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The Cove
The men behind this year's must-see shock-doc | | | |
The Cove is one of the year’s smartest thrillers. Penetrating the Fort Knox-like surrounds of Japan’s Taiji cove to lift the lid on the annual slaughter of 26,000 dolphins, it packs the tension of a heist movie into a bravura documentary with enough punch to knock you sideways. The Cove is the brainchild of photographer and first-time filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and one-time dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry. The ultimate gamekeeper-turned-poacher, O’Barry has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of marine wildlife since he worked on Sunday morning TV staple, Flipper, in the 1960s and saw first-hand the suffering of captive dolphins. We talked to them both to find out how their ocean’s X1 came into being...
How did you find out about what was happening to the Taiji dolphins?
Ric O'Barry: A photo appeared on the news wires in the ‘90s showing this bloody lagoon, but it wasn’t until I went to Taiji in 2002 that I realised it was still happening. The most shocking thing was that there’s no opposition. I’ve been going back five or six times a year but I didn’t know what to do. My Japanese friends advised ‘Gaiatsu’ which translates as ‘external pressure’ and I’ve been doing that ever since. This movie is gaiatsu, especially if it gets nominated for an Academy Award. That would be a public relations nightmare for the Japanese government.Louie Psihoyos: This is a Japanese nature reserve that Japanese people can’t go to for six months of the year because the locals are busy killing all the wildlife. And the Japanese aren’t aware that this is happening?
Ric O’Barry: They don’t know because the government won’t tell them. Our next objective is to get The Cove in front of the Japanese people and I think that’s going to happen. It’s been shown at the Tokyo Film Festival now, mainly thanks to Ben Stiller. It was initially banned but he called up the festival director and complained about censorship.
 What was the genesis of the movie?
Ric O’Barry: I’d made my own DVD called ‘Welcome To Taiji’ to get the media interested and Louie called me and said: “Hey, I just saw your film, can I follow you with my camera?” We agreed to meet in Taiji. What I didn’t find out until later when we were in Paris with Luc Besson was that when he hung up the phone, he went out and did a three day course in how to make a movie! But he’s a master photographer and captured The Cove perfectly. I didn’t know what it would become, and I’m sure he didn’t either. Louie Psihoyos: The first words of the film are, “We tried to make this legally”. It’s a crime on the side of angels. It’s proof that one person can change the world. The Cove is a documentary that plays like a thriller. Was that your intention from the outset?
Louie Psihoyos: I wish I could say it was. We were doing a ‘making-off’ and were being pretty aggressive with it because we had this Ocean’s Eleven-like team and thought it’d make a nice DVD extra. It was when we saw the thermal camera footage that our editor said, “This is crazy, this has to be part of the film.” Many documentaries can feel a bit like taking medicine, but this was a way to make it a thriller. Alongside the dolphin slaughter, The Cove deals with other issues like mercury poisoning, waning fish stocks, corruption at the International Whaling Commission…
Louie Psihoyos: It was also the idea that these animals are toxic. I wanted it to be complicated. I wanted the ultimate bad guy to be us and to ask who made these animals so toxic. That’s us.
The actual dolphin killing is only shown briefly in the film…
Ric O’Barry: You only see two minutes of the actual dolphin slaughter, editing down from 40 hours. Like the shower scene in Psycho, you don’t see the dolphins being stabbed but your imagination takes you there. Louie Psihoyos: This is a PG-13 movie and, like Hitchcock, a lot of the violence you think you’ve seen is in your head.
 How did you go about assembling your team to break into the cove?
Louie Psihoyos: Rico showed me the Taiji cove and told me I needed to put a Navy SEAL team together to get in there. I’m friends with Mandy Cruikshank, the World Champion free diver, who’s better than a SEAL in some ways: she can hold her breath for 6 ½ minutes and dive 80 metres on one breath. She and her trainer, Kirk Krack, helped us set up the underwater cameras and hydraphones. Our Head of Clandestine Affairs was Charles Hambelton who was working for Gore Verbinski to train actors to be pirates for Pirates Of The Caribbean. I called him and said, “I need a real pirate to help us get into The Cove.” For the cameras, we showed Industrial Light And Magic’s head mould-maker photos of the cove and ILM made these rocks that were so indistinguishable from the terrain that we struggled to find them when we went back. We couldn’t have scripted the footage they captured. How did you feel when your saw that footage?
Louie Psihoyos: We were shocked. We got scared actually because we realised that what we had could shut this place down. When we knew we had something that powerful we had to get the film out of the country. Ric O’Barry: We came back and saw the footage and it’s perfectly composed, just by accident. The most amazing thing is that the movie is shot while we’re sleeping. It all just happened as if by magic. How frightening was it to film in Taiji?
Louie Psihoyos: The movie doesn’t show how scary it was. We had five hotel rooms, the police had five hotel room; we’d go out, they’d follow: it was cat and mouse. There’s a lot of bad guys in this movie. Ric O'Barry: We had to use two decoy cars to lead the police away, so the car with the camera could get through. At any moment you could be arrested and even if you’re not arrested, you’ve got guard dogs, barbed wire, guys with knives and clubs. We just got lucky!
And, lastly, is it true you had some advice from Steven Spielberg?
Louie Psihoyos: I was on holiday in St. Barts with Jim Clark, the film’s ex-producer, and the next boat over belonged to Steven Spielberg – my son was doing sleep-overs with his son and he came over and asked what I did for a living. I told him I was thinking about becoming a filmmaker and he said, “Let me give you some words of advice: never do a film involving boats or animals.” So there may have been a certain amount of naivity involved! The Cove is in cinemas now. Visit www.thecovemovie.com to watch the trailer. Visit www.SaveJapanDolphins.org for more information on the campaign to protect the Taiji dolphins.
Interview by Phil de Semlyen
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