Interview: The Cove
Director Louie Psihoyos and Producer Fisher Stevens
By Tom Macy
August 5, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com

They deserve better.
When I got the chance join a handful of other critics at a round table interview with the men behind The Cove, director Louie Psihoyos and producer Fisher Stevens, I saw it as a wonderfully unique opportunity. Most interviews with filmmakers are all past tense, including insight into their processes, challenges they faced during the shoot, pranks Mel Gibson played on set. But The Cove, a subversive documentary focusing on a dolphin slaughter in Japan and the ramifications it causes - also the summer's best thriller - does not necessarily end. Instead, it closes with an open-ended call to arms to push for change. The film, which has been touring festivals for some time, shines such a bright light on such a shrouded subject that I figured there must be more to story now.

The other burning questions I had were in the more typical interview vein, primarily on how they constructed such an atypical film. If you've seen The Cove – I know it may not be in your city yet, but when it is you'd darned well better run to the theater – you know that it's a potpourri of genres evoking films that range from An Inconvenient Truth to Mission: Impossible to Night and Fog. What I wanted to know was...

Was that the plan all along? Or did something change in postproduction?

Fisher Stevens: I got involved a year and a half ago. Jim Clark, who financed the film and is the founder of Netscape among other things, [like] Silicon Graphics, one of the partners of WebMD, was a good friend of Louie's and mine. I met Louie on Jim's boat, the Athena, where we had been diving together. Louie would always be shooting dolphins and I would be like, "what're you doing?" He said, " Making a doc." I said, "Oh cool."

And on one of the trips we screened Crazy Love, this other film I was involved in, and about six months later Jim said, hey look, we'd really like you to help out on this epic journey that Louie had already been on for two years. I looked at some of the footage that Louie had done and I was blown away. I thought there was an amazing film here.

My idea was to make it an action thriller, even though it's a doc, but make it like it's not a doc - almost like you don't know if you're seeing the real thing or a fictional film. So basically, I brought on Geoffrey Richman, who edited Sicko and Murderball, [and] Mark Monroe (he and I made a film called Once in a Lifetime) to come in and write and we came up with what you guys saw.

Louie, when did you get started on this?

Louie Psihoyos: I've been working for National Geographic over the course of about 18 years as a still photographer; I worked for Fortune Magazine for about five, that's where I met Jim. I was a pretty successful still photographer but I feel like I was just walking in the wilderness until now. This is such a more powerful experience. Making a film is just...I wish I would've done this 20-30 years ago. I've reached so many more people in a deeper way. I've never seen a businessman cry over anything I did for National Geographic. You see audiences reacting like that - laughing, crying, cheering, standing ovations and people asking what they can do to help. It's a really, really powerful experience.

When Jim gave me the money to do this film, he said just make a difference. Coming from a guy who's used to hitting it out of the park all the time, I thought, I really need to try to change the world, because that's what he does.

How did you get turned on to the situation in Taiji?

Psihoyos: I'm the Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, an organization that Jim and I started in 2005. I was going around to marine mammal conferences to find out what the main subjects were. The biggest one was in San Diego, with 2,000 of the world's top marine scientists. Ric O'Barry (dolphin-trainer-on-the-show-Flipper-turned-activist) was supposed to be the keynote speaker. I was watching all the guys with PhDs doing these 15-minute poster board sessions and I was just going blind. So I was really excited to get some pop culture and see what Ric O'Barry had to say and all of a sudden he got pulled from the ticket. That got me curious, so I asked who pulled him and they said the sponsor. Okay, who's the sponsor? The Hubbs Research Institute, the non-profit arm of Sea World.

So I called up Ric and he told me he was going to talk about this dolphin slaughter in Taiji. And I couldn't believe that in this day and age the second largest economy in the world was slaughtering dolphins.

I asked who was doing anything about it. He said, "just me." I told him I'd like to help out and took a three-day crash course on how to make a film. Then I showed up in Taiji the next day.

What kind of course did you take?

Psihoyos: I hired a producer to come in and show me how to work the cameras.

Talk about how the break in scenes evolved into becoming such a vital part of the film?

Psihoyos: We were shooting two movies at the same time. One was The Cove and the other was The Making of the Cove. And when Fish came on he had the idea to combine the two. We had a military grade thermal camera - that we weren't allowed to bring out of the country - that wasn't supposed to record video. It was supposed to be used for warfare. So Charles Hamilton, my director of clandestine operations, figured out a way rig it so you could put video through. So we had all this night vision stuff and it when Fish saw it he was like, this is amazing.

So that stuff wasn't intended to be part of the movie originally?

Psihoyos: No

That's crazy!

Stevens: I had never seen anything like that. I was like, that's coolest thing I've ever seen. And the other thing is that Louie is a photographer, so the look was incredible. So I had to talk him into being in the movie. Originally he didn't want to but the team had to be in the movie.

We were screwing around with the idea of a narrator like Bill Murray, because of Steve Zissou. But then we figured that Louie's the narrator. It made so much sense.

Why didn't you want to be in the movie?

Psihoyos: I didn't want to be like a Michael Moore. Like most journalists, you never want to put yourself in the story. I don't want to be an actor.

Stevens: But we brought it Mark Monroe to help plot it all out. And there was a lot of shuffling. The mercury thing was a struggle. Louie said no matter what, we have to tell the mercury story. And there was a good 45 minutes to an hour of Mercury chunks. Finding how to incorporate that was one of the most difficult things.

How did it go trying to get the Japanese to talk on camera regarding the mercury situation?

Psihoyos: There was one Japanese doctor who we showed the mercury levels in Taiji dolphin meat. He said it was a clear danger but he wouldn't allow himself to be filmed because he gets his money from the government. It's really hard to describe how much pressure there is on the media, on doctors. The government really tries to repress people to keep information from getting out.

What about Sea World?

Stevens: They wouldn't talk to us. We did this amazing screening in Vegas for the exhibitors at ShoWest. At the end, Louie and I met with everybody. And there was this very unattractive, very unfortunate looking man that started screaming "Ric O'Barry is a fake! He's a charlatan! He's full of it." And he worked for Sea World.

Phihoyos: He owns Sea World.

How do you think the Japanese Government will react to this film?

Psihoyos: It's interesting. I did a public service announcement lat year, Fish and I did, and we had it in Japanese. And we took it to the IWC (International Whaling Commission) last year, which was in Santiago, Chile. And thought, we'll just have them take a look at the film because we knew it would be another year before the it came out, but in the meantime tens of thousands of dolphins are dying and people are getting hurt because of these toxic levels of Mercury. I brought all these DVDs and I was going to hand them out like chicklets to the Japanese delegation.

I was the second to last one to get on the plane. The last guy to get on was Akira Nakamae, (the Deputy Director of the Japan Fisheries Agency). He sits down right next to me. I thought, if there's a god, he has a good sense of humor. I waited until the plane took off. He couldn't switch seats with anybody; the plane was booked. I had this guy for ten hours.

I showed him a promo of the movie. I said, this movie's coming out. It's going to make your country look horrible. It's going to make you look horrible. Here's an opportunity to do something about it and he did nothing.

Stevens: And it's not about the Japanese per se. It's about these fishermen and the Japanese government turning a blind eye. There are very few guys that are doing it and as we show in the movie, the public doesn't know anything about it.

Has there been any real fallout since the film's been finished?

Psihoyos: No, but this film is coming out and there's going to be a tsunami of pressure.

Stevens: We sold it to about 20 countries. We have a Japanese dub in the works and we are going to find a way to get it out in Japan if it's the last thing we do. And Louie's right, getting it out is going to put a lot of pressure on the Japanese government to stop this thing.

Have you gotten any reactions from other Japanese who've seen it?

Psihoyos: I showed it to the director of the Tokyo Film Festival. And he said, given that the theme of this year's festival is the environment – they're doing a green not red carpet – it'd be hypocritical not to screen it. He then said, but you have to understand that the Government pays for the festival.

What are your hopes and expectations for the film now that it's getting a proper release?

Stevens: My whole goal in making movies is to entertain. And when you entertain, that's when you get the message in there.

Psihoyos: My only goal in making a movie is to change the world.

That's a good balance.