You moved to Lantau in 2020. How did you come across the buffalo?<\/p>\n
They\u2019re treasured members of the community. They\u2019re really unique, but there was this one lady who looked after them. She decided that she wanted to look after them and I kept seeing her. I would see her sometimes on the beach, sometimes on the side of a mountain or in the wetland, always surrounded by these buffalo. And I was like, \u2018Who is this lady?\u2019 It\u2019s incredible. It\u2019s like, I can\u2019t help myself. Literally, on one jog as I was going up the hill to my house, I almost ran into her. And so I was like, \u2018OK, the universe is really talking to me. I gotta say something.\u2019 So I said, \u2018I\u2019m sorry. I\u2019ve seen you around. Would you mind if I follow you around with a camera for a day or two?\u2019 And she thought I was a real weirdo. But she\u2019s like, \u2018Yeah, OK, no problem,\u2019 and really friendly.<\/p>\n
When did you realize you had a story?<\/p>\n
The next day, I\u2019m in the car with her, seeing what she\u2019s doing. I thought maybe I\u2019d film her for a couple days, I\u2019d have some interesting footage and I\u2019d cut it together as a little personal two-minute video. But then the more time I spent with her, and as I started to try to understand where the buffalo came from, and kind of what their situation is now, I really felt that it was a really deep story there. Not just the site, of course, the beautiful story of this fascinating woman, her connection to these animals, but also to understand they\u2019re threatened. Their habitat is disappearing. There\u2019s the potential for massive transformation of that island. They\u2019re directly in the crosshairs of that.<\/p>\n
Do you feel like you\u2019ve learned anything from the last five years?<\/p>\n
More than anything, I just fell in love with her and the animals. It taught me a lot. I went from fearing them to loving them. I just saw them in a totally different light, in the sense that I saw them as these kind of anonymous, beautiful creatures. But they\u2019re alive like us and they have personalities. They each have favorite foods, and so that was like, \u2018Wow. I have to tell that.\u2019 And to watch her care for them every day. She\u2019s in her 70s, and she does this every single day, and it\u2019s really hard. She doesn\u2019t do it for money. <\/p>\n
How important is a grant like this for you?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s huge. It\u2019s so hard to do independent film and it\u2019s hard to have the money and time. I put so much time into this. I\u2019m honored by the recognition. It\u2019s an incredible group of filmmakers. Richard Linklater started the Austin Film Study. There\u2019s another guy that\u2019s an absolute hero of mine. It\u2019s nice to be seen.<\/p>\n
What do you want audiences to take away?<\/p>\n
I just hope they see the beautiful thing that I saw. Yeah, that\u2019s it. It\u2019s really that simple. And I hope that just because I learned something, I hope that they learned something new and interesting. It\u2019s that simple something: learn something new and interesting.<\/p>\n
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You moved to Lantau in 2020. How did you come across the buffalo? They\u2019re treasured members of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":{"0":"post-19885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-plano","8":"tag-plano","9":"tag-plano-headlines","10":"tag-plano-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}