This Sunday, THE COVE's Louie Psihoyos is the odds-on favorite to take to the Kodak Theatre stage and accept the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. A couple of months ago, we had the chance to sit down and talk to the first-time feature director and we had a terrific and expansive chat that touched on the reasons he made THE COVE, how he fought to keep the film complex and even suggested why you might not want to be responsible for his luggage. So expansive was our talk that it seemed daunting to tackle the transcription. Our apologies for the delay.
Much has happened to THE COVE's Oscar prospects since we talked. At the time, FOOD, INC. was on a roll and seemed to be the odds-on favorite, but THE COVE was about to begin a streak of critics prizes, would win three honors at Cinema Eye (including Outstanding Nonfiction Feature) and go on to become the first documentary to sweep all four guild awards. Recently, the filmmakers announced that the film had secured Japanese distribution. All of this, combined with a smart and steady Oscar campaign, pushed the film to front-runner status.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I met Psihoyos. I knew he'd had a remarkable career as a photographer before he entered the documentary world, but what was his intention here? Make this one film and go back to his day job?
But Psihoyos seems to be in for the long haul - already talking about his next film. And while he may be, at the time at least, disappointed with THE COVE's theatrical performance, he was also still hopeful for its prospects on DVD and television and he was eager to understand more about the documentary community and figuring out his place in it.
All these wonderful things: How did this even come about that you ended up making this film. Obviously you had a great photography career, but how did you end up, not only making a documentary but making a documentary on this subject?
Louie Psihoyos: Well, my dive buddy is Jim Clark, the guy who started Netscape, Silicon Graphics, WebMD. He said the third billion dollar company he created - WebMD - was to prove the first two weren't a fluke. Really lucky to have him as a buddy because we've been diving all over the world for over ten years together. Every time we go back to the same dive spot, you sort of witness the degradation of the oceans. There's less fish, we can hear dynamiting going on - cause sound travels really far underwater, so you're in Indonesia, you hear dynamiting going on. I've seen (shark) finning in marine sanctuaries. The third time we were in the Galápagos, we saw a league of longline finsherman in a marine sanctuary, and he said, "somebody should do something about this," and I said, "how 'bout you and I?" The idea was, I was shooting shorts of our dive trips, just a memento really, and they were pretty decent, people liked them. It was Jim's idea to come up with a nonprofit organization that would do films and try to create awareness and inspire change. I like to put that context - I don't mention Jim just because he's got a lot of money and a big name. He's was really kind of an inspirational hero to me to begin with. I had read "The New New Thing" and he's a guy who's sort of a Robin Hood, in a way, in that world, that (venture capital) world. He gave most of his money to the VC's so that he could have enough money to do Silicon Graphics. When they sold the company, they made all the money and he didn't make anything. He reversed that with Netscape, so he gave these Indian engineers, he made them worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You know, he's a guy that when he starts a business, it's not just a business to make money, he creates an industry where there wasn't one before.
Silicon Graphics was a 3-D graphics engine, it was the way you could do JURASSIC PARK in three dimensions. That's his computer. You know, Steven Spielberg couldn't do it without Jim's computer chips. The day he quit that he started Netscape - that was the first, commercial internet browser. You know, the guy's a visionary, he's not just a businessman. And so when he gave me the money to make this movie, he just said, "make a difference". And that was my intention, to make a difference and make him proud, make myself proud. And to have that guy as a buddy - one reason we found each other is we're both really tenacious, we're very passionate about the oceans and we don't stop until we get what we want. And he set the bar really high. When Jim Clark's says, "just make a difference," and you know that he's changed the way that the world works, three times, he expects great things. And he basically financed the operation for the last almost five years. Now we're on our own, using my own money now and some other friends. Hoping that with the DVD release there will be some money. We're licensed in about 32 countries right now but it's not a lot of money. If you're in the doc world for money, it's the wrong business.
ATWT: You missed one of the memos, I think. (laughter) One of the things that I really love about your film and that people talk about in your film a lot is obviously the element of it being an espionage thriller. And I'm wondering if that was part of your original concept going in or if it was just the natural thing that started happening once you were in the process and realized, oh, we're going to have to come up with all these ways to film this and we're going to have to sneak around and it is going to be difficult and part of the film is going to be about getting this footage.
LP: Yes and no. Charles Hamilton, who was my director of covert operations, of clandestine affairs, he worked for me for about ten years. He's my best friend and assistant. He left me to go work for Gore Verbinski on PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. He was the sail master on THE BLACK PEARL. At the time, he was teaching Hollywood pirates how to look like real pirates and I called him up and said, "look, I need a real pirate to help me get into the cove. Can you help me?"
A little bit of Charles' background. He's a little bit of a pirate himself. He's a real activist. In my community, Boulder, Colorado, he was arrested twice in the same day for protesting Rocky Flats, which made plutonium triggers. We shut that plant down, not because they were making nuclear bombs, not because of the ethics of dropping bombs on people, but because they were polluting the atmosphere with plutonium. It was leaking out. He jumped the fence, got arrested, got let back out on the street, went back out, got arrested the same day for the same thing. He's the kind of guy that you want watching out for you, but he's really, really clever. He said, "OK, we're going to get into the cove, we need a military grade thermal camera, mainly for surveillance to see where the cops are and the guards...
ATWT: And when he says that, does that start sounding exciting to you?LP: Oh yeah!
ATWT: Cause as a photographer, you've gotta be into equipment and using things you haven't used before.
LP: I love gear. When I traveled around with National Geographic, I'm sure I had more gear than anybody. I traveled around with 42 cases, 6 carry-ons and I had one assistant. And when I'm talking about 42 bags, that's to Patagonia, Mongolia, not like Frankfurt to LA. When I traveled it was like a mini movie set everywhere I went - for still photography. So, I like the gear.
The movie is really the result of watching too many James Bond movies and Jacques Cousteau specials as a child. Here's the evolution of the idea of the thermal camera: the military doesn't care about shooting with it, they just want it for real-time surveillance. And Charles thought it would be really cool to hot wire the thermal camera so it could shoot video - and he did that. He said, if we're going to do this, we've got this amazing team of people together, why don't we shoot a "making of". And if we do anything, we wanna do it right.
People ask us if we cut the movie to make it look more risky than it really was. It was way more risky than it looks. We couldn't film a lot of it because if you're doing a covert operation at night, you don't want to turn your cameras on the cops in the daytime otherwise it gives them an excuse to arrest you. We had five hotel rooms, the police had five hotel rooms. We would go out, they would go out. We were staying at that spa hotel and we would never talk in our room because we thought it could be bugged, so we would go down to the spa, they would follow us down to the spa in their robes. It sounds funny but it was scary. There's two cops on you, you don't know how much English they speak and they're with you everywhere you go. You go down to the parking lot and there's an underground parking garage with tunnels. It was like Blofeld's hideaway. You would leave this labyrinth of tunnels and the cops would be about a block or two behind you. You'd go out in the middle of the night and you'd have to have reasons for going out there if you were caught. We came up with this ruse of setting up time lapse cameras throughout the town. We had them at the lighthouse, at the fish market, so we'd go out on ladders, check them out, make sure they were still working. Then we'd see the cops over there and devise ways... We had two vans that we knew were marked - they had cops on each one of them. But we had a third one that was rented by a Japanese person that they didn't know about. (We) parked it outside of town, then we'd go around a corner, (the cops) would be four or five blocks behind, we'd all pile out except for the driver, the van would keep on going. The cop would go past us and then we'd hop into another van and we'd go to the cove with the thermal camera.
So, anyway, we have this amazing group of people together and Charles had said, let's shoot a "making of" for the DVD, so we were doing B-roll on this the whole time. And then when we got back to the studio, Fisher Stevens, who was brought on board to finish the project and he brought on Mark Monroe, the writer, and Geoff Richman (the editor), who did MURDERBALL and SICKO, and these guys were sitting around the computer watching the thermal camera (footage) of the first night that we did it - when the cops came. And it was very exciting, probably the most exciting moment of my life. We're out on this rock with the three divers, and we edited this out, but I'm going "shit, shit, shit, shit, shit". And we're recording this on radio chatter too and Charles, who's so cool, is like, "there's flashlights coming down the path. This could be interesting." Just the difference in our personalities.
It was their idea, really, to marry the two movies.
ATWT: What was to be the "making of" with the other footage.
LP: It was organic, but it wasn't intentional that we would start out making a movie that would be like this OCEANS 11 kind of thing. The thing I regret is not having a little bit more of Jim in there. Because if you're doing OCEANS 11, you need a billionaire with a revenge motive. And he has a real revenge motive. He just hates how the oceans are being fished out and the way that all cultures are raping the oceans.
ATWT: The other thing I was going to say that I thought was really great about the film, particularly after having seen some other films that have dealt with the oceans, fish and sustainability, I liked how you were able to deal with a lot of issues - mercury, sustainability, the general health of the oceans - but you still were telling this one paritcular story. Was that something you felt was important? Was it something where other people were telling you, we need to make this more universal than just this one cove?
LP: I always thought that the cove was a metaphor for the oceans. This is my first film but Fisher, Mark, Geoff were adamant - "you've got to simplify, you gotta make it only about getting into the cove." And I was like, I wouldn't go to see that movie. It's gotta resonate with everybody. You can't just make the Japanese the bad guys, we're all the bad guys.
I used to live down in the Caribbean and you know, you run out of childrens' books. I had two kids and you run out a books and they'd say, "OK, make up a story, Dad." We did that for three years. I'd say, what do you want in the story? And they'd say, I want pirates, I want treasure, I want ghosts, I want witches. And I said to Mark, Geoff and Fish, "here's the deal, we're gonna make a movie, it's about captive dolphins, we're gonna have mercury in it, we're gonna have overfishing in it, were gonna have all these five things and we're going to marry them all together at the end of the day." It's the same thing as when I tell a story to my kids, you try to wrap it all up, you'd try to put it all in a nice package and they'd say, "you forgot the witches!" I intentionally wanted to make it complex.
When we moved back to the states (from the Caribbean), I hadn't seen television in five years and it was so stupid, the programming. People try to dumb it down, they try to dumb down the movies because they try to do the base, lowest common denominator. When I worked at National Geographic, the managing editor told me, "Louie, we really love your work, but you have to understand, your work is really sophisticated for our audience." And I said, "what do you mean by that?" This was right when I'd come out of college. They said, "we have the highest demographic of any popular magazine in the world but it's only 12th grade readership." And I said, "12th grade? Let's take 'em to college!" Isn't that the point? Let's raise the bar a little bit. So I loved the idea of taking a lot of strands of thought that are all related and to tie them together. And Mark and Geoff and Fish of putting them together. What I brought to the puzzle in addition to supplying the pieces was insisting that we bring them together so that at the end of the day, the bad guy isn't the Japanese, it's really us. Because we're really doing what no wild animal would do, we're fouling our own nest. And to me, that spoke a lot to the bigger picture, rather than just pointing a finger at the Japanese.
The dolphins are the only animals throughout history to save the lives of human beings. The cautionary tale here is that the only way we can save the life of a dolphin is to make it clear that we've made their environment so toxic that we shouldn't be eating them. That to me just shows how far we've come. My heritage is Greece and in ancient Greece it was a fine punishable by death to harm a dolphin because they were legendary for saving the lives of sailors. And now, we've lost respect for the animals and we've lost respect for their environment. Making this movie so that it resonates with everybody was really important to me.
ATWT: And was that one of the things that resonated when you screened the film in Tokyo? You got a strong reaction in those interviews on the street in the film where you told people about the mercury content as they learned that the dolphin meat was being substituted for when they thought they were having other fish.
LP: Yeah, exactly. There's two basic arguments. There's the animal rights argument, which, you know, I look at this whole issue as more of a chess game than a checkers game. When you argue animal rights with a different culture, at best you can come to a stalemate. They can say, "you kill cows and pigs are pretty smart. We eat dolphins." I attack the problem on a human rights issue. All human beings deserve to have healthy food and this isn't healthy. If our cows had 5000 times more mercury than is allowed by Japanese or American law, I would hope that someone would come across the border to tell me.
I stopped eating things that walked in September of 1986, but I'm not militant about it. I wear leather shoes. My wife eats meat. My kids eat cows and pigs. I feel differently about dolphins, other people feel differently about cows, but I know the way to win this argument is through the mercury. Absolutely. That's their Achilles heal. That's the weird irony. We can't argue intelligence and sentience. Dolphins have bigger brains than us. They have more convolutions in the grey matter. They're more sensitive than us. That falls on deaf ears. People say, "so what, how smart can they be?"
One of the really militant Japanese journalists over there said to me, "where's your proof that dolphins are so smart?" I said, "where's the proof that you're so smart?" By a dolphins standards, you can't do anything that they do. They have a bigger brain then you, they managed to live on the planet 55 million more years than us and not jeopardize the whole planet in just a few decades with their big brain. I mean, how smart are we? To me, it's such a species-centric question.
All the smart money with science says we're causing the sixth major extinction on the planet and it's human beings that are the cause of it, through habitat destruction and pollution. And when we argue intelligence, that seems so absurd to me. It's really laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
ATWT: When you got that footage, you'd planted these cameras and you finally pulled them out and you were able to look at them, was it mixed emotions for you, the combination of "yes, we got the proof, we have the evidence" and obviously seeing what evidence first hand.
LP: Well, what happened was there was a jolt of fear that went through me. Holy fuck, this is a lot worse than we ever dreamt it was going to be. And we realized it was going to be very, very inflammatory if and when it got out there. So then the problem became that I was more worried about our safety, so what we did right then is that we hired a dedicated runner.
We cut the film to make it look like we'd went in twice. We actually went in seven times, six times to set cameras. That actually means 14 times into the cove - seven times to set them and seven to retrieve them. The first time we scored heavy. Most of the stuff in the film is from the first trip. We had to go back in and get close-ups, basically fill it out because we'd been shooting all wides the first time.
These were the prototypes of the first hard drive cameras ever made. There wasn't even the technology at the time to edit the film. These were like HVR-1's. We had to wait a year for the software so that you could actually edit the film. So what we would do would be to replace the hard drives, we go on the internet and buy hard drives from some place in Korea, back everything up on hard drives and put them in the air conditioning ducts. It was just like James Bond. And we'd time it so that the runner could get on a train so she could get the last plane out on DHL or FedEx to get the stuff back to America. And we never rested until my wife back home could know that everything was safe and backed up.
ATWT: So you would send one set of drives while you kept the other set with you in the air conditioning ducts? So, in case it was taken by somebody...
LP: Yeah, exactly. Or if we got arrested. That was the fear, that we'd all get arrested. And then once we had enough footage, we kept going back in trying to get a little bit more.
You know, that sequence in the cove, that's what's keeping people out by droves. They're thinking they're going to see this horror show, well, the horror show is on the cutting room floor. This movie is PG-13.
ATWT: Yeah, I thought it was going to be worse.
LP: Everybody does! The irony is that I hate horror movies. I really don't like horror movies. I was at a festival in Melbourne and I found myself at a table and everyone was a horror film director. I was pretty vocal, I guess I was having something to drink and I said, "I hate horror films," and they said, "what do you do?" And I said, "I do docs." Well, what's your doc about? And I start to explain it and they all look at each other and they say, "you did a horror film". Lionsgate, who's involved in our film, you know they do the SAW epics. These are not home improvement videos. That's not my genre.
In all seriousness, we had 40 hours of graphic footage that nobody should have to see, but I knew that I had to see it. And I was literally in tears going from my office to my studio everyday. And I would brace myself, have coffee and I'd spend 12 hours looking at this graphic, awful stuff. And we had it all in there and you get 40 hours down to 17 minutes and you realize, I can't watch this.
Geoff and I decided to put in the stuff that was the most surreal. And we took our cues from Hitchcock. You look at the shower scene from PSYCHO and you think you've seen a very graphic, violent scene of a woman being murdered, but if you dissect that film, it's a lot of fast cutting, it's the music. But it's your imagination.
ATWT: Yeah, there's no actual penetration of the knife into the skin.
LP: The same thing with THE COVE. You never see the spear go directly into the dolphin. You never see the blood spurting and the point being jabbed in. You see a lot of blood, but it's almost like CG blood. And if it was, we'd probably be making hundreds of millions of dollars.
ATWT: The dolphin horror genre.
LP: We Americans love our violence, we just want to make sure it isn't real. The most horrifying parts of the movie for me are after its all over with. The banality of the genocide, where the guys are smoking a cigarette by the fire and the carcasses are rolling up on the beach. And you realize that what's so shocking is that it's shocking to us and it's so normal to them. Life is just going on. The juxtaposition is what's horrifying to people. My God, it's so normal to them, this must be what the guards at Auschwitz did, what everybody does who confronts horror on a daily basis.
ATWT: Your film played at Sheffield and I don't know if you heard about this debate between Nick Fraser from the BBC and Jess Search from BritDoc Foundation did.
LP: I didn't know anything about it.
ATWT: They did a little debate that turned really interesting, it was about campaign films, as they call them in the UK, and whether films that have a more activist perspective, if that's a good thing or a bad thing for the documentary industry as a whole. My personal perspective is that there should be all kinds of genres within the larger field that we call nonfiction. There should be essay films, art films, films with a strong point of view. But that debate got some play in the British papers and someone wrote, specifically about THE COVE, wondering whether the film was a documentary because you went in with an activist's perspective, you went in to make a difference. And I'm curious, has anyone asked you about that, do you think about that? Is that something that you care about?
LP: Yeah, I mean, I started out trying to be impartial. I'm a journalist, I was trained as a journalist, I went to journalism school. I worked at National Geographic, which is probably the most bland in terms of points of view. I mean it's beautiful footage and its gorgeous and I think I did some groundbreaking stuff there, but you always try to show both sides. And I say in the movie, I want to show both sides of the movie, but in this case, the dark side didn't want to talk. I'd been to a slaughterhouse before, that's why I stopped eating meat. I wasn't interested in seeing (the killings at) the cove. That was the bargaining chip when I was talking to the Mayor of Taiji's office and the fishermen. I said, "I won't show blood if you just give me one person who will tell your side of the story. That's all I want. I'll shoot the drive, you'll put the nets up, I won't try to get into the cove. You got my word." I just want to hear one person give your side of it. They wouldn't do that.
ATWT: Why do you think they were so reluctant, since now they've been forced to respond now that the film is out, forced to come up with some kind of rationale.
LP: Because, I believe - they wouldn't talk so I can only conjecture - I believe that they realized that their side was indefensible. They couldn't defend it. And when I went to the Tokyo Film Festival - and I've been to probably 40 film festivals now - but it was by far the most interesting because all of the bad guys were in the audience. I didn't expect they'd be there. Private Space, the Mayor of Taiji.
ATWT: Private Space is a great character by the way.
LP: Oh yeah. And they're all there with their attorneys. They're all sitting there with suits and ties and I'm like, fuck, this is going to be interesting. And Komatsu was there, he's the guy who wrote the book in defense of Japanese whaling, and he's an expert at giving both sides. He knew our side of the argument very well and he'd try to knock it down. And we had night vision at the screening and you could see Komatsu with his head between his legs, because you can rationalize evil when you talk about it. But when you see it, it becomes indefensible. And I think that's what he saw.
And also, the Japanese audience responded like western audiences do. They were as horrified and even more shocked because it's happening in their own country and they don't even know it. I had more people coming up to me after the Tokyo screening, Japanese people saying, "what can we do to help?"
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