A conversation with the director of Arctic Tale

Ravetch: I'm emotionally moved when I'm in front of these animals.

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By James Plath
FIRST ONLINE Dec 10, 2007

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Adam Ravetch got his TV documentary start in and around the warm waters of Key West, Florida, serving as a production assistant for "Dreams of Gold: The Mel Fisher Story" (1986).

But he and co-director (and spouse) Sarah Robertson have spent most of their filmmaking lives in considerably colder climes, working in the frigid cold of the Arctic. Their documentary, "Arctic Tale," is the fruit of six years of work, during which they amassed some 800 hours of footage.

Rather than choosing the safe route and going with a standard documentary, Ravetch and Robertson wanted something different--a warmer, more personal approach to telling the stories of a baby walrus and baby polar bear that they chose to follow from birth through young adulthood. That's why they went with Queen Latifah as narrator, and a script that's a blend of ecological conscience, nature-show narration, and a light comic touch that's reminiscent of Disney's 1957 film "Perri," which personalized the exploits of a little flying squirrel. And it's why they engaged co-writers Kristin Gore (yep, Al's daughter), Linda Woolverton ("Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King") and Mose Richards ("Wolves at Our Door," "Whales: An Unforgettable Journey").

But the script isn't really the thing with "Arctic Tale." It's all about the footage of the animals, which is nothing short of astounding in spots. How in the world did they manage half of the shots, you wonder? How did they get footage of a deep hole in the ice that's only wide enough in diameter for a seal to pass through? Or how in the world did they get footage of a newborn polar bear inside the den? There isn't much in the way of explanation on the DVD extras, and so I jumped at the chance to chat with co-director Ravetch over the phone.

Plath: Extreme conditions can be hard on any relationship. I was wondering if there were moments when you and your co-director, Sarah Robertson, went at it like a couple of walruses on a piece of ice that's just too small.

Ravetch: If you're saying were our bodies numb, yes [laughs].

Plath: Were there any creative differences brought on by the tension of the weather?

Ravetch: Not because of the weather, no. We got married, actually, for as long as we've been in the Arctic. When we met, we were on a television series on one of the major cable networks in Canada. She was a writer on that series and I was a cinematographer. I think we put both of our strengths together, and it's just been this big adventure ever since. Are there differences when two people are working together? [Laughs] Always. But I feel like two brains are better than one.

Plath: Well, for example, this is obviously a message film. Did you agonize or argue over how much global warming to include in the narrative, or whether to send a print to the White House?

Ravetch: Well, Sarah and I didn't argue on that at all. In fact, if anything, there was a big discussion originally--this was before even Al Gore's movie came out--that we started to edit and so we were unaware even of that movie, and Sarah and I felt very strongly if we didn't mention what was really going on, what we really were seeing up there, that we really would not have been stepping up to our responsibilities. To paint that this is a perfect winter wonderland we felt was not completely honest. We wanted it to really portray in the current time of this warming period, and this is something that we've been experiencing personally, so it was our strong vision to put the climate-change scene in there.

Plath: Were there any close calls or challenges to you and your crew, or by contrast, what were some of your most exhilarating moments during the filming?

Ravetch: I think the close call comes from when I was originally told about a walrus, that I was told it could hold me against my will. The reason I even focused on the walrus to begin with was one of the Inuit guys told me it was an animal that could hold me against my will, knock my head off, and suck my brains out. So it was this monster story, and really what surprised us was that there was this big animal that nobody really knew much about. And so we were out to sort of demystify, is it really a monster? And we found out that in fact it wasn't.

But the dangers are still there. You have a 2500-pound animal that, it's very gregarious. As you see in the movie, they always are on top of each other, walruses touching one another. So the very fact that one of them would come over to grab onto you--not to hurt you, really, but would just knock into you--was a potential danger. At first I built a cage, and I was just very careful what situation I would go into. There were times we got bumped around a bit, but we were very fortunate no one got hurt.

Bears also are very dangerous. Every other year we hear about somebody getting eaten, so we take precautions against polar bears. But what we learned with them is that you don't want to hide. You kind of show yourself, especially when you're going to live in the dynamic with them and camp beside them. You have to let them know you're there, and once you hold your ground, they seem to allow that. They relax, and then they go about their business.

Plath: Now did you have to have somebody with a tranquilizer gun handy, just in case?

Ravetch: You know, we work with the Inuit people, who are subsistence hunters, so they always had rifles. But I'm proud to say that we've never had to harm a bear, and no one in our crew has ever been harmed. I take great pride in that. My goal is to film them, not to injure them, so I didn't want to put our film crew in a situation where we had to put down a bear.

Plath: Could you talk about your creative decisions for the film? Why not, for example, a more serious narration with a serious British voiceover and symphonic background, or why not show more of the self-consciousness of the filming process, as you do in the bonus features and in the fascinating end-credits?

Ravetch: What we really wanted to try to do--you know, the British personality, there are films out there on television that you can get that from. What we really tried to do, because it was for the big screen, was to make a very entertaining story that took you on a journey, and it was really our goal to tell the story through the eyes of the animal. And the reason for that is that we wanted to engage our audience, we wanted to emotionally move people, and we felt the way to do that was to really immerse them in the Arctic, make them feel they were there, and really make them feel the plight of these animals and what they had to go through. We wanted to tell in a narrative construct, to take people on a journey through their lives.

Plath: Did you grow up watching Disney "True-Life Adventures"?

Ravetch: I mean, certainly I saw some of those, and I was fascinated by those films and entertained. I also grew up--I have some family members that are in the motion picture industry--so I grew up sort of liking the dramatic film, the feature film. But more importantly, when I was in the field, for me I'm emotionally moved when I'm in front of these animals, and I was always trying to think of how do we obtain that intimacy? How do we translate the intimacy from the images on the screen to the people watching it? And so it always came back to the point of view of the animal. If you could take people away and get them into their space, and tell that story through the eyes of an animal, I feel that's when you can really engage an audience member and really move them, which is what movies are supposed to do.

Plath: You shared a close call, but what about an exhilarating moment?

Ravetch: Well, I think the exhilarating moments are the surprises. What I mean by that is you go into the Arctic, and for example, when I went into the field to stake out an island where there was walruses and the bears would come, that was six to seven years of stakeouts, with absolutely nothing happening. And when the bear finally went in, and I was awake, and my camera was ready to roll, it's such an amazing thing to see. What happened was exactly what we expected, but then there was a twist. There was a surprise. That other animal--the auntie [walrus] animal--came out of the water and went to go sacrifice herself to save the young walrus calf. And that was what is exhilarating, is when you see something that you know no one 's ever seen before, you're privileged to be in front of it, and here you're documenting it so you can share it with the rest of the world.

Plath: So when you say walruses swam 200 miles a week to find new, safe land, is that based on research, or did you actually trail these animals for a week?

Ravetch: Both. You know, National Geographic, what people probably don't know, is that you have to go through a huge scrutiny. Whatever you say in a movie has to be substantiated by scientific fact, the credibility of naturalists in the field, and it has to have at least three or four references, so that whatever we say is what's really truly happening. So it's a combination of research that others have done on the animal science, and also our personal experience of 10 to 15 years in the field following these animals every year. Especially, about five years ago, we started to see the ice breaking up earlier than before and coming back later than ever before. I started working with walruses in 1993, and did a full sort of seasonal cycle by 1995, and then we followed that same cycle year-after-year up until the making of this film.

Plath: I notice you used a lot of stock or additional footage, too. Who got the shot of the newborn polar bear in the den, and how in the world was that accomplished?

Ravetch: Well, David Copperfield doesn't tell all his secrets [laughs]. But you know, the stories, in the beginning, when I first went to the North you heard these incredible stories from the Inuit people. And there was this story that one of the Inuit hunters sent his son into the den early in the season. When they're still in that sort of hibernating state you can actually climb inside the den, and the animal didn't attack. So it's remarkable stories that aren't just stories. They're true.

Plath: Wow. Another moment I enjoyed the most was the narwhals, seeing them. They're not captured on film very often.

Ravetch: In fact, I think even when you're standing right in front of them and you see it for your own eyes, you still doubt their existence. They're really something out of a "Beastiary." They're just a remarkable beast, and extraordinary. They say we know more about the rings of Saturn than we do about narwhals, and that's still another mystery to be cracked. It's something that we want to pursue in the future.

Plath: So when you and your wife go on a vacation, do you go to the Amazon or someplace tropical?

Ravetch: [Laughs] Well, you know, sometimes we just say we need a break and we try to go off to a little warmer waters. We have three children, and we want to immerse them too and get them started in their swimming and diving, so we've done different trips to Hawaii and Mexico, but we always seem to gravitate back north.

Plath: So you both scuba dive?

Ravetch: Yeah, we both learned to scuba dive when we were both at University.

Plath: Some of the footage at the end, I wish I could have seen more of it--you know, just the shot of somebody going down into one of those narrow seal holes, it makes you claustrophobic.

Ravetch: And that's where it started for me. In the late 1980s I made my first ice dive. We would really go through seal breeding holes only 30 inches in diameter, and it was quite spectacular to drop beneath the ceiling. Very few times in the ocean other than a cave where you actually have something over your head. So it was a fantasy land of sorts, the ice, the way it came down, it was like a mini-play tectonics going on under there, and the light coming through was just gorgeous, cathedral-like. It was like an otherly world, and it captivated us, for sure. It's what kept us coming back.

Plath: Is there another Arctic project in the works?

Ravetch: Well, you mentioned the narwhal--that's one animal, I'm going to head back this winter in March and I'm going to go into the pack ice to try to film them in their wintering grounds. That's an animal I think that, like the walrus 10 to 15 years ago, it's one that would be really great to start to reveal more of its life.

Plath: How long does it take you to complete a movie like that, if you're going after narwhal next?

Ravetch: Well, because of deadlines and things, I would probably do about two and a half years for a television program, but then I would continue it. Like the walrus started out, we did a project on walruses years ago for television, but it was just a continuation. So I look at the narwhal and I'm hoping it will be a 10-year project, where maybe after a couple of years there might be a program that comes from it, and then hopefully once on the big screen again. It would be really great to get that animal up there.

12-7-07

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