The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Python Hunt.

I heard you entered the Python Challenge a year before shooting. What did you learn from that experience?
Xander Robin: Thanks for watching the movie! I actually live in South Florida right now. I grew up there, lived in New York for a little bit, but I was trying to make a movie in South Florida. My producer knew I was struggling to get a film off the ground that I was writing about the exotic pet trade, all about the reptile world. I’ve been devoting my life to making reptile movies, at least for a time. And he said, “what about the Python Challenge?” I’d known about the bounty program Jimbo is part of in the film. There’s a lot of Python influencers, like Python Cowboy, and it’s mostly a success story: people grabbing snakes, “doing our part.” So I assumed they were just everywhere. If you were with an expert hunter, you would find one. But I joined the competition a year ahead of our shoot, and I spent time with so many different hunters alongside my friend Harley, who ended up becoming our casting director. And we saw zero pythons during the 10 nights. I also didn’t understand that it was mostly amateurs. It’s 95% amateur hunters in the competition. It’s mostly a story of failure and of traffic. It’s essentially a publicity stunt.

The python has kind of a friendly face

What kind of safety meetings did you have to have? There’s something very gonzo about being in that environment...
XR: You can’t overstate safety concerns. As a filmmaker, I naturally want to do things that are a little more dangerous. But this was around the time all the Baldwin stuff was happening. So we had a medic on standby for the whole shoot; luckily we never had to use them. The first night of the hunt, you see in the film this Cottonmouth incident. That subject is an eighth-generation Floridian, grew up out there. If you’ve ever read the book “Shadow Country,” his great-grandfather is Ted Smallwood, who owns the Smallwood General Store in Chokoloskee. He’s a storied character, and maybe it was just too late in the night… he mistook a venomous snake for a python. If that had happened, I don’t even know what would’ve gone down. We would’ve had to drive to a hospital. The insurance policy of the film would’ve had to pay for anti-venom. And do we film that? Do I become part of the film, at the hospital? I don’t know what would’ve happened, but I’m glad it didn’t, honestly.

You come primarily from narrative. Did this require changing the way you think about filmmaking?
XR: I’d done a lot of hybrid-type films, which are hard because there’s actually less of an audience for them. Sometimes you’re thinking too much about form while watching the film. To me it was about finding a light touch: when to make it beautiful, and when to make it feel real. That was the balance we were looking for. And trying not to overthink it, just finding the right decisions in the edit.

You’ve said that if anyone’s going to make jokes about Florida, you want it to be you. Do you feel like non-Floridians understand Florida differently than Floridians do?
XR: In the nineties and early two thousands, there was a huge tax credit in Florida for film. So a lot of people would pitch Florida movies and get them greenlit, and some people would shoot Florida for other places. There were a lot of films made in Florida through the lens of an outsider, and it became kind of kooky and zany. And now, with the rule that mugshots are public, the Florida Man situation is sort of a joke; there’s shows about it. So that’s why we were interested in making this film. A lot of the people I grew up with, that I went to film school with and stayed friends with, were all Floridians. So we’re telling it from that perspective, without trying to shove it in your face. And in a way, the character from San Francisco ends up seeming like the weirdest character in the film, versus the people who romanticize Florida.

Some of the most striking images in the movie are the inserts of the snakes and the other animals. Were you there for shooting all of those?
XR: I love the film “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History” and the way they told the story from the cane toad’s perspective. We didn’t do exactly that, but I wanted the snake to have a presence, almost like a human presence. In a way it gives the film some sort of POV. I’m fascinated by reptiles because they’re these creatures that everyone hates and demonizes, but when you get closer to them, they become a little more friendly. The python has kind of a friendly face, even when you see them skin it and see their insides. They have kind of the same insides as we do — just in a different order, all on one line. So I wanted to give them a presence, even if it felt a little more stylized.