Peter Strickland isn't exactly sure how he came to direct Bjork's concert film, Bjork: Biophilia Live, the movie element of a long-term endeavour that has incorporated a studio album, a multimedia project, an app, educational workshops and a world tour, constructed around the artist's singular vision of the relationships between music, nature and technology.

Someone suggested his name to her, it seems.  "I didn't need an introduction to her work,"  he says, "but she needed an introduction to mine". After she'd seen his films, which include the features Katalin Varga and Berberian Sound Studio, the collaboration was under way and Strickland joins the list of filmmakers Bjork has worked with, a list that includes Spike Jonze, Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine.

Bjork: Biophilia Live captures a concert at London's Alexandra Palace that took place last year at the end of a long tour. It's a wildly inventive show that features Bjork, the songs from Biophilia and, among other things, an Icelandic female choir, a percussionist, an electronic instrumentalist, a Tesla coil, a solar-powered music box and the voice of David Attenborough. It draws on some of the scientific and poetic imagery that has already been part of her vision. And it's performed in the round.

For Strickland, who doesn't regard himself as a fan of the genre, concert films fall into two categories. "They are seen either as souvenirs and merchandise, or a director trying to put their stamp on it". His own preference is for the straightforward account of the performance itself, and the focus for him is not on the filmmaker but on the music. "Even if Bela Tarr did a concert film with Sting, I'm not going to watch it." Working with Bjork, it was important to serve her vision, he says. although, he adds, "I would do the same for any other musician."

First of all, there were the logistics of filming in the round. "I'd only worked with one camera in the past, and suddenly here you were with 16 cameras and no retakes allowed." He saw the show live twice, with the director of photography, Australian filmmaker Brett Turnbull, a concert film veteran, who prepared elevation plans for the shoot that Strickland speaks of with wonder "and there was an amazing camera crew, they've done this for years and years, and they came in looking like something out of The Expendables," he recalls.

After the recording of the performance, the next stage was researching and choosing the imagery that would accompany it. Some strong, visually striking material was already part of the Biophilia project and the concert experience, but there was plenty more available to the filmmakers, Strickland and his co-director, Nick Fenton.

They had freedom to select from sources such as Getty, the BBC and the Wellcome Trust, and to bring their own ideas: Strickland, for example, is a great admirer of the work of the late Jean Painleve, and for the song Crystalline, his estate allowed the filmmakers to use some of his footage. "It was really exciting for me to have it. He was a scientist who made quite long scientific films and then did re-edits of the same films with avant garde music, quite lyrical and poetic, and on the borderline between art and science."

Bjork, he says, was receptive to their ideas and email conversations helped to clarify things. "She felt comfortable with us and we understood what she wanted and what she didn't want, and then we were very much left to it in the edit."

One of the things she wanted to avoid, he says, "was anything with a retro feel, anything that was too grainy. She wanted footage that was modern and quite clinical, and she didn't want a didactic approach." Her focus was more on "celebrating and marvelling at nature" and expressing the hope that nature and technology can collaborate. With this in mind they sought, for example, images that "looked virtually identical but were in fact complete opposites", such as an overhead shot of sand dunes juxtaposed with microscopic shots of tissue cells".

The concert also included songs that were not part of the Biophilia album, "that were not explicitly evoking that kind of texture, we were thinking, how do we interpret these, what scope do we have, can we be a bit more intuitive". For Hidden Places, for example, from Vespertine, "Nick found this amazing footage of a camera underneath a glacier, which completely got the title of the song. And when you placed it on top of the image, it made Bjork look really minuscule, like something out of Journey to the Centre of the Earth or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

His fellow director, Nick Fenton came at the task from a slightly different position. Fenton is an editor and that was originally going to be his role on the film. It took a slightly different turn, however, when another of Strickland's projects, a feature, went into production sooner than expected.

As Bjork: Biophilia Live came together in the edit, Strickland was in Hungary; Bjork was in New York, available through Skype; and Fenton was in London. There was a regular to-and-fro of contact, Fenton says: "it was a truly modern, digital experience and hopefully it hasn't lost its humanity."

Fenton has not only worked on concert films before, he's also done music films by artists from Iceland. He edited two Sigur Ros film, including Heima, a non-traditional tour documentary which followed the band around as they planned free, spontaneous, unannounced concerts in their home country.  He did an Arctic Monkeys concert video for Richard Ayoade in 2008; he's edited Ayoade's subsequent features, Submarine and The Double. And he also edited the movie version of the All Tomorrow's Parties concert compilation.

As a longtime Bjork fan, he was thrilled to be able to be part of Biophilia Live. Watching the footage of her on stage, he says, "I kept being amazed and awestruck by her performance and the depth of emotion she puts into these songs." Finding the imagery to sit with this, he says, was always going to be a challenge – "sourcing shots that were beautiful enough to earn their place but also scientifically accurate".

He and Strickland had slightly different, yet complementary approaches to the task, he says. "Peter is very comfortable with the idea of serving Bjork's vision, of seeing the film as a souvenir, a memento for fans, but I aspired for it to be something extra, and the whole opening sequence came from that, to start out somewhere else and end up in the concert hall."

Bjork: Biophilia Live is at ACMI from October 27 to November 12.

www.acmi.net.au