Disney's
"Earth":
Amazing Reel-life Adventure
by Lynn Barker
 A
brand new branch of the Disney film empire called Disneynature is releasing
Earth, an amazing film narrated by the rich voice of actor James
Earl Jones, that follows three animal families through several seasons;
long quests for food and water that cover up to 4,000 miles. In the spirit
of March of the Penguins, we see the trials of a polar bear family,
the long trek to water for an elephant family and a whale mom and calf
swimming on a global journey to feeding grounds. The mating dance of several
birds provides some great laughs as do a family of baby ducks leaping
safely to the ground from their aerial nest. Over 42 animal species are
included in the High-Def film.
Shooting from
balloons, special flying rigs and on the ground in amazingly harsh conditions,
the filmmakers captured the change of the seasons world-wide and the majesty
of the highest peaks and most stark deserts. We wanted to know how this
was all done, the dangers and challenges and what is next for directors
Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield and Disneynature studio head Jean
Francois Camilleri.
Earth
opens Earth Day April 22nd and for every person who sees the movie in
its first week, Disneynature will plant a tree in the Brazilian Atlantic
Forest, the most endangered rain forest in the world! Pretty cool.
AGW: Can you
talk about the genesis of this project and why it was an important film
to make?
Alastair:
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. [For example] if you look at March of the Penguins, it's
focused 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.
AGW: Quite
a job! There are so many endangered species in the world now. Why pick
these three particular species to feature?
Mark: 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.
AGW: Teens
will want to know. Some of these animals are really struggling. Do you
have to be a certain type of person that you can record this and not get
involved and try to help any of them?
 Alastair:
It's a question that concerns us a great deal. On the first level, what
are you supposed to do? The male polar bear was starving, yes. Filming
that was, for the cameraman and the director there, a very painful thing
to do. But, what are we supposed to do, shoot the walrus? You might shoot
one, but then you’ve got a life responsibility to go on doing it.
The first rule wildlife filmmakers have is to be true to nature. You don’t
interfere, you don’t get involved and the reality is that nature
is real in tooth and claw. You have to be true to nature, both on the
screen and also in the way that you deal with those issues.
AGW: So, it's
just the circle of life?
Mark: That’s
an important point. There’s a line of commentary over the cheetah
hunt that says, 'This is the circle of life that people in their urban
environment have lost touch with.' In many ways, that cheetah hunt is
metaphorical for lots of stuff that you don’t really need to see.
You don’t need to see the blood and guts. But, equally, I don’t
think you want to shield people from the sequence, up to that point. That
is nature. That is the stuff that some of us are losing contact with.
Alastair:
We recognize that a cheetah is a predator, beautifully evolved. Yes, a
cheetah kills Bambi, and that’s sad, but that cheetah has got its
own cubs and I think people understand that, if you put it in context.
If you look at the cheetah sequence in Earth, we very deliberately
slowed it down. You look at that cheetah and can see every move of its
muscle and every sinew in its body, and you think, 'This is a beautiful
predator, at the very top of its game.'
AGW: How long
did this take to make?
Mark: 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:
And patience, patience, patience.
AGW: 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:
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 in a helicopter so 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.
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. 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.'
AGW: People
will wonder if some of this amazing stuff wasn't done in computer.
Alastair:
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.
Mark: That’s
where the power of it comes from.
AGW: What
was the most dangerous situation that you got into during filming, that
had the biggest pay-off for you?
Alastair:
The dangerous one was the lions and elephants with the sequence of the
pride of 30 lions bringing down the elephant. A 15-20 ton mother elephant,
looking after her calf, will run straight through your Land Rover without
even thinking about it. That was something where the safety issues were
slightly high on our concern levels.
Mark: There
were some other surprising ones as well. The great white sharks you would
think are not dangerous because we’re in a boat and the great white
sharks are leaping away. But, they’re actually leaping quite close
to the boat and, at that particular location, it has been known for a
shark to leap out of the water, rather innocently chasing a seal, and
actually land in the boat, which is not recommended.
Alastair:
The other one that was particularly memorable was the sailfish, that are
these wonderful big fish that are 2-3 meters long with these great big
javelin things on their noses. We had about 70 of them together. It was
an extraordinarily lucky occurrence to have so many. And they were feeding
on little bait fish, which are small fish. These little fish are very
clever and they saw the cameraman as the best thing to hide behind, and
the cameraman came out of the water and said, 'This is just unbelievable.
I’m in there and these javelins are shooting past my ear. I can
literally hear the roar of this fish.' They swim at 70 mph. It is a fast
fish.
 Mark:
Anything to do with polar bears is another thing. Polar bears are very
unusual animals, in that most animals maybe present a risk if they’re
wounded or they’re starving and hungry. Polar bears just see you
as a nice, tasty mammal, wrapped up in a bit of plastic wrapper. You are
fair game for a polar bear. If you think about where they live, out in
the Arctic waste, there isn’t much to eat. When they come across
something nice that’s the size of a fat seal, they’re going
to have a go, if you’re not very careful.
AGW: There
are some very funny sequences as well, like the male bird doing his hilarious
courting dance.
Alastair:
The bird of paradise dance is hysterically funny. The fact that he puts
all that effort in and the girl never turns up, well we’ve all been
there.
Mark: Particularly
Alastair.
Alastair:
Yeah. But it’s true.
Mark: Even
the baboons [wading across a swamp]. They’re not wanting to get
their private parts too wet or whatever. It’s great, it’s
fabulous.
AGW What would
you like to have the audience take away from seeing the film?
Alastair:
More than anything else we want them to have a good time in the cinema.
This isn’t An Inconvenient Truth. It’s not The
Eleventh Hour. It’s not trying to preach to people. There’s
a lot of bad news about the environment out there. But if you had all
the money in the world and ten lifetimes you wouldn’t see ten percent
of what we can show you in this movie. It’s all there, it’s
still there, it needs preserving. And we just want people to come out
uplifted, really.
Mark: It’s
funny, people come out saying there’s a conservation message but
it’s so subtle and light that it just naturally emerges from the
fact that when people see all the things they see in the movie, they realize
that’s still out there and what we need to preserve. You just naturally
come to that conclusion. It’s a very light environmental slant but
it’s actually not so much delivered by us, it’s what people
tell us after the movie. It has a strong conservation message and not
really intentionally, it’s just the way it is. It’s inevitable
AGW: How do
you become a nature cinematographer/director? Where did you get your passion
for nature?
Mark: We both
started rummaging around in the undergrowth, catching slugs and snails
to show to our family.
Alastair:
I had a zoo in my bedroom. My mother would never, ever come near it.
 Mark:
Both of us had rooms full of animals that we probably shouldn’t
have had and both of us really enjoyed being excited about them and explaining
them to other people. We both went to university to read zoology and then
just sort of tried to publicize our enthusiasm and kind of spread it so
it was a natural evolution to end up doing this.
Alastair:
We started in television at the BBC Natural History unit and made a lot
of TV documentaries. The cinema has been the natural evolution of that
for us.
AGW: What
did you learn from making Earth?
Mark: 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:
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.
AGW: Where
do you go from here if this one is Earth? What is on the Disneynature
slate?
Jean Francois:
I think Earth is a perfect film to start with. The next one will
be about oceans, which is depicted in Earth a little bit but
it will really be about nothing but ocean. Then we are doing a movie called
Naked Beauty which is about pollinators, bees, hummingbirds,
butterflies and explain the incredible love story between them and flowers
and vegetables. We are doing a movie in Kenya about African cats called
African Cats: Kingdom of Courage, where we follow cheetahs, lions
and leopards. Mark and Alastair are working on a new thing for us called
Chimpanzees, which is being shot in the Ivory Coast in Africa.
Photos courtesy
of and copyright Disneynature, 2009
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