French film actor, director, and producer Jacques Perrin has worked both
in front of and behind the camera. He acted in and produced Z, directed by
Costa-Gavras, which won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1969. More
recently, he’s best known around the world for his big-budget, high-concept
nature films, Microcosmos and Winged Migration. His Galatee Films spent eight
years on the groundbreaking new film, Oceans. For more of my conversation with Perrin and his team, check out the companion book to the film, OCEANS, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide. For mo
“It started with a simple dream: to swim with the fish and the dolphins, to accompany them underwater and as they crossed the oceans. The desire to forget the little we do know in order to rediscover it and see and hear it anew. To invent a camera as fast and nimble as the sea lion, a camera made for the big screen but using short focal lengths so we can get up close and personal with the animals, sparking new relationships and emotions. To stop watching the spectacle and be a part of it. To never slow down—the sensation of speed and vitality is far too precious. That’s what we wanted: a living camera dancing with the whales, leaping with the dolphins, bursting forth with the tuna, and gliding with the manta rays.”
That was Jacques Perrin’s goal for his new film Oceans and aided by a cast of many hundreds they managed to pull it off. On a sunny spring day I find Perrin and the top echelon of his team – the film’s co-producer Jacques Cluzaud, executive producer Jake Eberts and biologist/writer Francoise Sarano – in Paris. The official opening of their beautiful film in the U.S. was still a month away (April 22).
Conceived in Perrin’s head a decade ago, the filmmaking required to match his vision had been a monumental undertaking, taking the mostly-underwater camera crews to 54 locations around the globe. (At one point, there were twenty-six location managers and nineteen cameras in the field on a single day). A veteran producer and film director, known to an international audience most recently for his bold, technology-pushing wildlife films Microcosmos and Winged Migration, Perrin’s films have always been major events. Oceans, funded by a long and varied list, including the expected (film companies and television channels) and the unexpected (NGOs and philanthropic foundations, banks, businesses and regional councils) is no different.
'OCEANS' producers Cluzaud and Perrin
His team built thirteen specially modified digital camera systems and sophisticated waterproof housings for each. Every camera operator had to be able to use rebreathers in order to allow them to stay down long and dive without bubbles; each cameraman was assigned a security diver/“rebreather instructor” who shadowed his every flipper-stroke, responsible for managing and maintaining the dive equipment so the cameraman could focus solely on the pictures. In cases where the diving site was more than two hours from the closest first aid center specialized in diving accidents, the expedition traveled with a pressurized stretcher and an emergency doctor trained in hyperbaric medicine. They built a high-tech crane using military secrets dubbed Thetys; a remote controlled helicopter camera they called Birdy Fly; a torpedo-cam that could be dragged 300 feet behind the boat; and a pole-cam, for getting up-close with the fishes from above sea level. All that time, energy and money is apparent on the screen.
But they were after something bigger than a nature film or documentary. In the words of the film’s co-producer Jacques Cluzaud, “Be clear, Oceans is not a wildlife documentary. A documentary maintains a certain distance, an outsider’s viewpoint. It describes a phenomenon and often explains it. Oceans takes the opposite approach: It doesn’t teach the audience anything, it attempts to jolt it.”
Jacques Perrin: The idea for Oceans came to me about ten years ago when we were finishing Winged Migration. Still vague, it was an idea for a fiction film about a defender of whales and oceans based on the story of Captain Paul Watson. Then the sea animals grew increasingly important. Of course the story continued to fill out, getting increasingly rich, with more and more characters and points of view—that of the sailor, the diver, the oceanographer, the fisherman, the judge, the polluter and the ocean traveler—to represent every aspect of the ocean. But it was never enough: the ocean has too many faces. And more and more the sea creatures were taking over our script, ever more disconcerting. Clearly there wasn’t just one ocean but thousands of them, making up the great global ocean we couldn’t ignore. It filled us with enthusiasm over the days and nights and years that we worked on the script. Jacques Cluzaud and I surrounded ourselves with an indispensable, unbeatable team who helped us to develop an intimate understanding of the oceans. After three years of collaborative work, we realized the script we had finally finished was a dead end: at three and a half hours, the film wove the stories of human characters and sea creatures into the greatest impressionistic vision of the ocean—and was way too long. We came to an abrupt, painful stop.
We had to start over, build it from the ground up, using only what was essential: the marine creatures—the best advocates there are for the ocean. So long as you’re not just in it to film pretty pictures or vent your pessimism, this kind of filmmaking is the best weapon you have to testify, take a stand, denounce, and convey your indignation, no matter how complex the subject. The evocative power of cinema could truly resonate with that of the ocean.
Of course, we’re not the first to make a movie about the sea. But we wanted something else. Wasn’t it possible to make something different and innovative using images we might have seen before? Naturally it wasn’t easy. The breadth of the ocean cannot be defined from a single point of view. It took a long time: three years of writing and pre-production, nearly four years in production, endless trial and error that allowed us to pinpoint our desires and better define our intentions as we went along. Though Winged Migration was a challenge, Oceans was incredibly more complicated. Underwater, our cameramen were physically and visually handicapped: too slow to swim as fast as fish in an environment where visibility is rarely greater than fifty feet. Yet we wanted to express the life and movements of sea animals as different as the cuttlefish and the sailfish. Oceans isn’t a documentary, it’s a wildlife opera. And each animal played its part, contributed a few notes to the score.
The essence of a documentary is that you start off with a theory, that you wish to explain using pictures or images. In a way it becomes an illustrated text. Our case was a bit different because we spent a long time listening to scientists, learning from them, digesting that information and re-expressing it by giving full throttle to nature itself, allowing nature to express itself fully, getting really into the heart of what nature could show us. Which is a very emotional way of expressing it and the viewer should feel that emotion.
It’s a bit like the end of the nineteenth century painters doing seascapes, for example. They would show you colors of the sea and colors of the sky, and would perhaps describe scientifically what was happening at a particular point of time. What I hoped to do is convey that expression and that emotion in a similar way.
With Winged Migration we were trying to see things that we know, animals that we know, but see them differently and therefore discover new things about them. We’ve done that in this film in different ways. First of all, in the way in which we filmed and also the way it’s been edited. The way it’s been presented gives you that very close feel to the animal, but also the fact that we are covering them extremely fast in the speed of their movement. For example, if you are following a dolphin at 10 knots in the water, or 22 knots outside water, you see things differently, you see things in a new light and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. So we’re very close to them.
We had all sorts of advisors but scientists were not dictating us to do certain things. We just followed the animals; they guided us, kind of telling us what to film, what not to film, and how we should feel. We might be right in the middle of them but their behavior didn’t change with our presence, which is what makes it so special, the fact that we are there, we observe them, but they continue to behave in a completely natural way without being modified in any way.
We have heard several times after private viewings of Oceans people coming out of the theater saying, ‘We didn’t realize the diversity that we talk about so much is an expression of life and movement.’ To us, that is what is important to show. For example, when you see a sequence where there are sharks being brought out of the sea and their fins cut off just to be used for soup and the bodies thrown back into the sea it means these sharks have been condemned to death. People young and old people have come out of our movie in tears because of those scenes. The fact that we’ve been able to touch people in that way, show them something different, shows that there is this great diversity and that the diversity also is a question of personality. We are not just talking about ordinary fishes; we are talking about predators and prey, about innate and acquired behavior. We’re not just talking about fish that are going to be eaten or displayed in a store or a market but about beautiful, graceful animals moving in a natural, balletic way. What we are trying to do is show that this diversity is something that we belong to as well, that we are not more than these animals, that we are not in any way better or greater but just another species, part of the huge diversity that exists on the planet. We are not just showing them a gallery of pretty animal pictures, but all of life’s theater, which we hope is going to move them, blow them away.
Many people have come out of the theater and said, ‘we want to share this with someone else. I want to talk about it with my children, my family.’ They either come out feeling really angry at some of the things they’ve seen, or incredibly moved.
After all these years of such intense filming on the ocean am I concerned about it and its creatures? Absolutely. During these eight years several species of fish have disappeared, forever.
I truly think individuals can change things. Otherwise it’s just like going to church and lighting a candle and hoping that something is going to happen. We need to do more than that. We need to have tighter regulations, a United Nations of the Sea so to speak, and it should no longer be mere rhetoric for conferences and discussions. We’ve got to go much further and really have an armed sense of protection of the sea and its nature. I think, however, that more people are becoming aware of these issues and that they are going to really put pressure on governments to take action along these lines.
The ocean is really quite strong and capable of regenerating itself if it were to be allowed to do so. So I think our film is an ode to the ocean, and I think if we kind of sing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak, and we sing in tune, we can make a difference.
When Marylee Orr started what has become Louisiana’s most effective environmental organization she thought it would be a six-month commitment. “I realized how dirty our air and water were at that time and felt it was my civic duty to try and raise awareness of the problems. But I didn’t realize that it would become my life.” That was twenty-four years ago.
I’ve known Marylee for the past 15 years; we worked together initially on stories about how the big petrochemical plants lining the Mississippi were poisoning local aquifers … and not telling anyone once they learned. Standing in her Baton Rouge driveway two weeks into the spill she rests her arm on a 35-foot-long rowboat that was delivered to her last summer, rowed the length of the Mississippi from its source in Minnesota. Among the many hats she wears as executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, she is also the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper, part of the international Waterkeeper Alliance. The rowboat was gifted to her as a way for her local team to get out onto the river they help protect.
But since the Gulf oil spill, she’s been far too busy to do anything but man the telephones, 12, 13 hours a day. “We are all suffering from disaster fatigue,” she admits, “from sleeping just four and five hours a night for weeks now.
“We are responding just as we did after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Documenting everything that’s going on, trying to keep people informed, especially our fishermen. Being a conduit for information, like about what’s going on with the dispersants that BP is putting in the water and claiming are not harmful. We went to court on a Sunday to force BP to forego the contracts they were trying to get the fishermen who were going to help with the cleanup to sign. They basically said if they got hurt their own insurance would have to cover them, that BP wouldn’t cover their boats if they were damaged and that they wouldn’t be able to speak about what was happening out there, essentially giving away all their rights. We got that stopped in with a lawsuit.”
For the rest of my conversation with Marylee — and a video interview — go to The Current at takepart.com.
A resident of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Christopher Swain is in the midst of his most ambitious adventure yet, swimming the length of the Atlantic coastline. Previous record-settings swims have taken him down the Hudson, Columbia and Mississippi rivers. Using adventure to draw attention to environmental concerns is a unique – but effective — lure. His essay from OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
When I was a boy, I snorkeled in Buzzards Bay, a fat thumb of the Atlantic Ocean that presses into the coast of Massachusetts.
I remember squinting down through my mask at acres of rippled sand, hunting for the telltale bulges of treasure chests.
As an eight year-old, I didn’t know the sea was warming and turning acidic. I had no idea there was mercury in the bottom sediments or pesticides in the waves.
I was just a kid who loved the ocean.
As an adult, I swam through thousands of miles of water laced with everything from motor oil to raw sewage, in an effort to make our waterways more friends.
When I gave speeches about my adventures, folks would sidle up to me afterwards and ask, “What can I do to help?
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got an inbox full of spam telling me what I could be doing to help the ocean, about how I could clean up plastic trash in the Pacific, or stop whale hunting in the Southern Ocean.
And I have to admit it bugs me every time someone tells me what I should be doing. But when people are looking into my eyes, asking for ideas, I feel like I need to say something.
I believe we protect what we love.
When we walk the beach, play in the surf, or go for a swim in our favorite slice of the sea, we get in touch with what’s going on there. We begin to care about that place. We become invested.
And once we do care, once we are invested, protection and restoration take care of themselves.
You know what I see when I look at pictures of our planet? Massive swathes of blue water. Continents floating like islands. And living on those islands? One people, sharing one ocean.
Your ocean.
You want to protect it?
You’ve got to get wet.
By Michael Roberts, Louisiana Bayoukeeper: The boat ride, out, from Lafitte, Louisiana, Sunday, May 23, 2010, to our fishing grounds was not unlike any other I have taken in my life, as a commercial fisherman from this area. I have made the trip thousands of times in my 35 plus years shrimping and crabbing. A warm breeze in my face, it is a typical Louisiana summer day. 3 people were with me, my wife Tracy, Ian Wren, and our grandson, Scottie. I was soon to find out, how untypical this day would become for me, not unlike a death in the family. This was going to be a very bad day for me.
Photo by Jeffrey Dubinsky, Grand Isle, LA
As we neared Barataria Bay, the smell of crude oil in the air was getting thicker and thicker. An event that always brought joy to me all of my life, the approach of the fishing grounds, was slowly turning into a nightmare. As we entered Grand Lake, the name we fishermen call Barataria Bay, I started to see a weird, glassy look to the water and soon it became evident to me, there was oil sheen as far as I could see. Soon, we were running past patches of red oil floating on top of the water. As we headed farther south, we saw at least a dozen boats, in the distance, which appeared to be shrimping. We soon realized that shrimping was not what they were doing at all, but instead they were towing oil booms in a desperate attempt to corral oil that was pouring into our fishing grounds. We stopped to talk to one of the fishermen, towing a boom, a young fisherman from Lafitte. What he told me floored me. He said, “What we are seeing in the lake, the oil, was but a drop in the bucket of what was to come.” He had just come out of the Gulf of Mexico and he said, “It was unbelievable, the oil runs for miles and miles and was headed for shore and into our fishing grounds”. I thought, what I had already seen in the lake was enough for a lifetime. We talked a little while longer, gave the fisherman some protective respirators and were soon on our way. As we left the small fleet of boats, working feverishly, trying to corral the oil, I became overwhelmed with what I just saw.
I am not real emotional and consider myself a pretty tough guy. You have to be to survive as a fisherman. As I left that scene, tears flowed down my face and I cried. Something I have not done in a long time, but would do several more times that day. I tried not to let my grandson, Scottie, see me crying. I didn’t think he would understand, I was crying for his stolen future. None of this will be the same, for decades to come. The damage is going to be immense and I do not think our lives here in South Louisiana will ever be the same. He is too young to understand. He has an intense love for our way of life here. He wants to be a fisherman and a fishing guide when he gets older. It is what he is, it is in his soul, and it is his culture. How can I tell him that this may never come to pass now, now that everything he loves in the outdoors may soon be destroyed by this massive oil spill? How do we tell this to a generation of young people, in south Louisiana who live and breathe this bayou life that they love so much, could soon be gone? How do we tell them? All this raced through my mind and I wept.
We continued farther south towards Grand Terre Island. We approached Bird Island. The real name is Queen Bess Island, but we call it Bird Island, because it is always full of birds. It is a rookery, a nesting island for thousands of birds, pelicans, terns, gulls etc. As we got closer, we saw that protective boom had been placed around about two thirds of the island. It was obvious to me, that oil had gone under the boom and was fouling the shore and had undoubtedly oiled some birds. My God. We would see this scene again at Cat Island and other unnamed islands that day. We continued on to the east past Coup Abel Pass and more shrimp boats trying to contain some of the oil on the surface. We arrived at 4 Bayou Pass to see more boats working on the same thing. We beached the boat and decided to look at the beach between the passes.
The scene was one of horror to me. There was thick red oil on the entire stretch of beach, with oil continuing to wash ashore. The water looked to be infused with red oil, with billions of, what appeared to be, red pebbles of oil washing up on the beach with every wave. The red oil pebbles, at the high tide mark on the beach were melting into pools of red goo in the hot Louisiana sun. The damage was overwhelming. There was nobody there to clean it up. It would take an army to do it. Like so much of coastal Louisiana, it was accessible only by boat. Will it ever be cleaned up? I don’t know. Tears again. We soon left that beach and started to head home.
We took a little different route home, staying a little farther to the east side of Barataria Bay. As we approached the northern end of the bay, we ran into another raft of oil that appeared to be covering many square miles. It was only a mile from the interior bayous on the north side of Barataria Bay. My God. No boats were towing boom in this area. I do not think anyone even knew it was there. A little bet farther north, we saw some shrimp boats with boom, on anchor, waiting to try and protect Bayou St. Dennis from the oil. I alerted them of the approaching oil. I hope they were able to control it before it reached the bayou. We left them and started to head in.
My heart never felt so heavy, as on that ride in. I thought to myself, this is the most I’ve cried since I was a baby. In fact I am sure it was. This will be a summer of tears for a lot of us in south Louisiana.
Once the king of New York City seafood restaurants, Rick’s Moonen’s pseudonymous restaurant in Las Vegas is one of the leading examples of a cook committing to sustainable seafood. A founding member of the Seafood Choices Alliances, which named him “Seafood Champion” in 2006, he is an active member of the Wildlife Conservation Society and SeaWeb, practicing what he preaches – choosing fish wisely – at home and in his restaurant. An excerpt from OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
I was first introduced to the world of ocean-friendly seafood when I was Executive Chef at Oceana in New York City in the 1990’s. I was approached by a non-profit conservation organization, SeaWeb, who had done their research and knew I had been highly involved in the Pure Foods campaign. I was quite outspoken that consumers, including chefs, have the right to know what’s in their food. SeaWeb was concerned about a different issue, the North Atlantic swordfish, and wanted me to sign on to their Give Swordfish A Break campaign. They were asking chefs to take swordfish off their menu as a means of raising awareness that Atlantic swordfish populations needed protection.
I had been going to the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan for years, and had seen a lot of changes in both the size and quality of fish. In 1988, swordfish often weighed two hundred pounds or more; today it is frequently found below one hundred pounds. I admit that I was quite nervous about taking such a popular seafood item off my menu, that it might not be a smart business decision. But I began to feel very passionately about the issue and signed on. I became the campaign’s spokesperson, and it ended up being a historic in that it actually forced the government to take action.
Since then, I’ve enjoyed being on the front lines for other species campaigns such as Take A Pass On Chilean Sea Bass and Caviar Emptor. In 2001, I worked with SeaWeb to launch the Seafood Choices Alliance, an association of conservation organizations and seafood professionals that brings ocean conservation to the table by promoting seafood that is good to eat and good for the ocean. As a “Seafood Champion” for the Alliance, I am often called upon to testify at management council meetings or government hearings, participate in media features related to seafood and ocean conservation, and in development of local events to raise awareness of better seafood choices.
The oceans cannot provide an endless supply of fish. More effective fishing methods have led to fish populations being caught faster than they can reproduce. Cod have been depleted – as much because of overfishing as from damage to the ocean floors. So fishermen turned to monkfish, a “trash fish” once discarded as bycatch. Now monkfish is depleted. A savvy marketing campaign renamed the Patagonian toothfish “Chilean sea bass.” These are slow-growing fish, living forty years. A fish that takes that long to mature is particularly susceptible to overfishing – something that is clear when you find out how few of these fish are left in the world.
Seafood conservation has become the focus of my career. As a seafood chef, I feel I have the utmost responsibility to ensure a lasting and diverse supply of seafood. My customers have begun to know me as a conservationist and expect that everything on my menu has been caught or farmed in a way that has had minimal impact on the environment. But for the consumer who doesn’t know me or is going to other restaurants, they should educate themselves and try to find out the following from their server or chef:
- Where is the fish from? Be a smart shopper!
- Is the fish farmed or wild caught?
- If the seafood is wild caught, how was it caught?
- Eat smaller fish; they are lower on the food chain and better for the environment and your health.
If a server, manager or chef of a restaurant can’t provide you with the above information, then they do not hold the passion and commitment in serving only sustainable seafood. As a consumer, you are entitled to know what you are buying and how to choose it. If nothing’s done to change the way we are purchasing, consuming, and removing biomass from the ocean, all commercially available fish will be extinct in the next thirty five to forty years. That was reported by biologist Boris Worm in Science in 2006 and scares the hell out of me.
New Iberia, Louisiana – Wilma Subra wears many hats: Community activist. Grandmother of six. MacArthur Genius. Wife of forty years. Perhaps most importantly she is a trained chemist. And when things go bad in southern Louisiana – or others states, for that matter; she recently testified in a dubious water case in my neighborhood in New York – she gets called to weigh in subjectively on what exactly is wrong with the air, ground or water.
Which means, in Louisiana, she stays very busy.
And when people as far from the oil spill as New Orleans started complaining about feeling sick and blaming the spill – headaches, irritated eyes, nose, throat and lungs, nauseous, dizzy – Wilma started comparing and collecting atmospheric data. What she’s finding is that the spill isn’t just putting the ocean and marine life at risk, but the very air that southern Louisianans breathe. For the rest of my dispatch from New Iberia, see www.takepart.com.
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