» Ron Currie, Jr. discusses his first full length novel, which features a protagonist who is the fourth smartest person in human history and who knows exactly when the world will end.

» Read more about Everything Matters!

Everything Matters! Ron Currie Viking Podcast

(View entire post here)

via press release:

Producer Michael Schwarz says the main characters in this film don't move and they don't talk. "As main characters, that makes it tough," he says about producing "The Botany of Desire," featuring Author Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book.

Airing on Wednesday, October 28, at 8 p.m. EST on PBS, the special takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration of the human relationship with the plant world -- seen from the plants' points of view. Narrated by Frances McDormand, the program shows how four familiar species -- the apple, the tulip, marijuana (Cannabis) and the potato -- evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.

Schwarz said the whole notion of looking at the world from a plant's point of view was something that nobody had really done before. "It's very provocative and intriguing, and the stories of the plants themselves were so surprising. The most interesting thing about the book is the chance it gives you to get inside Michael's head as he's thinking about these plants, and musing about them, and it is the philosophical nature of the book that's interesting."

The talented cinematographers brought a lot of the look to the film, according to Schwarz. "The interesting thing about cameras is that they can see things that we don't. And one of the things we really tried hard to do was to see the plants in a way you don't ordinarily see them when you look at them in nautre. So we wanted to take them out of their natural environment some, but we also tried to look at them very close up. We used a lot of macro photography in some cases. You saw a lot of that with the marijuana plant, in particular, where you just don't see the resin," Schwarz explains.