One of the strangest episodes in Weyerhaeuser’s life – which Taylor is clearly fascinated by – was when the future empire-builder was kidnapped aged nine and kept in a ditch for eight days before his captors received $200,000 in ransom (approximately $4.5m today). ‘When I met him, I didn’t know it would be three months before he died. “I tried to be agnostic about what was doing to trees,” Taylor told me. Known both as a timber baron and a conservationist, Weyerhaeuser’s fortune established the collection of the majestic Pacific Bonsai Museum (before gifting it to a new non-profit a decade ago) and funds tree farms and other environmental initiatives, while his company is also the largest private landowner in the US and one of the world’s largest fellers of trees.

One of the most complicated people in the film is surely Weyerhaeuser. It provided a fascinating concept for how to talk about people, vis-a-vis trees.” “It’s a book about characters whose lives were very interconnected with trees and each other. Taylor was inspired to begin work on a film about trees after reading author Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer winner The Overstory, which brought out the resonances between people and their trees. “I was able to go in so many different directions.” “This was the most liberating film I ever made,” she said. Taylor follows the stories of these individuals and others in a highly idiosyncratic way, making them as much about her own obsessions as a film-maker as it is about their lives. I’ll never be the same film-maker again.” It was editorially a huge exercise in film-making. “If you give one more screen time, it would have changed the narrative, you have to balance everything. “I was really looking at an ecosystem of narratives,” she said. Mostly based in the Pacific north-west of the United States and Canada, the film’s central characters include George Weyerhaeuser, who transformed the family timber empire with a model of harvesting trees that has caused severe environmental damage Ryan Neil, one of the few Americans to master the Japanese art of bonsai Beth Moon, a photographer who has gained worldwide acclaim for her masterly large-format prints of trees and Dirk Brinkman, a force for reforestation for over 50 years. Trees and Other Entanglements tells the fascinating, occasionally intersecting stories of various individuals’ often strange and surprising relationships with trees.

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