On 10 February, Eton College welcomed Alastair Fothergill OBE, who gave a wide-ranging and deeply personal talk on his four decades of wildlife filmmaking alongside David Attenborough.
Mr Fothergill began his filmmaking career in his late twenties, first filming The Trials of Life, during which he spent six months on the road with Sir Attenborough filming what are known as “pieces to camera”. This is where he walks towards the lens and explains the scene around him. Although Mr Fothergill had worked on many sequences during this series, he focused on discussing his most ground-breaking one: the chimpanzees of West Africa.
At the time, chimpanzees hunting cooperatively for meat was still a controversial idea. Nonetheless, Mr Fothergill and his crew captured a coordinated hunt, working with a research crew in the Ivory Coast who had spent twenty-five years habituating the troop. Showing us his work, he described the forest erupting with noise as the chimps pursued their prey in an “organised, almost militaristic fashion”.
This was a revolutionary airing for a primetime BBC audience. He explained that although most of the difficulty lay in the filming, another large part lay in framing it and having the script acknowledge the brutality of the scene without sensationalising it.
After this, the scale of his projects expanded quickly, moving on from the tropical forests to polar ice. At thirty-two, he was given the task of producing his own series, Life in the Freezer, the first major television broadcast about Antarctica. He said it was “the hardest place on Earth to work: temperatures of minus fifty degrees, equipment freezing solid, and vast stretches of emptiness where wildlife simply does not exist”.
However, he also explained that when life gathers there, it does so in astonishing numbers. He described the beaches of South Georgia being packed with king penguins and elephant seals, and the “peculiar experience” of trying to film four-tonne “beachmaster” elephant seals with only a Steadicam and broomstick for protection.
His next major project was The Blue Planet, which took his ambition underwater. Most marine documentaries until this point depicted coral reefs and the shallow seas. Mr Fothergill wanted to explore the open ocean and the deep sea, the largest habitat on the planet and yet barely seen by human eyes.
He and his crew had to descend thousands of metres under immense pressure in submersibles, filming anglerfish and vampire squid, many species never even having been captured on film before; some were completely new to science.
This was also the first time that Sir Attenborough had narrated a series without appearing on screen, which made BBC executives sceptical about the show’s likelihood of success, with some claiming that “eight hours on fish” would not bring about high ratings. But the gamble paid off as the series became a major global hit and completely changed the way audiences thought about the oceans.
In 2011, Mr Fothergill left the BBC to found Silverback Films, with his partnership with Netflix leading to Our Planet, the first of his series to fully confront environmental decline directly. One sequence in the show, filmed on the Russian coast, showed walruses forced ashore by retreating ice, some falling to their deaths from cliffs they had scaled in desperation.
This sequence premiered at the Davos summit, which moved many political figures to tears, leading to the founding of the Earthshot Prize. He said it was “easy to talk about climate change” and that “it’s harder to show it”; this was his way of doing exactly that.
Mr Fothergill ended the evening with footage of manx shearwaters leaving their burrows at night to begin their 6,000-mile journey to Brazil. These shots had to be filmed under infrared light to avoid disturbing them, and he reminded us that the unwritten rule of wildlife filmmaking was to “never interfere”, even if sometimes the outcomes can be hard to witness.
He also revealed that filming without interference meant that most of the sound we hear from wildlife was created post-filming. This was done through foley artists recreating footsteps, rustles, and high-detail sounds missed during location recording.
He closed by addressing that biodiversity loss and climate change aren’t distant threats. However, he resisted fatalism, as “nature has a remarkable capacity for recovery”, and that the challenge facing this generation is formidable, but also an opportunity.
