Oscar nominated actress Queen Latifah (Chicago) narrates the story of a polar bear cub named Nanu and a walrus pup called Seela in Paramount Classics' stunning nature film Artic Tale. Cinematographer & director Adam Ravetch and his co-director/spouse Sarah Robertson spent 15 years working with the National Geographic Natural History Unit filming the creatures who inhabit the Artic Circle. Ravetch and Robertson's Artic Tale includes footage of animal behavior that's never been captured on film before and provides an intensely personal look at the lives of two of the Artic's most engaging creatures: polar bears and walruses.
Living amongst the animals, Ravetch and his crew were able to follow the polar bears and walruses as they went about their everyday lives and as they adjusted to the profound changes in the Artic ice.
Exclusive Interview with Adam Ravetch
How difficult was it to edit 15 years of footage down into an 84 minute film?
“We had 800 hours of footage that we went through, that’s why it took two years to edit. We were in the edit room for two years. That’s 1,700,000 feet of film. Basically we’re calling this a brand new genre – ‘wildlife adventure feature film’ - and we really are trying to follow our characters’ story. We’re trying to make our audience very intimate with our characters. It’s a coming-of-age story, so we wanted to hit the benchmarks of their lives. That’s how we really sort of decided on what footage to pick.
We constructed our story and we got into this maternal investment that the walrus mother makes to its baby. We found that they had an 'auntie' walrus, just by being in the Arctic and discovering this. After four years we saw this – that they have a family to help them. We saw the single mother, the solitary polar bear bring up its cubs. So we followed this parallel story. And then 15 years ago science said that bears and walruses don’t come together. But we started, especially when the ice began to break up earlier than ever before and come back later and later, we started to see them come together. So that was sort of the basic construct.
There are a lot of animal sequences that didn’t make the film that we originally constructed, but we wanted to make sure we didn’t do a tangent. It really had to have something to do with the story we were following in order for us to explore that animal. So that’s how we picked [the footage]. It really just sort of happened over time.”
You had no idea there was an ‘auntie’ who would hang out with the mother walrus and her baby?
“No. In fact in the beginning it was just about the newborn. That was an obvious choice because a lot of nature films do one year in the life of an animal. But when we found the newborn - scientists said it ranged for about two months, but we found it like within hours of the birth - a newborn walrus and the mother whom we were so amazed to see it tug and pull, that was extraordinary. But then there was this third animal always hanging around. We started to see it was the sibling, and then it was the auntie helping out and that was something that science didn’t even know about. There were a lot of things in this film there weren’t even known by science.”
It’s amazing you were actually able to stay amongst the animals and never got attacked.
“I lived side by side with polar bears. Polar bears are a really dangerous part of the food chain. You can get eaten. But in the Arctic, the whole thing is to show yourself and to let them know you’re there. And then you have to protect your territory. There’s always a negotiation over that.”
How quickly did you learn how to handle yourself around the polar bears?
“The way we figured this out is in the beginning we were in this great situation. In fact we were sitting on a chunk of ice and we had another herd of walruses drifting towards us on their chunk of ice, so we were getting these great images of filming and all of a sudden a polar bear showed up. This was the first time I’d ever been in this situation so of course I didn’t have the experience and we sort of panicked. We started yelling at the bear to scare it away because we thought it had to come right through our ice that we were on to get to the walruses. We didn’t have any rifles or any protection with us so we thought we were going to get eaten. We really screwed up the whole situation. The walruses went in the water, the bear took off, and here was a perfect opportunity to get something that no one had ever seen before and we blew it. That was the first one that told us we really had to learn to be with them. We weren’t going to just show up and get great footage. You had to stay there and spend the time and have events like that happen. And so slowly we started living with them.”
How close did you actually get to the animals?
“From the beginning I worked with Inuit hunters and with them they would get us very close. I got a shot of the bear going into the herd of walrus and grabbing our main character, and to get that we staked out these remote islands, these tiny islands in the Arctic. They were the size of a football field so there was nowhere to hide. If a bear shows up, they come right over. They’re very curious so you’ve really got to go through sort of a negotiation process with them to basically stake out your territory. And then they relax and kind of sit there.”
Page 2: The Appeal of Polar Bears and Walruses
