In her second feature length documentary Examined Life, which opens today at IFC Center, Canadian born, Georgia bred documentarian Astra Taylor whips around the Tri-State area and beyond with eight of the planet’s most renown contemporary philosophers and probes their ever active brains for answers to questions large and small, elemental and abstract. Engaging a diverse and eclectic group of lauded philosophers and/or public intellectuals to step away from the Ivory Tower and into airports and lakesides, Tompkins Square Park and quaint row boats, Taylor’s subjects include Martha Nussbaum, Avital Rennel, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Mr. Prophesy Deliverance! himself, Cornel West, who at one point happily summarizes himself as a “blues man in the life of the mind, I’m a jazz man in the world of ideas”.

Heady but built for maximum glide, Examined Life expands upon the director’s previous outing, a 2005 portrait of Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek (who appears here, discussing the fascism of ecology next to a trash dump) which was also distributed, to wide acclaim, by Zeitgeist Films. This time she incorporates a broad spectrum of contemporary philosophical viewpoints within a series of lengthy, wide ranging chats that are often held while in motion through spaces that illustrate the topics at hand. The film ultimately creates a dynamic new template for a primarily verbal cinema that remains both visually satisfying and endearingly self-reflexive.

It seems somewhat appropriate then that I caught up with Astra via cell phone, while she strolled around Austin, TX.

Spout: For a film that’s almost entirely comprised of people talking about philosophical concepts, Examined Life is quite dynamic and visually stimulating – how did you conceive the aesthetic for it?

Taylor: I became very invested in the kinetic element of filmmaking. I came to filmmaking by accident. I wasn’t schooled in it, I don’t really know any of the formal language of cinema, I don’t understand three point lighting. One of the biggest letdowns of the documentary format is that its talking heads. People never say that as if it’s a good thing. So when I decided to make an ensemble piece about philosophy, the question that concept raises is will the film just going to be a series of talking heads? So I was thinking about ways to do something inexpensive and yet still make a film that was monologue driven and mostly propelled by speech. I was thinking about different options and of course considered animation. It seems like an obvious tool when you’re making a pedagogical film. I decided I really didn’t want to do that. I decided early on I wanted to make a film devoid of any bells and whistles like that. I wanted to make something very simple and formal.

I was brainstorming and was reminded of this book Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, who’s a writer of non-fiction works based in San Francisco. It’s a history of walking, a very interesting book. It deals with the intersection of philosophy and walking, it talks about Kierkegaard, who’s a very sad philosopher – he would take these melancholy strolls around Copenhagen. It talks about Rousseau reverie of the solitary world. The bigger theme of the book is how walking, at least temporarily, resolves the mind/body dichotomy. I sort of just had this epiphany when I thought what I need to do is take my philosophers on walks because this works on so many different registers. It speaks to philosophies’ history but then it also a way for me to realize my desire for there to be a richer academic debate going on in public places, outside the academic setting. It also provided an opportunity for movement and variation of scene and as you say, it was a chance to make it a more visual stimulating experience. It was a very lucky day when I had this come to me. Then it was just a question of figuring out how actually to do it. Filming walks wasn’t easy as I thought it would be.

Were the various philosophers in the film collaborators in developing each of their segments, in terms of the style and subject matter?

I approached my subjects as collaborators, but sometimes there is very little mutual decision making. I’d throw out a topic and I’d throw out a location and they’d agree. I definitely didn’t want to force my subjects to walk around a space they felt uncomfortable in or at odds with. I was the only person in this situation who knew what all the other philosophers were doing or what all the other locations were. So I wanted to develop segments that were appropriate to the individuals but also segments that fit into a larger whole and into a film that was more than just these individual sequences.

Once I settled on ethics as the fundamental, overarching topic, then I found specific concepts for each philosopher and proposed that to them. Occasionally they came back with a variation on what I had proposed. Then I tried to think of a location that was either illustrative of that concept or something that spoke to that philosopher, their history and their experience, some place that was meaningful for them. Also some place that would work in the larger framework. Interior spaces, exterior spaces, parks, streets – I wanted each segment to be like its own short film with its own environment that was unique in comparison to everything else.

You’ve studied philosophy and theory and had made another film on Slavoj Zizek – what else in your background pushed you toward making this film?

I have two interdisplinary degrees, an undergraduate degree in social and cultural studies and a masters in liberal studies. I took a medley of courses in a number of things, political science, sociology, philosophy, but to the truth is I spent very little time in formal education compared to the average person. I did my undergraduate and masters degrees in 3 ½ years and I didn’t go to school when I was a kid so even though I have a long standing interest in this topic and some formal training, I’m much more concerned with bringing intellectual subject matter into the public sphere. I worked at an independent book publisher called Furso for a long time and one thing I really liked about that job was figuring out how to have an impact with these very theoretical, political books. I don’t know why I’m attracted to this challenge or why this has become my calling. Its something I believe in, I believe in the power of ideas. I believe there’s a space for the exchange of ideas. There are people doing it in other mediums, but not a lot of people doing it in film.

What philosophical concepts resonate most with you in your daily life? How do you apply any number of philosophical concepts you wrestle with in your moment to moment existence? Who are your favorite philosophers? Are they in the film?

One thing I’m trying to do is to bring light to the material conditions in which ideas emerge, so the fact that even the space we inhabit is not ideologically or philosophically neutral and that we’re living by a set of preconceptions and ideas that we receive from the culture and that maybe those can be questioned or reevaluated or transformed or something like that so I hope that Examined Life shows that ideas are all around us.

For me, one really simple definition of philosophy I like is that philosophers are people who persist in asking childish questions. Maybe questions that are timeless and eternal and ones in which there is no consensus on the answer. Maybe that’s why some people think it’s an indulgent, pointless exercise, but I don’t see it that way.

I was very happy when Judith Butler invited my sister Sanaura, the girl in the wheelchair, to participate because Sunny had a be impact on me in forcing me to reevaluate the importance of these sort of theoretical conversations. We were living together in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 2000 and 2001. At that point I was 21 and Sunny was 19. She viewed her disability in a sort of isolated context. She didn’t see it as part of a broader social field or anything like that. She discovered disability studies, which she talks about a little bit in Examined Life, and started reading everything from Michel Foucault to Margaret Russell on political economy. Her perception of herself shifted, she began to see disability in a social and political context and as something with a history. This ha very tangible ramification in the way she lived. Within weeks she was pushing herself to go outside and go into a coffeeshop in Brooklyn when she had spent her entire life avoiding that sort of thing or just thinking it was impossible for her to do so.  I think ideas are very powerful. It seems like a very private tale of personal transformation but I think that those things can have much broader ramifications.

A lot of my favorite philosophers are in the movie. A lot of people who’s work has impacted me or provoked me or challenged my thinking do appear in the film. I didn’t want to cast people who hadn’t produced some sort of consequence in my own perception of the world because then I couldn’t really wager then that they would have a significant impact on the audience.

What ideas did you encounter while making the film that you found especially troubling or provocative?

At post screening Q&As, people often ask me, what was the big thing you learned from Examined Life. Because I choose topics based on my reading, I knew what was going to be discussed in the film. We improvised and had long conversation and often the interviews went for four hours, so I didn’t know everything they would say in advance, but in some sense I had a master plan and basically knew what I wanted them to cover when we were shooting.

What impacted me most was the accumulation of all these perspectives. One thing I quite admire about these thinkers is that they have coherent positions on things, they’ve worked out their worldview and weather I totally agree with them or not, there’s a consistency there, so making Examined Life has caused me to turn the mirror on myself and my own ideas about how things should be and I must say that I’ve been forced to acknowledge the inconsistency and gaps in my own perspective. It’s been quite interesting. Part of me thinks that when all this is done and I have a bit more time, I should try to rigorously formulate my own philosophy of the world.

It takes quite a bit of thought I think.

[Laughs] The truth is I like having a open minded, flexible perspective on the world. One thing I hope Examined Life shows is that, by mixing all these philosophers, many of whom have quite divergent perspectives, I mean, they’re all broadly liberal but they certainly don’t have uniform perspectives on life, and by preserving this diversity of perspectives, this multiplicity of philosophies, it doesn’t lead to a quagmire of moral relativism, which is what some might fear. That is fear is that you have all these people talking and sharing their different points of view and the result is this confusion, this anything goes sort of thing and on the contrary I think the film shows this ethos of moral commitment and intellectual rigor and, hopefully, an excitement about a life of the mind.