OSCAR-WINNER Louie Psihoyos: The Hollywood Interview

Oscar-winning filmmaker Louie Psihoyos.


LOUIE PSIHOYOS KEEPS WATCH ON THE COVE
By
Alex Simon

When Louie Psihoyos’ documentary The Cove was released last July by Roadside Attractions, it had already gained major buzz after nabbing the Best Documentary award at Sundance, and went on to score the Best Doc prize in some of Hollywood’s most coveted arenas: The DGA Award, The PGA Producer of the Year Award, The National Board of Review, The L.A. Film Critics, and the BFCA’s Critics Choice Award. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature—not too shabby for a first-time filmmaker. The Cove was released on DVD by Lionsgate in December.



Psihoyos (rhymes with Sequoias) has been one of the world’s top nature photographers for years, cutting his teeth immediately out of college by shooting for National Geographic, where he landed an 18 year tenure. His passion for diving and underwater photography led him to create, along with Jim Clark, The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) in 2005. It also led to his acquaintance with another legendary name in the world of the aquatic, Ric O’Barry, a once-legendary animal trainer who captured, and then trained, the five dolphins who, in the 1960s, starred in the hit TV show “Flipper” as the eponymous dolphin. It was the worldwide popularity of “Flipper” that gave rise to aquatic theme parks, such as Sea World, private “swim with the dolphins” organizations, and the popularity of dolphins as pets which people kept in their backyard pools. All of these factors produced one common denominator in the minds of fishermen: dolphins were suddenly a very lucrative business. When O’Barry realized what he’d unintentionally created, and after the death of the primary “Flipper” dolphin, who literally expired in O’Barry’s arms, Ric O’Barry became a committed conservationalist, and animal rights activist, realizing that dolphins (and their first cousins, the whale), are highly-intelligent mammals and not simple fish as many still believe, and are not meant to be put in captivity, or even worse, hunted and killed. It is the latter which brought O’Barry, and Louie Psihoyos, to the small fishing village of Taiji, Japan.

Seemingly built around its love of the creatures of the sea, the dolphin in particular, Taiji also hides a horrific secret: a remote, natural cove which is ominously surrounded by barbed wire and “keep out” signs, where the fishermen of Taiji, driven by the multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry and an even more scabrous market for mercury-tainted dolphin meat, engage in an unseen (and highly-taboo) hunt for creatures that are not only among the most advanced on Earth, but also among the most toxic, with their mercury levels topping five thousand times the safety level allotted for legally-sold seafood.

Working with model-makers at George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, Psihoyos and his team of filmmakers and activists made a series of cameras and microphones, disguised to look like the rocks of the cove, hid the equipment under cover of night, and captured some truly horrific footage, and equally chilling conversations from the fishermen, damning not only the fishermen and the community of Taiji, but the highest levels of the Japanese government, as well. One of the most provocative and incendiary documentary films in many years, The Cove combines covert op suspense with ecological and scientific fact. It is a unique work.

Louie Psihoyos sat down with The Interview during a recent L.A. stopover. Here’s what transpired:

Let’s start with how your journey from photographer to filmmaker to activist happened.

Louie Psihoyos: I was a still photographer for many years, then got into filmmaking because I wanted to create awareness of ocean issues. I was trying to really be objective when I went into this film, to tell both sides of the story, because I thought that’s where the magic was. When I realized that the other side didn’t really want their side told, probably because as Ric O’Barry said in the film, if the world found out what was actually happening there, they would be shut down. So I think the dolphin hunters realized that they were in an indefensible position on a couple levels, not just in terms of the humanity and the extinction of these creatures, but the inhumanity to man. These animals are toxic and their mercury levels far exceed the minimum toxicity levels allowed for seafood in Japan, five thousand times more toxic, in fact. I asked some of the scientists about why (the fishermen) continue to do it and they said “The money.”

Former dolphin trainer-turned animal rights activist Ric O'Barry.

Economics, plain and simple. And also sociology, it sounds like, because a big part of Japanese culture involves fishing, whaling, and fish in general. So it sounds like there’s also a certain nationalistic pride involved.

Sure, you could argue that, I suppose, but the types of boats they’re using and style of hunting they’re engaging in has only been in practice since 1933. My mother is older than their tradition. So it’s disingenuous to call it a tradition, plus if your tradition is poisoning people, you have to rethink your tradition. We had a tradition back in Colorado, just down the street in Rocky Flats, where they made triggers for plutonium bombs. The argument that the workers had there for continuing to do what they did was “Well, what are we going to do for a living if we don’t make bombs?” Well, they found other ways to make a living. The sons of the dolphin hunters told us that they don’t like doing it, either, that they’d rather be hunting lobster or crabs.

Let me play devil’s advocate for a few questions, if you don’t mind.
No, not at all.

You’re dealing with this very specific subculture of fishermen in this small region of Japan. If you ask an educated, upper-middle class person what they think of dolphin hunting, odds are they’ll agree with your position, because they realize dolphins aren’t so-called “lower creatures,” but actually very sophisticated mammals. But these fishermen are tough, blue-collar guys, most of whom I'm guessing aren’t terribly educated, have been fishermen for generations, probably hundreds of generations, would they really be able to make a living doing something else? Your example of Colorado is bit different. The town of Taiji struck me almost as the Asian equivalent of Appalachia, where people also have a tough time “getting out,” so to speak, and breaking with tradition, even though that tradition might be harmful to themselves, and to others. Is this a fair question?

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. They actually speak a dialect that few Japanese people understand. When we had the covert footage of them talking around the campfire, we had to find a translator who specifically knew this very obscure dialect. So yes, that’s one argument, and a variety of countries, including the U.S., are culpable in terms of the endangerment of whales and dolphins. The bottom line is that all those countries got the word pretty early that the hunting of these creatures continued to go on way after it was sustainable.

And it became illegal to hunt whales in 1986?

As a law it was 1982, and then it was actually implemented in 1986. But the Japanese are still doing it under the aegis of the scientific permit they issued to themselves when, of course, it’s not science. It’s just an excuse to do commercial whale hunting, which is very profitable.



Let’s get back to the original question, which was if you took whaling away from the country in general, and dolphin hunting away from this community in Taiji, would they have a source of income that they could survive on?

Take income away from a couple dozen people? I have to be honest that I don’t really care.

I had the impression that it was more than a couple dozen people, that most of the town depended on the income earned from the fruits of the sea. Taiji struck me as a “company town,” so to speak, just like a lot of the Appalachian communities were literally owned by mining corporations back in the day, and their people exploited.

Well, there’s 26 people in the boats, then the other people work in the slaughterhouse, some are the middlemen, but most of the fishing there is done from other sources. Tuna fishing, for example, is huge there. It has one of the biggest tuna fishing markets in the world. There is a dwindling supply of fish in the ocean, and I know that the top level people I’ve interviewed are keenly aware of it. The Deputy Minister of Fisheries, Akiranakmai, I sat on a plane next to him for ten hours, on a flight from Dallas to Japan. We had had this footage for a couple years that I didn’t want to sit on, because I knew that more of these animals were going to be slaughtered and more children and adults poisoned. So I cut together a P.S.A. from what we’d shot, along with the scientific facts, with the idea of showing it to the Japanese delegate of the I.W.C. So I hop on this plane, one of the last people on board, and there’s this empty seat next to me, and who should sit down next to me, but this man, Akiranakamai! (laughs) I thought, if there is a God, then he has a really good sense of humor. I waited till the plane took off so it would be uncomfortable for him to try and get up to change places with someone on the plane. So I turned to him and asked ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’ He said “No.” I said “Well I know who you are, and I’d like to show you some movies.” And I did. He was furious at the fact that we’d gotten this footage. I said ‘Listen, you’re responsible for five thousand tons of toxic dolphin meat being put on the market every year, a lot of it being sold as fake whale meat. How do you feel about that? You could stop it.’ His response was “Well, I’m in charge of food security, not food safety.”

Louie Psihoyos confers with the model-makers at ILM.

You touch on a very important cultural point: Japanese culture is all based on hierarchy. One of the most telling moments that illustrates this point in your film is when you showed the footage to Akiranakamai’s subordinate, his only response was “On whose authority did you film this?” He couldn’t respond any other way, with a real opinion, and neither, obviously, could his boss. So how do you battle something so firmly rooted in a culture that’s completely different from ours?

Well, hopefully this film will cut through, to some level, to the hierarchy, where it will be shut down. There’s two ways to kill a rabbit: you destroy all the grass that it’s eating or you shoot it through the head. With this film, I think we can do both. The Minister of Health, she could shut this down. The minimum amount of mercury allowed in fish to consumed in Japan is .04 parts per million. Dolphin meat has anywhere from 5-5,000 parts per million.

You raise another alarming point in the film, that there are many other very popular types of fish that also have high amounts of toxicity in them: swordfish, tuna, and grouper. What are some of the others you mentioned?
Marlin. Shark. There are advisories for mercury in all 50 states of this country, so it’s available. On the DVD extras for The Cove, we have a 24-minute short that’s on this subject, as well.

Ric O'Barry and friend.

Another devil’s advocate question: the ultra-left wing environmentalists who, peacefully, are trying to stop the slaughter of dolphins in this film, it could be argued, are the opposite side of the coin from the extreme right wing who, sometimes violently, in this country picket and in the extreme, bomb abortion clinics or assassinate OBGYNs. In both cases, you have a small group of people trying to keep another group of people from engaging in a way of life that makes their living. I happen to think the extreme right-wingers are naïve if they think that their actions will ever help repeal Roe vs. Wade. Are the left-wingers equally naïve to think that their actions and that of a very talented filmmaker will make a difference here, or are their ideals, and strategy, progressive?

For me, personally, I think it’s progressive, as are most animal rights issues. I personally stopped eating things that walk 25 years ago, however I’m not militant about it. My wife still eats meat, as do my kids. I try to wear vegan shoes. (laughs) But if I was eating fish that was toxic with mercury, I would hope someone would tell me! Some of these fish should have poison labels on them when they reach stores. I’ll give you even more of a left wing point-of-view. At the core of this, we’re not making demons out of the dolphin hunters as much as we are the rest of society for toxifying these animals. It’s such a big issue, but the way we’re getting our energy through the burning of fossil fuels is destroying the planet through acidification. We’re going to lose all the corral reefs by the end of this century. Now do I use energy every day? Sure. When I charged all my electric devices in my hotel room, am I engaging in hypocritical behavior? You bet.

We all do, even the best-intentioned of us, just to survive.

Right, just to survive. Halfway through the making of this film, I realized that we were taking another left turn in the story, in that the film wasn’t just about dolphins and the bad guys who hunt and kill them, but that the real bad guys of the story are us. I did a carbon assessment of what it would take to make the film at that point, and came up with a figure of 646 tons of carbon that would be put into the environment to make the film. Because we were producing the film in Colorado, most of our power there is coal-derived, and coal has a lot of mercury in it. So I realized that one of the dirtiest things you can do to the environment is to make a film about it. (laughs)

A still from the covertly-filmed dolphin hunt inside the cove.

So what do you do in your daily life to combat this?

Well, that realization changed the way we used energy from then on. I’m the Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, and we installed 120 solar panels on our roof, which generates 140% of our electric needs. The electric company gives us a check every month, as opposed to the other way around. We have two electric cars, not the hybrids, but completely electric, that can go 80 miles an hour and 120 miles per charge. The license plate reads “VUS”—Vehicle Using Sun, the opposite of an SUV. Now all our neighbors are installing solar panels on their roofs. We’re trying to do the same thing with this film, to show people what’s possible if you’re committed.