Crew

Louie Schwartzberg, Director.

The film will be directed by Louie Schwartzberg, a recognized film artist, innovative visual storyteller, and technical master. He is an acclaimed director, producer and cinematographer. An award-winning filmmaker whose career spans over 35 years, he is a visual artist breaking barriers, connecting with audiences, and telling stories that celebrate life and reveal the mysteries and wisdom of nature, people and places. His stunning nature, aerial and slice-of-life imagery has helped transform films by such directors as Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Haggis and Ridley Scott. His latest picture is Mysteries of the Unseen World, produced with National Geographic (2014). His previous film Wings of Life is a feature documentary for Disneynature, narrated by Meryl Streep.

Kenny Ausubel, Producer & Writer

Kenny Ausubel, who originated the project, is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and social entrepreneur. He founded Bioneers, a globally acclaimed nonprofit whose annual conference features social and scientific innovators with breakthrough solutions for people and planet. Through his Bioneers work, he has an exceptional set of contacts and relationships with key thought leaders who will be interviewed for the film. He brings award-winning filmmaking and writing skills and extensive knowledge of central topics covered in the film. His feature documentary Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes a Crime won the Best Censored Stories award for investigative journalism, was shown to members of Congress at the Kennedy Center, and reported on NPR. It remains in distribution and is in development as a Hollywood feature. He is a successful fundraiser and is primarily responsible for the financing of the film.

Bill Benenson, Producer & Laurie Benenson, Co-Producer

The award-winning filmmakers Bill and Laurie Benenson have worked together for decades. Along with producing many feature films, Bill produced and directed the acclaimed environmental documentary Dirt! The Movie (official Selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, 2010 Earth Day special on PBS’ Independent Lens). He produced The Hadza Last of the First in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy, which premiered in 2014. He is working on the documentary In the Point Cloud about the search for a lost Pre-Columbian city in Central America, using breakthrough Lidar technology, reported in the New Yorker in 2014.

Richard Tarnas, Subject and Advisor

Author of Cosmos and Psyche on which the movie is based, Richard Tarnas is an acclaimed, bestselling author and professor of philosophy and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 1968 Tarnas entered Harvard and studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, James Hillman, and Stanislav Grof, and later served as director of programs and education. He also wrote The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, an acclaimed narrative history of Western thought and archetypes that became a bestseller and continues to be a widely used text in colleges.

In 2007-09, John Cleese and Tarnas lectured together in Santa Barbara as well as San Francisco about the importance of regaining a connection to the sacred in the modern world. Cleese and Tarnas then taught a full graduate seminar at the California Institute of Integral Studies on “The Comic Genius: A Multidisciplinary Approach.”