It’s foolish to use words like frontrunner in the unpredictable Oscar documentary categories, but the “The Cove” came out of the recent spate of guild nominations looking good. With nods from the Producers Guild, Directors Guild, Writers Guild and Editors Guild, director Louie Psihoyos’ film – which is part horrifying chronicle of the annual slaughter of dolphins in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji, part thriller about how Psihoyos’ crew got their footage – remains one of the most honored documentaries of 2009.
“The Cove,” which was recently released on DVD, has also had an effect on Taiji’s annual dolphin hunt, which was the subject of far more press scrutiny this year than it had ever been previously. After a controversial and widely-publicized showing at the Tokyo International Film Festival focused attention on the film inside Japan, Psihoyos told theWrap that he hopes to keep the pressure on, particularly when it comes to the toxic levels of mercury in dolphin meat.
How much change have you seen in Japan since the film came out?
So far, the dolphin hunters in Taiji have not been slaughtering show dolphins, the bottlenosed and common dolphins. I’ve seen videos of them releasing pods of them back into the sea after they do the selection process. And that’s new. But they’re still killing Risso’s Dolphins, and they’re still killing pilot whales, which are large dolphins, and very toxic.
So they haven’t really gotten the message about the mercury. Although they have mandated that health instructors test everybody in Taiji for mercury poisoning. The first thousand people they tested had levels about ten times higher than the rest of the Japanese people, who have levels ten times higher than the rest of the world, which has levels ten times higher than it should be.
The Japanese press is finally writing about the film.
That’s the big news, the Japanese media breakthrough. I’ve been going there since 2005, and I’ve never seen one video camera. But this year, when I went to the Tokyo Film Festival, there were news crews waiting for me even before I went through immigration.
Were you worried about the reception you’d receive there?
Well, I was prepared to be arrested when I got off the plane. There are arrest warrants out for me: conspiracy to disrupt commerce, trespassing, and photographing undercover police without their permission. So I travelled with my attorney, and we had three Japanese attorneys lined up. I was prepared to spend the next few months in jail, but they probably didn’t want to bring more attention to it.
And it was a great screening. In that audience were all the bad guys: “Private Space,” the mayor of Taiji, Komatsu, the guy who wrote Japan’s defense of whaling. We had night vision in the theater, and you could see him rubbing his temples, his head was down. It’s one thing to defend whaling on paper – you can do that pretty well, especially from the Japanese perspective.
