“ Kieslowski was able to capture the narrative behind the mundane.

“ It’s dense, I know,” he adds and explains his admiration for the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. That dimension that we don’t have access to is indirectly affecting the dimensions that we do have access to…” Cahill trails off, knowing that his ideas are complicated and heady. “ I think about how a worm can’t perceive the light of the sun. I Origins is thought and sensory provoking, indeed – whether you believe in the spiritual realm or not, science does present its own shocking possibilities. Who knows how they experience that realm?” Certain dogs and cows have a magnetic sense, they know where the poles are. Of course there’s six, of course there’s seven. It would take a lot of hubris to say five senses are all there are. We know about sound.” Cahill snapped his fingers several times for effect, “This was a realm that was all around this species but it didn’t have access to it until they mutated the gene. That alone is utterly mind-blowing.”Ĭahill grows animated, “Think about that…there’s a species who had their perception of the world completely opened up to a whole other realm that was there, all along.

But in a real-life scientific experiment – and I’ve seen it – scientists can modify worms that only have smell and touch, to give them vision. “ I wrote the scene where Sophi comes into the laboratory and talks about how the worms have two senses. “ I was coming back from a wedding in Maine and stopped in Massachusetts at the Emerson Inn, which is interesting because Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in reincarnation. He says he remembers clearly where he was when he began writing the screenplay.

“ I have this suspicion that’s there’s more to life than just tables and chairs and I wanted to use science as a way to explain the metaphysical, that’s sort of the key to the movie.” It asks the question: Can the study of human evolution provide evidence of the soul? While the Cahill doesn’t have the answer, he’s optimistic. I Origins is a film that begins as a scientific experiment and does a 180-degree turn into a spiritual, heart-stopping story that ends up as a para-evolutionary quandary. Referring to the bowl he said, “That’s the premise for holograms, I think,” making it clear that Cahill is constantly searching for alternative perspectives, both in the larger world and within the smaller objects around him. As I lifted the empty silver metallic bowl and peered into it, I discovered my own image, inverted and distorted as if I was looking into a funhouse mirror for adults. “It’s really trippy,” he said, egging me on. Before I could begin asking him questions, the playful filmmaker asked me to check out a particular bowl that was sitting on the coffee table. In person, 35-year-old Mike Cahill is hipster-handsome with long, russet-colored Samson hair that touches the middle of his back. What Ian is unable to see through his microscope is how a passionate romance with Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), a young woman with kaleidoscope eyes, will forever change his scientific perspective. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), works with his lab assistant, Karen (Brit Marling), to prove eyesight evolved naturally through genetic mutations in the hopes of quashing the Creationists who insist the eye is too complex to have evolved without an Intelligent Designer. In the film I Origins, molecular biologist Dr. His latest film continues his own personal journey to explore the complicated relationship between science and spirituality. You may remember his last film, Another Earth that won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. I Origins writer/director Mike Cahill has a truly unique vision as a filmmaker.

Seeing kaleidoscope in one eye