By Christina Radish

Director Alastair Fothergill

In honor of Earth Day, Fothergill and Linfield spoke to MediaBlvd Magazine about bringing this remarkable film to the big screen.

MediaBlvd Magazine> What was the genesis of this project and why was it an important film to make?

Alastair Fothergill> The genesis was the desire to make an epic movie about an epic subject, which is the natural history of the whole planet. The original vision was that, if you look at nature in cinema, it’s been played on a relatively small canvas. If you look at movies like Microcosmos, Winged Migration and even March of the Penguins, they’re very focused movies on a particular subject. And, Mark and I felt that nobody had ever tried to do the whole planet and it seemed to be a time where people were increasingly caring about our planet. It was the perfect time. But, we didn’t quite appreciate the scale of the challenge. Logistically, it was massive.

MediaBlvd> How long did this take to make, how much footage did you end up with and how long did it take to edit all of that together?

Mark Linfield> The production period was five years, three of which were filming. There were 2,000 days in the field with over 40 different teams. With these true-life adventures, there really is no script. The animals just don’t do stuff to order. The way to crack it is immense effort, immense time and using everything that we can to stack the odds in our favor, using the best scientists, the best locations and just a lot of time.

Alastair> And patience, patience, patience.

MediaBlvd> There are so many endangered species in the world now. Why pick these particular species?

Mark> One of the storylines is the power of the sun, the journey the sun takes and the strength of the seasons. We wanted to choose animals that were affected by the seasons of the planet. The polar bear, living in the Arctic, is in the most seasonal environment on Earth, and much of the storyline is about how the mother polar bear has to battle with the naturally changing things in her environment. Similarly with the elephants, they have to undertake long, epic journeys through desert, which is seasonal. And, the humpback whales travel from the Equator, all the way down to the south. The other thing about those animals is that they are all engaging, intelligent creatures that we felt people would connect with, and that was very important in telling the story in the cinema.

Director Mark Linfield

Alastair> There were some real technological challenges in this movie. We were extraordinarily lucky that high-definition cameras had just become available, at the beginning of the shooting. There is an extraordinary camera system, called a Cineflex, which stabilizes a lens four or five times more powerful than has ever been stabilized in a helicopter before, and that’s extremely important for wildlife documentaries because you can fly four times higher and still get all the close-ups you need. A classic example would be the wolf hunt. Wolves are very shy animals and they run very fast when they’re running down caribou calves, and you just cannot film that from the ground. That had literally never been filmed before. But, with our helicopter so high that the wolves could hardly hear it, we filmed the whole sequence. And we were able to film the swimming polar bear, out there where you can’t go in a boat or on foot, beautifully in the wild. I was in this helicopter, over this male polar bear that was swimming, and I knew nobody had ever filmed anything like that before. I was genuinely in tears because I thought, “This is just beautiful.” One of the things that we’ve been really pleased about the reaction to this movie in Europe and Japan is that people have said to us, “The stuff in this movie which we cannot believe hasn’t been created by a computer.” In a world where a lot of cinema is dependent on computers, and Disney does that better than anybody, it’s really wonderful that, with true-life nature, there is nothing in Earth or any of the movies we are doing as part of Disneynature that isn’t absolutely true.

Mark> That’s where the power of it comes from.

MediaBlvd> What was the most dangerous situation that you got into during filming, that had the biggest pay-off for you?

Alastair> The most dangerous one was the lions and elephants with the sequence of the pride of 30 lions bringing down the elephant. You immediately might think that the lions are the dangerous bit and, if you got outside your vehicle, they would have definitely eaten you. But, that was okay. You just sit in the vehicle. What was really dangerous was that that sequence was filmed in infrared, in complete darkness, because if you use white light, you would have disturbed the animals. We had about 20 people there and the only person who could see anything was the camera woman. There were a lot of these elephants, and these mother elephants were really worried. A 15-20 ton mother elephant, looking after her calf, will run straight through your Land Rover without even thinking about it. That was something where the safety issues were slightly high on our concern levels.

Mark> The great white sharks you would think are not dangerous because we’re in a boat and they’re leaping away. But, they’re actually leaping quite close to the boat and, at that particular location, it has been known for a shark to leap out of the water, rather innocently chasing a seal, and actually land in the boat, which is not recommended.

Alastair> The other one that was particularly memorable was the sailfish, who are these wonderful big fish that are 2-3 meters long with these great big javelin things on their noses. We had about 70 of them together. It was an extraordinarily lucky occurrence to have so many. And they were feeding on little bait fish, which are small. These little fish are very clever and they saw the cameraman as the best thing to hide behind, and the cameraman came out of the water and said, “This is just unbelievable. I’m in there and these javelins are shooting past my ear. I can literally hear the roar of this fish.” They swim at 70 mph. It is a fast fish.

Mark> Anything to do with polar bears is dangerous. Polar bears are very unusual animals, in that most animals maybe present a risk if they’re wounded or starving. Polar bears just see you as a nice, tasty mammal, wrapped up in a bit of plastic wrapper. You are fair game for a polar bear. If you think about where they live, out in the Arctic waste, there isn’t much to eat. When they come across something nice that’s the size of a fat seal, they’re going to have a go, if you’re not very careful.                                                                                                                         

MediaBlvd> Do you have to be a certain type of person not to get involved and try to help any of these animals?

Alastair> What are you supposed to do? The male polar bear was starving, yes. Filming that was, for the cameraman and the director there, a very painful thing to do. But, what are we supposed to do, shoot the walrus? You might shoot one, but then you’ve got a life responsibility to go on doing it. The first rule wildlife filmmakers have is to be true to nature. You don’t interfere and you don’t get involved. You have to be true to nature, both on the screen and also in the way that you deal with those issues. Mark and I are passionate about the natural world, but we recognize that a cheetah is a predator, beautifully evolved. Yes, a cheetah kills Bambi, and that’s sad, but that cheetah has got its own cubs and I think people understand that, if you put it in context. But, we recognize that these are family movies and we’re very careful to cut them so that you don’t dwell on the blood and gore.

Mark> There’s a line of commentary over that cheetah hunt that says, “This is the circle of life that people in their urban environment have lost touch with.” In many ways, that cheetah hunt is metaphorical for lots of stuff that you don’t really need to see. You don’t need to see the blood and guts. The moment that that gazelle is brought down, you really don’t need to see what happens next. But, equally, you don’t want to shield people from the sequence, up to that point. That is nature.

MediaBlvd> There are a lot of funny things that the animals are doing, like with the courting bird, the little birds falling out of the nest and flying, and the baboons. Did you make a conscious effort to balance this film with humor?

Mark> Absolutely. It’s critical. In any movie, you want the full, rich gamut of emotions, such as laughter, sadness and pathos. The great thing about nature is that it does provide them all, so you’d be crazy not to use it. It gives you the full, rounded experience of cinema that we hope people will get when they see the film.

MediaBlvd> Was James Earl Jones your first choice for the film’s voice-over?

Alastair> Absolutely! We’ve used different voices in different parts of the world. In the UK version we used Patrick Stewart.

Mark> But, for the U.S., James Earl Jones was our first choice. He brings a weight and gravitas fitting of the subject.

MediaBlvd> Where did you get your passion for nature?

Mark> We both started rummaging around in the undergrowth, catching slugs and snails, to show to our family.

Alastair> I had a zoo in my bedroom. My mother would never, ever come near it.

Mark> Both of us had rooms full of animals that we probably shouldn’t have had, and both of us really enjoyed being excited about them and explaining them to other people. We both went to university to study zoology and then just tried to publicize our enthusiasm and spread it. It was a natural evolution to end up doing this.

Alastair> We started in television at the BBC Natural History unit and made a lot of TV documentaries. The cinema has been the natural evolution for us.

MediaBlvd> What did you learn from making this?

Mark> The amazing tenacity and dedication of all of those animals that have successfully pulled through a difficult year on earth and showed incredible tenacity and drive. That’s what we all need.

Alastair> One of the nice things about concentrating on mothers and their babies is that you realize we’re preserving the planet for the next generation. That’s one of the resonances that we hope this movie might have, in a subtle way. There are very specific and exciting challenges about making nature work for cinema, creatively and technically.

MediaBlvd> What would you like to have the audience take away from seeing the film?

Alastair> More than anything else, we want them to have a good time in the cinema. This isn’t An Inconvenient Truth. It’s not The Eleventh Hour. It’s not trying to preach to people. There’s a lot of bad news about the environment out there, but if you had all the money in the world and 10 lifetimes, you wouldn’t see 10% of what we can show you in this movie. It needs preserving. We just want people to come out uplifted.

Mark> People come out saying that there’s a conservation message, but it’s so subtle and light that it just naturally emerges from the fact that, when people see all the things they see in the movie, they realize what we need to preserve. You just naturally come to that conclusion. It’s a very light environmental slant, but it’s actually not so much delivered by us. It’s just the way it is. It’s inevitable.