Disneynature Earth Q&A
Disneynature’s first film, Earth, which comes out on Earth Day (April 22,2009), follows three animal families across the globe. It’s a beautiful film by the same directors that brought us the Planet Earth series. I was lucky enough to get a chance to speak to the directors and ask a few questions. Here they are!
Me: I’m from 4theloveofanimals.com. My question is, what was your favorite animal to film? What was the most exciting or that just gave you the most joy to watch and film?
A. Fothergill: Let me kick it off. Inevitably, it’s a situation where you were there, and for me, it’s the swimming male polar bear. I was up high, high in the helicopter with this special, stabilized camera system we were using, and I knew that I was filming something that had never been filmed before because you can’t normally follow a polar bear out into the open ocean. You obviously can’t walk on the ice because it’s melted, and you can’t get close on a boat really without disturbing them. But also, it was a very beautiful image, and we started out on a close up, and this is the largest land carnivore on our planet. We just pulled back, and we pulled back, and we pulled back, and ended with this tiny, tiny dot in the middle of the wide expanse of the Artic Ocean, and it was a very emotional moment for me.
I also loved the birds of paradise. I think that’s a wonderful sequence and, again, a real first for us because those birds live on the bottom of the rain forest floor in New Guinea where low light conditions have made it very difficult to capture them on film, but the high sensitivity of the high definition cameras we used really do justice to those extraordinary displays of those very beautiful birds.
M. Linfield: Yes, and I think, as Alastair says, you were always influenced by the things that you film. In my case, I suppose it would be filming the elephants caught in a sandstorm in the Okavango Delta. I was just really taken by the great care the mother was using to shield her little calf from this sort of lashing sand in the sandstorm, and I was high above in a helicopter filming, like Alastair, with one of these gyro-stabilized cameras. Of course, we were relatively isolated high above, but the sight of her looking after her calf in the face of the elements was really, really touching, and that’s one that will stay with me.
Then, of course, I’m a sucker for things that make me laugh, so I loved the jumping mandarin ducks, the mandarin ducks flinching and flying. That was one of my favorites as well.
Me: Thank you. If I can ask just one more, was it ever difficult to observe and not intervene at all, or was it easy to just stand back?
A. Fothergill: It’s very hard. When you see a dying male polar bear and you’ve been with that animal for a long time, it is hard. But clearly what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to shoot a walrus? It’s a slippery slope, and our first rule is never interfere, never disturb. As soon as you get into that situation, I think you’re breaking the first rule of wildlife film making, which is to record and never interfere in any way with the animals at all.
Me: I just wondered, what was your favorite location that you went to during the filming?
M. Linfield: Probably my favorite location was the Okavango Delta in Botswana for two reasons really. One, I absolutely adored the transformation that happens between the dry season and the wet season. It’s one of the greatest things that happens on the planet, in my view where the delta gets turned from being a desert to being an incredibly lush wetland full of wildlife over the course of really just a matter of weeks, and that’s a magical transformation. Plus the fact that it’s one of those few places left where you can be surrounded by wildlife with very few people, and whilst we were filming there, we were using a helicopter to cover large amounts of ground. We saw pretty much nobody, which as you’d appreciate, is very, very rare these days. That made the wildlife viewing all the more special really, so that’s probably my favorite place.
A. Fothergill: For me, it has to be Svalbard, which is an archipelago of islands between Greenland and northern Norway. It’s where we filmed all the polar bear material. And it’s a very special place because although it’s 700 miles south of the North Pole and, as such, very remote, it has extraordinary logistics. You can fly in daily from Baslow, because the Norwegians keep the logistics very well. And you can jump on your skidoo and go over the top of a glacier and be in one of the most extraordinary wilderness areas in the whole world, you know, right in among polar bears. To get to such a remote and wonderful wilderness so easily and quickly is very, very special. It’s a breathtakingly lovely place.
**Just a reminder, for every ticket that is purchased during opening week, Disneynature will plant a tree.**
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I cannot wait to see this.