LONDON, UK (18 June 2005) -- With more than 7,000 hours of unused underwater film footage lying around the house, it was no surprise that BBC directors Alastair Fothergill and Andy Byatt decided to make a big-screen feature film about the ocean. But what caught many off-guard about the documentary "Deep Blue," an offshoot of the popular British television series "Blue Planet," were the film's unconventional and almost avant-garde pacing, minimalist narration and ambiguous point of view. It was, according to Fothergill, all part of a master plan. "People have made plenty of nice films about coral reefs and the ocean," Fothergill says, "but we wanted to immerse people into this underwater world where even the most experienced divers have never been. And we wanted the pictures to tell their own stories through an emotional rather than didactic way." With the help of the film's occasional narrator Pierce Brosnan, "Deep Blue," which swam into Bay Area theaters this weekend, does just that. It also leaves viewers to fill in the blanks along the way, as the sweeping and climactic oceanic images silently float across the screen during the 90-minute film. While audiences are absorbing extremely rare footage of, say, a killer whale flinging a sea lion about 100 feet in the air, or alien-like creatures spewing psychedelic colors into the blackened bottom of the sea, Brosnan does little more than make adjective-heavy comments that usually end in either "vast," "blue" or both. It's kind of like having Remington Steele and James Bond whisper little sweet nothings in both your ears every 15 minutes. Brosnan was not Fothergill's first choice as narrator. In fact, the director says he even considered forgoing narration for "Deep Blue" altogether. "Once you start explaining every last detail, it becomes more and more like any documentary that you can watch on television at home," says Fothergill, who points out that the original British version of the film includes even less narration. "There's an awful lot of natural history on television. We were aiming for a more cinematic experience." | | The idea to transform "Deep Blue" into a theatrical film was born after Fothergill and Byatt screened extra footage from TV's "Blue Planet" at the Royal Festival Hall in London, accompanied by a live soundtrack played by the BBC Orchestra. The concert was a huge success, according to Fothergill, ending with nearly everyone demanding that the experience be translated to cinema. The evening's success was in no small part because of the music, he says. "Another reason for keeping the narrative simple was because we hoped the music would hold your hand throughout the experience," Fothergill says of composer George Fenton's musical interpretation. Holding hands with the person next to you while watching the dramatic images unfold in "Deep Blue" wouldn't be such a bad idea either. Filmed from the Arctic to the Antarctic over the course of nearly 10 years, digging as deep as 15,000 feet below the ocean's surface, "Deep Blue," takes its audience from a colony of crabs kicking up sand on the beach to the feeding frenzy of hundreds of competing hammerhead sharks. And while you don't need more than a few words from a narrator to understand that the drawn-out scene of a giant gray whale mourning the loss of its calf is incredible, a couple of glasses of wine before watching couldn't hurt. |
