The story of a man who unearths a time capsule with children's drawings predicting the future that was buried in the 1950s. One child's drawings predicted several horrible events that already have come true; however, one of those events has not yet occurred, and the man sets out to prevent it from happening.

Note: the room was extremely loud and transcribing was extremely difficult…

BD: How to you compare KNOWING to your other films, which are all very visual?

AP: It’s a very different film for me because it’s very real. It feels very gritty and real and it’s very naturalistic, and that was really important to me to make it that way. So it’s not really about the visuals and stuff. It’s still about the atmosphere and the emotion, I think more about atmosphere than visuals. The visuals, I can take them or leave them. Sometimes visuals help you tell a story, and other times they don’t. Other times they get in the way. So, this is very conscious effort to do something stylistically different.

BD: Did you like working with Nicolas Cage?

AP: Yeah, Nic’s great. He’s a great guy. A really sweet, sweet guy and obviously and immensely talented actor. We had a great time. I think it’s probably the best [inaudible] in the movie. We really got along well…

…He’s very funny, actually. He’s very subtly funny, which is great. He’s got a similarly twisted sense of humor to my own, I feel. We really saw the project…we were very much on the same page. We’re very good collaborators. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to do more stuff together.

BD: What attracted you to the script?

AP: I changed the script enormously. I’ve been involved with this project for about five years, so I really took it in a very different direction from the first draft that I read. And really, the first draft I read is really the hook of the movie, which is unearthing this time capsule with information….

BD: Is that the Richard Kelly draft?

AP: No. Richard Kelly at one stage was involved with the film but he’s got nothing to do with my version of the movie. Ryne Pearson was the original author of the first script, and that central idea is Ryne Pearson’s, and then we took it in this different direction.

BD: How much of the original writers’ stuff was in your version?

AP: Well essentially, Ryne Pearson came up with the original script. Snowden and White came in when I was first involved with the project. The main development of the script was Stuart Hazeldine and myself up to a certain extent.

BD: Why do you think we [mankind] are obsessed with knowing our own future?

AP: Why we obsess with knowing the future? Well, it’s a double-edged sword and what’s interesting to me is you ask people, if you could know the day that you were going to die, would you want to know that and would you want to know that information? People are very conflicted about having that knowledge. But if you’re given this information – if somehow, it’s right in front of you – then what do you do with it? Can you change the parameters of what’s going to occur? Can you effectively change your destiny? I think that’s a really intriguing notion.

BD: What’s the message of the film?

AP: I want people to be the judge of them. At the best of times I don’t really like talking about the movies because I put so much into the movies and I want people to find that stuff themselves. Essentially what I’m fascinated by in this film is the whole concept of order vs. chaos. Nicolas Cage’s character in the movie starts off believing that there’s no central meaning to our existence, that the universe functions along chaotic principals, and he discovers that there is actually order and there is actually meaning. It’s his journey back to meaning in the movie. That’s what I guess is the central theme of the story.

BD: Is there discussions about the plane crash scene and the difficulty in doing that? Or nervousness at all?

AP: What, technically, or morally, or…

BD: Yeah, morally…was there any sort of…with like, 9/11…

AP: The crash itself is not really anything after the 9/11 scenario and the art direction is very different. There have been many plane crashes before 9/11 and there will be many others after 9/11, sadly, and [inaudible]…I certainly wouldn’t based that event around the 9/11 incident. It’s not really connected.

BD: Now that you’ve seen movies these days, with the technology you can do anything. Sometimes a push to CGI, [inaudible] organic…

AP: I just want it to look real. I’ll use whatever technique makes it convincing. I’m very blasé. I think a lot of people are very blasé toward CGI these days. Everyone knows how it’s done and if you’re aware of it being CGI then you kind of disconnect what happens. It’s a great tool like any other tool we have, but we just have to be careful about how we use it and how good it is when we use it. I’d rather not do a shot than do a shot [referring to an obviously CGI shot]…that’s my basic principle. I’ll use whatever technique is necessary. The plane crash scene in the movie is actually quite interesting because I wanted to do this entire scene in one shot, and my idea about that was to put you right into the situation like you’re a documentary crew following Nic through this carnage. So essentially in one shot… the plane crashes off into the field and we follow him into the wreckage with people on fire, [inaudible] the thing blowing up, and it’s all one continuous two-minute take. I did that specifically to not let the [inaudible] of visual effects and all the cuts and stuff we can do get in the way of the motion of the scene. I believe it works quite well. When people don’t actually realize that it’s one shot, I go, “do you realize that you’ve seen one take from the moment he sees the plane right to the end of the scene?”, and no one actually realizes and I think they’re kind of disturbed by what they’re experiencing.

BD: Is it literally one shot, or did you, when you were filming it, stop…

AP: No, it’s actually one shot… which definitely gave me a major headache to achieve. It took us two days to setup, and two days to shoot. We did three takes over two days because it was a huge reset between shots. The weather was a nightmare…it’s all the fun of directing. He got it just at the final line. It’s like everyone had just won the lottery, suddenly, because it was an immense relief that we actually got the shot.