Spending 250 shooting days over several years with three camera operators in Volcanoes National Park, the crew of Netflix documentary A Gorilla Story was able to capture multiple seasons of the great apes’ behaviour. Weaving together Attenborough’s contemporary thoughts and remembrances alongside readings from his journals and archival footage from 1978 — and his first encounter with the silverbacks of the Rwandan mountains — the film gets inside the Pablo Group, as the gorilla family is known. It not only offers a detailed look at the daily life of these majestic creatures, it serves as a poignant bookend to Attenborough’s adventure nearly 50 years ago in the landmark nature documentary Life on Earth.
The documentary, produced by Silverback Films with Appian Way, is directed by James Reed (My Octopus Teacher) and produced by Alastair Fothergill (Life on Our Planet).
It releases globally on April 17th.
WHAT WAS THE GENESIS OF THIS PROJECT?
ALASTAIR: I’ve worked with David Attenborough for my whole career and obviously the most famous sequence in the whole of wildlife filmmaking is David with Pablo the gorilla in Life on Earth, his first series.
JAMES: We wanted to do a story about that particular group of gorillas.
ALASTAIR: Nobody had ever had the chance to do a proper film on gorillas, and I knew it was
critical to get a variety of behavior. I knew this was a film that had never been made from a pure natural history sense. People have been up the mountain with presenters for a couple of days, but we spent 250 days with these gorillas, with three camera operators.
JAMES: We would do four or six week shoots, four or five times a year for two years.
HOW DID YOU PREPARE?
JAMES: We went out to Rwanda together – me, Alastair and other members of the team – and met with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. We spent a couple of days in the field with the gorillas as well, to try and understand how we were going to film them and their environment. We got to know every animal. We all knew gorillas a bit, but this was going to be quite an in-depth character study and we wanted to do the modern group as well as a historic story based on the archive. We also did all the necessary administrative work around how to work with the Fossey Fund — who monitor the animals — as well as things like how many hours a day we could film, and various permissions including drone permits.
HOW DID YOU HIT ON THE IDEA OF BLENDING THE ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE WITH THE FOOTAGE YOU ALL SHOT AND HAVING DAVID READ EXCERPTS FROM HIS JOURNALS TO TELL THIS MULTIGENERATIONAL TALE?
ALASTAIR: I remember going to see him when we were dreaming up this film and had lunch and he said, “I must get my diary. ” He has written beautiful diaries throughout his life. He has hundreds of them. He started reading me a bit of the chapter about the first time he’d met Pablo and the rest of the gorillas, and I knew immediately that it was magic. I asked if we could film him reading his diary. That was a way to start the journey for the audience. And because we were making a feature, we wanted it to be very cinematic and have a really powerful narrative. So, the idea of following the Pablo story was a really exciting one to us.
JAMES: That gave us a flavor for how he was going to voice the film. People know and love David and want to hear from him in the way that they’re used to, but we also wanted to shift it a bit more informal, a bit more personal and about a specific story that had happened to him.
ALASTAIR: It was great timing because when David went there in January 1978, Pablo was only three years old. It was the beginning of Dian Fossey’s studies. It was the beginning of the journey. And so it became very clear to us that there were several narratives. One was Pablo’s story, which we knew we’d have to tell principally through archive. One was the modern-day Pablo group. We were so lucky because, in all honesty, a lot of the time gorillas don’t do a lot. They’re quite stable animals generally. They eat a lot of the time. Because the silverback is so dominant, there’s not a lot of sexual tension, and there’s not that many battles between groups. And I thought even with 250 days, are we going to get amazing behaviour? Literally two weeks after we started filming Ubwuzu, the beta, overtook Gicurasi who had been the alpha silverback for six years. But what was even more interesting in a sense is that Teta, the lead female, initially didn’t support Ubwuzu. She stayed with Gicurasi. I love that story because the power, as usual, actually lands with the women. They’re in charge. So we had that amazing narrative – that it took over a year really for Ubwuzu to have dominance.
YOU ALSO HAD THE VERY DRAMATIC STORY OF IMFURA, A TEEN SILVERBACK WHO, ON THE ONE HAND IS PLA YING WITH LITTLE, RASCALLY TWO-YEAR-OLD UBI BUT IS ALSO ACCLIMATISING TO HIS OWN SIZE AND STRENGTH AS HE MATURES INTO ADULTHOOD. IMFURA IS ULTIMATELY OSTRACIZED BY THE GROUP AND ENDS UP COMMITTING A REAL ATROCITY AGAINST THE FAMILY.
ALASTAIR: In 25 years of studying gorillas in Rwanda, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund have only seen intragroup infanticide happen within the group once before. It is common between groups, but not within them. So for Imfura to do what he did was unbelievably rare.
DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF HOW MUCH IMPACT BEING IN THEIR SPACE AND DOCUMENTING THEIR LIVES HAS ON THEM?
JAMES: I would say 99% of the time our impact, our interactions with them are completely passive. They might sort of react to you initially as a distraction a little bit. So, as soon as you’ve done that, you’ve changed their day slightly, but then they’ll get on and do their stuff. With sensitive and aware creatures like gorillas, you have to let them know you are there and they have to accept you into their sort of social circle. The gorillas we were working with are habituated, which means scientists and trackers have been following them for years.
ALASTAIR: You cannot work with great apes without years of habituation. All the groups that we worked with were habituated by people going up into the forest day after day. It took Dian Fossey years before they would accept her. So we were obviously coming into a group that were very used to people. I mean, there’s absolutely no way they don’t know you are there, but they almost ignore you.
HOW DID YOU APPROACH THEM AND WHAT WAS THE MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE GUIDELINE?
ALASTAIR:That was very important and was largely to do with COVID. They have similar diseases to humans, so we always wore masks and we always kept to a safe distance, usually about 15 meters. It changed on a day-to-day basis and depended on what cameras we were using. We essentially had two cameramen there the whole time. And that was very critical because one of them was shooting with a traditional long lens camera to get the closeups. But the other thing we developed very specifically for this project was a very lightweight, steady-cam type system which was worn by cameraman Ben Cherry around his waist. It was low, at gorilla level. What worked brilliantly is that gorillas walk relatively slowly so that Ben could literally walk in their footsteps which resulted in a lot of very fluid shots where you feel yourself moving with the group. Now obviously, steady-cams have been used forever, but the challenge was that sometimes we were walking four hours before we even encountered the gorillas. They move up and down the mountain at different times of the year, depending on the vegetation they’re feeding on. And if they’re at the very top of the volcano, it’s a four hour struggle up a really steep hill before you even start work. So the rig being lightweight was a very important technical development. The other real breakthrough was we, for the very first time, were allowed to use drones. Because the one thing nobody could do is frighten the gorillas. But after a year and a half of working with them, seeing the rushes, seeing how we behaved, excited by the shape of the film, realizing it was going to be a very special film of their gorillas, the Rwandan Development Board gave us permission. We had to do it very carefully.
THE LATE DIAN FOSSEY AND HER GORILLA FUND ORGANISATION OBVIOUSLY LOOM LARGE OVER ANY STORY ABOUT GORILLAS IN THE AREA. DID YOU WORK CLOSELY WITH THEM?
ALASTAIR: We were very fortunate to work with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and the Rwandan Development Board. The Rwandan Development Board gave us access to the park and very importantly provided us with three amazing guides. You can’t go into the forest without the guides. And we were very lucky that they provided us with three dedicated guides that worked with us for three years, and they were amazing. But on top of the guides from the park, there was also always somebody from the Dian Fossey Fund on site. Their work, which is extraordinary, has gone on and continues to go on every day. The chief
scientist, Veronica Vecellio, was constantly advising us.
JAMES, YOU MENTIONED THAT WHEN YOU STARTED THIS PROJECT, MR. ATTENBOROUGH WAS 96. HE IS OBVIOUSLY AN ICON IN THIS SPACE AND IS STILL INCREDIBLY SHARP AND
ENGAGING ON CAMERA. WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING WITH HIM?
JAMES: Amazing. It’s a miracle that he can perform and communicate and remember with such clear detail and then see the meaning of that in hindsight. He had a very rich and detailed memory and a lot of interesting insight.
ALASTAIR: One of the amazing things is that our film is coming out on the 17th of April, and David will be 100 on May 8th. He is extraordinary. The pieces to camera are still absolutely beautiful. We recorded the whole 76 minutes of narration in literally four or five hours. Now, I’ve worked with Hollywood stars on big wildlife docs, and I’ll spend two days with them. But David is just so good. We were very, very privileged to work with him. I’ve worked with him for literally 35 years. I probably won’t live to 96 or a hundred, but if I was half as good as him at that age, I’d be very happy. I asked him if he was ever going to slow down and he said “Absolutely not.” He thinks that the reason he’s still so sharp is because he’s been carrying camera boxes in the field forever and he’s writing as much as ever. He likes to be busy.
WHY DO YOU THINK HUMANS REMAIN SO CAPTIVATED BY APES?
JAMES: Our familiarity with them, whether you know it or understand it scientifically, you see a distorted version of yourself in them. It’s like a weird mirror. It’s not you, but it’s like you somehow.
ALASTAIR: Anthropomorphism. We know they’re really intelligent. You don’t have to spend long with them to really appreciate their intelligence. And you do feel they’re conscious and there’s quite strong scientific evidence that they are conscious. David’s line,“there is more meaning looking into the eyes of a gorilla than any other animal I know, ”absolutely is the experience of being with them. They look at you and they have a presence, which is unique in my experience. And the sheer size of a silverback is just —it puts you in your place.
WHAT DO YOU HOPE PEOPLE TAKE AWA Y FROM A GORILLA STORY?
JAMES: What excites me as a filmmaker is interesting stories and characters. I want people to realize the gorillas are complex individuals. Their society is complex. There are different personalities within them. And if people realise all those things I think it should affect people’s attitudes towards conservation because there’s as much complexity in gorilla society as there is in human society, and you can find that wherever you look in nature.
ALASTAIR: I hope they take away a true respect for a really wonderful animal. For a lot of people, gorillas are King Kong. They don’t have a good press agent. It was very important to us that people realize that they are wonderfully engaging, warm characters. So, if people appreciate them for their beauty and their warmth and the complexity of their society, I’d be very pleased about that. This is also one of the very few really positive conservation stories. We hear so much bad news from the natural world. But when David was there with Dian Fossey in 1978 for Life on Earth, there were 250 gorillas left. Digit, her favourite silverback, had just been poached. Today, there are 600 gorillas in Rwanda, and there is a tourism system that not only looks after the gorillas, but generates a lot of money and 10% of all the earnings are given directly to the local communities. The bottom line is that a developing country will never preserve a wilderness unless it’s got economic value for the local people and that’s absolutely understandable. And most of the nature left in the world is in developing countries. I want people to appreciate that. We can turn it around, give animals the chance, and nature will bounce back. Finally, I really want people who watch to realise what an extraordinary man David has been.
These interviews were conducted by Netflix.
Pippa Considine
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