by Paul Cronin
But ranting about cultural decay isn’t very useful. The poet must not avert his eyes. When you look at the cultural shifts that have taken place over the centuries in the representation of female beauty, for example, someone as uncouth as Anna Nicole Smith becomes fascinating. The earliest representations of females are small statues from forty thousand years ago, like the Venus of Willendorf, with no face but a massive belly and breasts; this is apparently an idealised version of fertility and fecundity. Greek antiquity has its own well-known Venuses, and in late-mediaeval paintings we see fragile Madonnas, with porcelain-like skin and small breasts. Rubens’s Three Graces, by comparison, are real porkers. With Anna Nicole Smith, the ideal of femininity was transformed into comic-book proportions. When combined in one person, breast enhancement, Botox and lip augmentation make for a walking art installation. However vulgar she was, there was something of great enormity and momentousness about Anna Nicole. I wish I had made a film with her.
Grizzly Man is about bear-lover Timothy Treadwell, who was eaten by his furry friends.
Treadwell was a celebrity because he spent thirteen summers living with bears in the Alaskan wilderness. He was killed and eaten in 2003, but not before he had filmed his final years among bears with a video camera. Grizzly Man is cut together from material he shot of himself with the animals amidst the extraordinary landscapes of Alaska, alongside the footage I filmed a few months after his death.
Treadwell’s story is a dark and complex one, and his cause – though noble – was ill conceived. He saw a mission he wanted to fulfil and, by doing so, somehow wrestle meaning from a life he had already lost. As he says himself, “I had no life. Now I have a life.” Although he tried to protect bears from poachers and other imagined dangers, it’s fair to say he needed the animals more than they needed him; they were some kind of salvation for him. Treadwell was a haunted man, perhaps even with a death wish, who was forever trying to overcome his demons, which included a serious drug and alcohol problem. Out in the wilderness he was able to experience moments of both dazzling elation and utter dejection. In his footage one minute he’s full of joy, exuberance and pride; the next he’s weeping, feeling dejected and utterly downhearted, overwhelmed by paranoia. But whether you sympathise with Treadwell or not is irrelevant. Grizzly Man is a unique document about humanity’s relationship with the wild and a glimpse into the deep abyss of the human soul. For me this is a story about the human condition, the misery and exhilarations that haunt us, the contradictions within. This was definitely a personal project for me, even if so much of the film is comprised of Treadwell’s own footage. We owe him our admiration because of his courage and single-mindedness; it doesn’t matter how wrong his basic assumptions were and how much he romanticised nature. No one holds out for thirteen summers living amongst grizzly bears without having a deep conviction within. Whether that conviction is right or wrong doesn’t matter. There is something much bigger in his story.
It would be easy to denounce Treadwell because of the games he played with danger and his sporadic moments of paranoia, as well as the posture he had of an eco-warrior, but we have to separate his occasionally delusional acts as an individual from what he filmed, which is powerful indeed. I think everybody who has an instinct about cinema would acknowledge there is something out of the ordinary and of great depth in Treadwell’s footage. Probably unbeknownst to him, he created unique images of extraordinary beauty and significance that Hollywood would never be able to reproduce, even with all the money in the world.
How did you discover that materal existed?
I went to pay a visit to a producer friend of mine, who took me on a tour of his office. We sat down at his desk – which was covered with paper, drawings, DVDs and empty FedEx boxes – and when I got up to leave realised I had misplaced my car keys. I glanced at the table and knew they were there somewhere, but my friend thought I had noticed something that interested me. He handed over an article, one of the first published about Treadwell. “Read this,” he said. “We’re making a film about it.” I went out to my car, but ten minutes later, after having stood reading these few pages without taking my eyes off them, I walked back into his office and said, “How far along is this project? Who is directing it?” He answered, “Well, I’m kind of directing.” When I heard his casual “kind of,” I looked him in the eye and said, “No. I will direct this film!” I knew this was big, even before I had any notion of Treadwell’s footage. I never look for these characters. I just stumble into them, or they into me.
Treadwell left behind almost a hundred hours of footage, though much of it was of kitsch landscapes and fluffy bear cubs. In his unedited footage we see how he staged and directed things, how he did one take after another and erased the ones he disliked. We know he did at least fifteen takes of certain shots because what survives in his footage are takes two, seven and fifteen. He was extremely selective and methodical, keeping only those images that made him look like Prince Valiant in the wilderness, protecting the bears against evil poachers. I give him great credit as a filmmaker; he was no amateur, and seemed to be preparing some big production with himself as the star. Treadwell was a failed actor who claimed he almost got the role of the bartender in Cheers. With Grizzly Man I wanted to give him the chance to be a real hero, and even gave him the most glorious soundtrack possible, written and performed by Richard Thompson.
Production took twenty-nine days from the first day of shooting – in Alaska, Florida and Los Angeles – to the delivery of the final film. Although I was aware of Treadwell’s hundred hours of material, I went to Alaska before I had looked at a single frame. After shooting, I was able to create the essential structure of the film and record the voiceover in only nine days. Everything fell into place with such clarity and blind certainty that all I had to do was follow a single direction, as if a star were guiding me. As I watched the footage it became instantly clear what was needed for the film and what should be left out. Just viewing all of Treadwell’s material would have taken me at least ten days, but I had four assistants who went through everything, melting it down to about twelve hours of footage. I gave them precise instructions about what I was looking for, but sometimes scrutinised what they had put aside and found extraordinary moments they had dismissed. The shots of the fox paws on the tent had been discarded because they were too shaky, but I thought it was very beautiful imagery. I think even Treadwell himself would have overlooked it. At certain moments, when he was in his Starsky and Hutch mode, sporting his bandanna, Treadwell would jump down in front of the camera and start talking. Then he would disappear for twelve seconds and jump down again; he would do take after take. But that “dead” footage of reed grass flowing and bending in the wind, in between takes, demanded to be seen. Even without Treadwell in shot, this empty and apparently useless material was extraordinarily powerful. To this day I have watched perhaps only 15 per cent of what Treadwell shot.
A key moment in Grizzly Man is when we watch you listening to the audio recording of Treadwell’s death.
When the bear attacked Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, his girlfriend, their video camera was switched on. The lens cap was still attached, but the microphone continued to record for six and a half minutes. As I understand it, no one has heard the tape except for the coroner and a few park rangers, who discovered the camera. I stupidly told Jewel Palovak – a close friend and collaborator of Treadwell, and heir to his archives – that she should destroy the tape, but she was wise to lock it away in a safety-deposit box instead. To this day she has never listened to it.
Everyone knew of the tape’s existence, so there was some pressure on me to address the issue. There is always a boundary that mustn’t be crossed, and playing that tape in public would have been a gross intrusion into two people’s right to a dignified death. Once again I found myself facing the question of limits, something I have carefully navigated from the start of my professional life. There is a difference between voyeurism and filmmaking. Voyeurs have a ps
ychological sickness and would have jumped to include the tape in the film, but not me. This was no snuff movie. I explained that if anyone on the production insisted the recording be included in the film, I would quit. Grizzly Man’s producer and distributor asked me to film myself listening to it, but I thought it would be more effective to film Jewel as she watches me, trying to read the echoes from my face. She was worried that the screams would leak out of the earphones I was wearing and be picked up by the microphone, but I promised her that if I detected even the slightest sound, I would erase it. The camera is behind me, and what the audience is focused on at that moment is her anguish as she imagines what I’m hearing, which was horrible beyond description. The advancement of a medium is often driven by certain transgressions. Values change from one generation to the next, and perhaps my grandchildren will find it ridiculous I chose not to include the tape in Grizzly Man. But I doubt it.
The film contains few details about Amie Huguenard.
All I can say is she was very brave. She chose to stay and attack a thousand-pound bear with a frying pan, which was found next to her remains. These are animals that can run as fast as a racehorse, drag a huge moose up a steep mountain, decapitate with one blow of a paw and kill a human with a single crunching bite. Loud metallic bangs can be heard on the tape. Hardly anything was left of her. What’s interesting is that though Huguenard had spent the last three summers with Treadwell, in her diary she described him as being “hellbent on destruction” and made it clear she was about to leave him for good and return to California. Treadwell seemed to hide Huguenard’s presence out there; there is less than a minute of her in the hundred hours of his footage. He stylised himself as a lone warrior, and having his girlfriend with him in Alaska clearly didn’t fit this image. I would have liked to talk to people who knew Huguenard; her sister was prepared to speak on camera, but the family decided against it. There is something deeply heroic and tragic about her, and she remains the great unknown of the film.
You said earlier that throughout the film your voiceover takes issue with Treadwell’s views of nature.
He considered nature to be wondrously harmonious, but for me, the world is overwhelmingly chaotic, hostile and murderous, not some sentimental Disneyesque place. Treadwell overstepped a boundary; perhaps because he grew up so far from the wilderness he had no understanding of the place. We all know bear cubs are cute, but where there is a cub there must be a mother, and there is a ferocious instinct in these creatures to protect their little ones. When I look at Treadwell’s footage I see someone who felt strangely privileged, constantly crossing this line. In his quest to be close to the bears he would actually act out being one, going down on all fours and adopting the nature of a wild beast. For Treadwell, stepping outside of his humanness into this ecstasy was an almost religious act. But there were many facets to the man, and I could never reject him out of hand. Despite his stupidities he had a vigorous joy of life, and there was a genuine warmth about him. I also admire him for the impact he had on education – he addressed tens of thousands of schoolchildren over the years – which means the argument I have with Treadwell is similar to one I might have with my brother, someone I love and respect.
I found it ridiculous that everyone thought Treadwell was so courageous. “Any idiot can walk up to a bear,” I thought. After hibernation, the animals graze like cattle for a few months, and at the end of the summer, when the salmon run starts, converge in large numbers along the riverbanks. While filming at one of the creeks in Alaska where Treadwell had lived, I walked up to a sleeping bear, one of the biggest I could find, one we know Treadwell filmed. I slowly moved in until I was about thirty feet away, then started speaking Bavarian. The bear heard me coming, woke up and stared into my face, but didn’t bother to get up. Grizzly bears are basically uninterested in human beings as objects of prey; many more people in the United States die from wasp stings than bear attacks. The truly dangerous bear is the polar, which will usually head straight towards you because it’s accustomed to hunting mammals the size of human beings. Two days after my encounter I spoke to an Aleutic – a local native – who was the curator of the museum on Kodiak Island. He made it clear how inconsiderate Treadwell had been, and I realised how foolish I had been and how misplaced was my bravado. “Bears need to be respected,” he explained, “and the only way to do this is from a distance. You have to know their boundaries.” The National Park Service has certain rules, one of which is that you have to remain three hundred feet from any bear at all times, and a minimum of four hundred and fifty feet from a female bear with cubs. What I did by getting so close to these creatures was a gross transgression and outright stupidity, not because it was dangerous but because it was disrespectful. Don’t love the bear. Respect the bear.
Had you been back to Alaska since shooting Heart of Glass?
About twenty years ago I spent a summer there with my son, at the end of his childhood. We were dropped on a lake beyond the Alaska Range with some tools and a large tarpaulin, but no tent, and immediately set about building a shelter. We had some basic food, like rice, noodles and salt. I’m not a hunter but I forage, so we searched for berries and mushrooms, and fished for salmon and trout. We lived off the land for six weeks, and from our encampment would venture out for day trips. It was so wonderful that we repeated our visit out there the following summer. I love Alaska for its solitude and space. It’s one of the very few areas with a truly primordial nature. Much of the place is unchanged since humans started roaming the planet.
It can be quite sobering to return, years later, to certain places. The deserts and jungles where I filmed were fantasy locations, but seeing them again can make everything seem so banal in my mind. When I went back to the jungle, to the locations we used for Fitzcarraldo, two decades later while working on My Best Fiend, I remember wondering why it seemed such a grandiose place for me all those years before. Everything was completely overgrown; there was no trace of us ever having been there, and even if you had known where we shot the film, you wouldn’t have recognised it. The mountainside where we cut the hundred-foot-wide path from one river to the other looked just as it did before we arrived to make the film, which is a humbling reality. There was absolutely nothing there, not a single nail or scrap of wire left, which is bizarre seeing as there are traces of prehistoric man still to be found on our planet. We were actually asked by the locals to leave certain things behind once production on the film was complete because they wanted every fragment they could find. It all had a use for them. Only Machu Picchu retained its power, though no one likes having to line up for a ticket among those throngs of tourists. The most sobering are the lava fields in Lanzarote, where I made Even Dwarfs Started Small. Back then the landscape was completely black and white, with barely any vegetation, but today the fields are swarming with hotels. The ten thousand windmills in Signs of Life were replaced by electric pumps years ago.
The Wild Blue Yonder contains an array of footage, some archival, some shot by yourself.
The film emerged from my fascination with the troubled Galileo space probe. After fourteen years drifting in space, the danger was that the probe would crash into one of Jupiter’s moons, which apparently contains ice and shows signs of microbiotic life. To avoid contamination, scientists decided to use the last few ounces of the craft’s energy to catapult it out of the moon’s gravity and send it on a suicide mission: a premeditated immersion into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where it would become a superheated plasma and vanish. The probe was sending messages back until its last moments; for the final fifty-two minutes – which is the time it takes for radio signals to reach Earth – it was actually already dead but still communicating with NASA scientists. Some of them were ecstatic and popping champagne corks; others were sad that the mission had been sent to its death. When I discovered the expedition was being orchestrated from Mission Control in Pasadena, only half an hour away from my home, I told myself I needed to be there to film it. I was ready to jump the fe
nce and forge an ID to get inside, but had a stroke of luck because I spoke to someone from NASA in Washington who had seen some of my films, and he got me access.
Then, some time later, in a dusty old warehouse also in Pasadena, I discovered a NASA archive comprised of documents, photos, videos and film footage shot by astronauts. This staggering collection of material represents the history of our space explorations, like El Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the archive of the discovery and conquest of the New World, where you can find Columbus’s personal diaries and Cortés’s letters to the king of Spain. This NASA archive had been underfinanced and understaffed for years, and the archivists there were surprised to have a visitor. One of them took me around and pulled out a box full of 16mm footage shot in 1989 by the astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis, which transported the Galileo spacecraft. The material had come directly from the lab and was still sealed; no one had ever looked at it. What they filmed on that mission – probably the last time celluloid was shot in space – has an extraordinary beauty. The television stations wouldn’t have touched it because there are shots that go on, uncut and uninterrupted, for nearly three minutes, which for them is an eternity. But there was real beauty in these images precisely because they roll on and on, as we move from the cargo bay in the command module and drift past any number of weird and wonderful objects.