I guess you can call the movie sci-comma-fi as opposed to sci-dash-fi, writer-director Mike Cahill said of his new film, I Origins, which continues his exploration of science as an engine for emotional storytelling. Building from ideas involving iris biometrics eyes as a unique identifier Cahills new film exists at the intersection of the headier (some might say trippier) aspects of modern science with all-too-human issues of identity, spirituality and love.

In the film, Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt) is a scientist determined to give sightless worms the ability to see, jump-starting the process of evolution and thereby disproving the existence of God or intelligent design. While working intensely with his assistant-turned-lab-partner Karen (Brit Marling),his head and heart are turned by Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), a bohemian free-spirit. A few years later, Ian is with Karen, committed to each other and their work. Then a database of human eyes turns up a match to Sophie somewhere in India a seeming impossibility that implies some divine intervention. Ian goes to India to find those mystery eyes.

As an artist, youre trying to transmit emotions to an audience, and the landscape, the frontiers, discovered by science are new lands to tell new stories in, said Cahill of the connection he sees between science and storytelling.

The film opened last weekend in Los Angeles and New York and will be platforming to more cities. As part of theL.A. Times Indie Focus Screening Series, Cahill, Pitt and Marling appeared for a Q&A after a showing of I Origins.

In the freewheeling conversation, the trio spoke of the creative process behind the film. Cahill recalled photographing exactly 273 pairs of eyes for the film its all on a hard drive, he said of the specific count while also noting more than 200 visual effects shots are in the film.

Marling and Pitt recounted how the trio went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to spend time with researchers there, learning the basics of working in a laboratory.

I dropped somebodys thesis in a petri dish, and it shattered, Marling said. We broke some hearts at Johns Hopkins.

Joked Pitt: I saw his heart shatter. She took like seven years of his life.

But for a good cause. It was a good movie, right? countered Marling.

Marling and Cahill previously collaborated on Another Earth, directed by Cahill and co-written by the pair. That film supposed that a parallel planet just like ours existed elsewhere in the universe, an offshoot of the scientific ideas known as string theory.

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Mike Cahill, Brit Marling and Michael Pitt on science of 'I Origins'