’s looking for something beyond the scene. You just have to be ready for when it happens. We did kind of hit a wall at a certain point and Terry said, “Let’s just go to Mexico.” So the next day, we went to Mexico. Terrence Malick.

You directed a highly personal Detroit-set fairy tale, shortly after making

Was Malick an inspiration?

He would give me the camera almost every day and have me shoot something. It was great for me just to be having that practice knowing I was about to go make a film on my own. He doesn’t place a lot of importance on the rituals that most people in the industry kind of depend upon: continuity, linear storytelling, traditional coverage, a script, hair, make-up, wardrobe, location. In some cases, he refers to them as cinderblocks holding you down. Obviously that doesn’t work for every film, but it’s very helpful to see from that perspective to sort of demystify the importance of all those things. —AP