Did You Know?
The choral piece near the end of the film, "Prophecies", is sung in the Hopi dialect. The translation is: "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster. Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky. A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."
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The scene near the end of the film with firefighters and emergency service crews are walking about is video from riots, looting and fires after the two-day blackout in New York City in July 1977.
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Godfrey Reggio originally wanted an uninterpretable symbol as the title of the film, but instead settled on "Koyaanisqatsi", from an obscure language (Hopi) that he said "had no emotional baggage attached to it" due to its obscurity.
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One shot of a mountain range was provided by MacGillivray-Freeman Films; the shot was leftover footage from The Shining.
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Although most of the film was shot in the US, some of it is stock footage of Soviet military operations. The tanks in long lines are recognizably of Soviet manufacture, and only the Soviets used rockets to soften the landing of equipment in an airdrop.
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Godfrey Reggio was hooked on Philip Glass doing the music. He approached Glass through a mutual friend, and Glass replied, "I don't do film music." Reggio persisted, and finally the friend told Glass that the tenacious guy was not going to go away without at least an audience. Glass relented, though he still insisted he wasn't doing the music. Reggio put together a photo montage with Glass' music as the soundtrack, which he presented to Glass at a private screening in New York. Immediately following the screening, Glass agreed to score the film.
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Godfrey Reggio did a series of short films for the Institute of Regional Education, consisting of a stream of images to the theme of the invasion of privacy. It was here that Reggio met cinematographer 'Ron Fricke'. An attempt to bring these films to national attention failed, thus the next logical step was to create a feature film - "Koyaanisqatsi".
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Philip Glass divided the film into 12 different sections and wrote music for each. However, once Godfrey Reggio heard the music, he completely reassembled the film, cutting to the feel of the music and not its structure.
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One of Godfrey Reggio's advisers was Langdon Winner, one of the world's leading social analysts on the impact of technology.
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There's an inherent homage to Russian director Andrey Tarkovskiy. There's a similar long highway shot used in his film Solaris.
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The rights to the video and DVD release were complicated. As the film was "presented by" Francis Ford Coppola, the original rights were owned by American Zoetrope. When that company went bankrupt, it was bought up by PolyGram. When it went bankrupt, the rights were snapped up by MGM.
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The first of the trilogy was made under the auspices of Francis Ford Coppola. The second, Powaqqatsi, came under the aegis of George Lucas, and the third, Naqoyqatsi, of Steven Soderbergh.
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While October 4th, 1982, may have been its New York City premiere, at Radio City Music Hall, its actual world premiere was held at the Santa Fe Film Festival (USA) on 27th April, 1982.
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The music video for the Grace Jones song Pull Up to the Bumper uses some of the time-lapse footage from the 'The Grid' sequence.
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The film contains a total of four frames (two frames each in two different places) of someone who appears to be adult film actress Marilyn Chambers. These appear during the "channel surfing" montage within the segment titled The Grid. In three of the four frames, she is visibly topless.
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The music video of "Hard to Explain" by _The Strokes features several scenes from this film along with clips from WarGames and Brainstorm.
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