Michael Almereyda on the set of "Big River Blues," Earthworks Films, 2008

Despite the film spanning multiple countries, travel seems very defiantly not a thread, with the stop in a rug store in Iran receiving the same weight and gaze as the drive to watch fireworks in L.A. and the filming of a scene in "The New World." I seem to remember that in an earlier version, locations were identified on screen. Was that something removed, and why?

You're right. I began to realize that naming the cities made the piece seem like a travelogue, which felt more than a little misleading. While it's important that you realize these episodes span the globe, WHAT is happening is more important than WHERE it's happening. With any luck, there's an emotional build and you might even gather, by the end of it, a sense of good old-fashioned universality -- shared experience, shared humanity.

When "Paradise" screened at the New York Underground Film Festival last year, it was as "excerpts from a work-in-progress." This version is also labeled a work-in-progress. Is the film by its very nature eternally so? And is it actually something you expect to continue to build on, or is that designation more theoretical?

Yes, it's eternally work in progress, in some form or another. Maybe there'll be a kind of extended remix down the road. I have in mind a version with director's commentary where the voiceover -- like footnotes in Nabokov's "Pale Fire" -- will derail or devour the meaning of the things being described.

How do you see your place in the film? You never appear on camera, but there's always an awareness in the watching that these are the accumulation of someone's experiences -- would you describe it as a self-portrait?

I think back on one of my unlikely boyhood heroes, Albrecht Dürer, who I considered the first great comic book artist. There's a Dürer self-portrait made when he was about 22 -- three ink drawings sharing a page, slightly overlapping images. You see Dürer's face, warily looking out, and independent of this, the same size, is a drawing of his left hand with thumb and forefinger touching. There's also a drawing of a pillow, with the folds beautifully articulated, crosshatched. And even as a teenager, I understood that all three drawings were self-portraits. Each is a manifestation of this one particular sensibility -- a way of drawing, a way of seeing, a way of taking in the world. So maybe it's time to admit a dirty secret: all my films are self-portraits. But that's not all they are, and it's not what defines them most.

Has it always been an habit, to reach for a camera to record these fragments of living? There's a marvelous lack of self-consciousness in the subjects of the footage used in the film, but I'd imagine that wasn't true of everything you'd shot.

It's possible I have a talent for making myself invisible. And sure, often, I feel an instinct, a need, to record things going on around me. It can be an ache, a necessity, aligned with a naïve faith in the camera as a vehicle for capturing images and experiences that'll otherwise slip away. (You know: time flies, death is around the corner, everything slips away.) All the same, I wouldn't call it a habit, and it's not easy. And it's not just a craving to hold onto things, but to share them -- to make a sharable record. Sometimes, I have a prideful feeling that I'm the only one who can record certain things. Ridiculously prideful, though also, sometimes -- more and more, it could be -- I'm content to leave the camera at home, to let it all go.

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