Earth Press Conference - Writer/Directors Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill
Can you talk about the genesis of this project and why it was an important film to make?Alastair Fothergill: “Well, it took five years to make. 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. The genesis was the desire to make an epic movie about an epic subject, which is the natural history of the whole planet.”
There are so many endangered species in the world now. Why pick these particular species?
Mark Linfield: “One of the storylines is the power of the sun and 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.”
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: “Five years was the production period, of which three years 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 Fothergill: “And patience, patience, patience.”
What are some of the challenges that you both had to face during the making of this movie, and what did you learn from them?
Alastair Fothergill: “There were a number of different challenges. Mark has touched on the logistical challenges, to a certain extent, and there were some real technological challenges in this movie. Actually, 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 the swimming polar bear, out there where you can’t go in a boat or on foot, we were able to film beautifully in the wild. I was in this helicopter and I was over this male polar bear that was swimming, and I knew nobody had ever filming anything like that before. It was dark blue water and bits of white ice and he dove down, and I was genuinely in tears because I thought, ‘This is just beautiful.’ I was pleased because I knew it was new, and I was in tears because I was emotionally moved by it.”
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.”
What did you learn from making this?
Mark Linfield: “The amazing tenacity and dedication, all of those animals have successfully pulled through a difficult year on earth and show incredible tenacity and drive and I guess that’s what we all need as well.”
Alastair Fothergill: “I think that’s true, and one of the nice things about concentrating on mothers and their babies is that one of the things you think about the film is we’re preserving the planet for the next generation. That’s one of the resonances that we hope in a subtle way this movie might have an environmental message for people. I think there are very specific and exciting challenges about making nature work for cinema and creatively and technically something that will continue with us. We’re very fortunate to be doing that now with the chimpanzee movie and the big cat movie, which are very different challenges but very exciting as well.”
