For the sound, we would put small microphones on people, occasionally on the sheep or the horse or the dog. Not so much on the animals—[the microphones] were very expensive and the horse would often break it and so on. That way, while I was filming, I was also listening to people who were a mile and a half away from me

IB: And then we blew up the video to 35mm film.

THC: Walking behind the sheep must have been quite an experience—I imagine that many sheep produce quite a bit of waste.

LCT: Yes. There’s a shot where the sheep go through a town. The municipal authorities had just cleaned the street. 3000 sheep went through and it was just covered with sheep shit afterwards.

THC: You have talked about your film’s relation to ethnography—isn’t filming “the last” of something a common trope in ethnographic films?

LCT: It’s a completely embarrassing cliché. It’s been critically embarrassing for the last 30 years.

IB: It has its roots in the basics of anthropology. Margaret Mead’s “Principles of Visual Anthropology” called for people to go and document disappearing cultures.

LCT: It is often though, that privileged Western observers lament disappearing cultures when they are usually in ways quite oblivious and somehow complicit in the cultural tendencies. For that reason, it has lost any kind of credibility. That is a reason we were interested in it. And although this ended up being the last herd ranched in this way, we also wondered how this could be happening in the 21st century United States.

THC: What did the sheep-herders think of your project?

LCT: They didn’t need any convincing—the ranch owners had invited us to film. There wasn’t any reticence to our presence, but some wariness. The two hired hands [who are much of the film’s focus]—I am good friends with them both.

In many parts of the world there’s a different imagination at work about the environment. The notion of wilderness as space out side realm of human agency is peculiar to America. It’s almost an arrogant conception of nature—it implies we are not natural, just purely cultural. In Europe, there is more of a continuum, a spectrum of human culture and animal-nature relationships. It’s more subtle than either or.

—Madeleine M. Schwartz