Going global

Director and producer Alastair Fothergill
on making the massive, planet-spanning
BBC documentary Earth

WHALE OF A SCALE: Earth
(Click here for larger image)

by MARK SLUTSKY

How do you make a film about the planet Earth and capture even a fraction of its complexity, of its vastly different natural environments and incredible diversity of life? Well, one way is to start from the top and work your way down. That’s the approach taken by the BBC Natural History Unit in Earth, a new film about our planet that doesn’t bother with us troublesome humans and instead focuses on the life forms we share the planet with, and who we seem to be encroaching on more by the day.

Earth, a natural history documentary in the purest sense, tells the story of a year in the life of the planet by starting at the North Pole and heading south. The movie tells the stories of a few individual animals—a polar bear and her cubs, elephants migrating through the Kalahari, a humpback whale and her calf—while touching on dozens of other species, like sharks, sea lions and birds of paradise.

Shot in high-definition, it’s a glorious and often psychedelic portrait of our world. Despite the dramatic variations in ecologies and living conditions, the animals display a universality that’s quite touching (a plausible alternative title for the film could be Animals Eating), and the film’s environmental consciousness is firmly present but never overbearing.

If all this sounds familiar, you may have gotten a taste of Earth before, as it was produced in conjunction with BBC’s mind-blowing Planet Earth series, with which it shares a bunch of footage. Still, even if you have a slick flat-screen/Blu-Ray set-up at home, seeing Earth on the big screen with proper digital projection is a whole other experience; it really looks incredible. It’s also far more narrative-driven than the series, which focuses on particular environments and habitats.

A BIGGER CANVAS

“We really wanted to make an epic movie about the whole planet,” says Alastair Fothergill, director of Earth and Planet Earth’s series producer. “If you look at the history of natural history in cinema, you might point to March of the Penguins, you might point to Winged Migration, you might point to Microcosmos; these are all films that work on a relatively limited canvas. And we wanted to do something on a much bigger canvas. So, constantly, I was thinking about where there were the interactions between the two.

“I suppose the key thing was that we needed a very simple journey for the audience: north-south, really, following the sun on its annual journey. We wanted three characters that would take the audience on that journey. We chose the characters partly geographically—polar bear in the north, elephant in the tropics, humpback whale from the tropics to Antarctica—but also, in their own different ways they encapsulated some key issues, conservation and environmental issues on the planet.”

It’s obviously difficult to bring up the Arctic these days without a mention of climate change. It’s to Earth’s credit that it never wimps out on the issue, but never gets heavy-handed either. “Particularly in Canada, people are unbelievably aware of what’s happening in the Arctic,” Fothergill says. “When we got some of the extraordinary images of the male polar bear struggling on melting ice, I mean, that was an individual polar bear at the end of the spring, but his dilemma was in a sense a wonderful symbol of the dilemma that the species now faces. But I don’t think people go to the cinema to get heavy environmental messages rammed down their throats and that wasn’t our ambition.”

A LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE

Watching the film, what keeps coming to mind is what organizational insanity it must have been to produce, with 202 locations in 64 countries spanning the globe, five to 10 camera crews in the field at any given time and subjects that are unpredictable by nature.

“Yeah, it was a logistical nightmare, to be honest!” Fothergill admits. “Of course, the wonderful thing about wildlife filmmaking is that you make extraordinarily organized plans months ahead and then the animals decide to change the rules. You just have to hope that most of the time you’re successful. A lot of the time, we failed. The sequences that you see are the sequences we filmed. The sequences you don’t see are the sequences that failed.”

It’s also hard to keep from continually wondering “How the hell did they get that?” The film’s opening sequence, featuring polar bear cubs emerging from their den and into the sun for the very first time, is a good example of Earth’s amazing “gets.” “That was a very major challenge,” Fothergill says of the shot. “Because we very much wanted to get that very first moment—the innocence of the first day. The problem with that is you have no idea where the female polar bear has made her den. There’s no sign of it.

“But we were very lucky, because the Norwegian government gave us access to an amazingly remote island called Kong Karls Land in the Svalbard archipelago. It hasn’t been visited for 25 years because, basically, the Norwegians found an extraordinary density of polar bears there. There’s 14 polar bear dens in one valley. That enormously increased our chances of actually finding an emergence, but my team waited on a hillside where they thought there was a polar bear going to emerge twice, only to find a polar bear mother walk past with two cubs. And immediately they knew they were in the wrong place, because female polar bears are very, very territorial. So they moved on and it was only the third time that they finally got lucky and finally got the sequence that opens the movie so nicely.”

LIONS AND LAND ROVERS

The polar bear sequence may have been the trickiest to capture, but the film’s most dangerous sequence is, without a doubt, a hair-raising scene where a pack of lionesses attack a herd of elephants in the dead of night. Filmed all in infra-red night vision, it’s kind of the last thing you’d ever want to get mixed up in—let alone try and get on camera. “The cameraman was the only person on our team who could actually see the action!” Fothergill says. “But there was a big team there because the whole scene was being lit by big infra-red lights on Land Rovers that were running around it. She, on radio, was directing the lighting so it wasn’t front-lit, but nicely side-lit.

“Those female elephants couldn’t see in the dark—they couldn’t see any better than us—and they were bloody frightened, frankly. They were charging around, desperately trying to protect their calves while we were shooting. And you know, a very cross female elephant (laughs) will charge through your Land Rover without even thinking about it.”

The lions they were less worried about. “To be frank, I still don’t quite understand it, but when you’re in a vehicle, a lion won’t eat you. If you step off the vehicle, it’ll eat you. I mean, this is a national park in Botswana where they’re used to tourists and tourists watch the lions from vehicles, but I still don’t understand it. If I was a hungry lion, I’d jump straight on a Land Rover and eat an American tourist, but they never seem to.”

Fothergill cites one shot in particular as a personal highlight: “For me, I didn’t go on all the locations—clearly, I was back at the base running the operation. But for me, my favourite shot is the male polar bear swimming. I was directing that, I was in the helicopter above that swimming polar bear and I love it, because I knew it was something that had never been filmed before, first of all.

“But just the whole pattern of the bear swimming, from the air, with the dark ice, dark water with the broken ice, it was just a very aesthetically beautiful image. And also a very poignant image; you pull out and you pull out and you pull out and it’s this tiny dot. You’ve got the world’s largest land carnivore and yet it is just a tiny dot in the Arctic Ocean and I just think ‘Wow,’ basically.”

EARTH IS NOW IN THEATRES