A little over a year ago we were struggling to get our film, “The Cove,” into Sundance. We finished the film at 4 a.m., two hours before I was to board a plane and hand deliver it to the festival organizers. They were understandably getting nervous back in Park City where a snowstorm was threatening air travel.
This was my first film, and I remember asking the weary, seasoned post-production crew, "What do you think, do we have a good film?"
"Prepare yourself for a disaster," came the reply from someone who had worked with Academy Award-winning directors.
I had been privately doing that for three years. I'm the executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), and we had started out trying to make the most beautiful underwater documentary we could. Then the OPS team visited the cove in Japan with reformed dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry, who captured and trained the five female dolphins who collectively played the part of Flipper for the 1960s television show and movie.
At that point our movie took a radical turn into a real-life action/adventure film with an environmental message of global implications. The joy ride that everyone had signed up for was not the eco-thriller we ended up producing.
Everyone was nervous, our biggest backer was understandably questioning my sanity, and my wife was dropping not so subtle hints that I should return to my money-making career instead of the bank account draining one of filmmaking.
I had ignored the first rule of filmmaking, "Never use your own money." I even borrowed money from my son's college fund.
Success for a film can be measured in many ways, but our mandate was to just make a difference -- hopefully the money would follow. We have yet to break even financially, but all the public screenings in Park City were met with standing ovations. Clearly audiences were being moved.
I was packing to go home before the final night of Sundance when someone told me stick around -- there was an awards ceremony to come. I had thought getting a film into the festival was the award. I didn’t know they gave out actual awards. We ended up winning the audience award -- and since then, some 50 other awards from festivals, guilds and critic’s associations around the world.
“The Cove,” to me, isn't a movie about just saving dolphins; it's also about trying to save humanity. The dolphin is the only wild animal throughout history known to save the lives of humans. But the only way we can save the lives of dolphins now is to prove that we have made their environment so toxic that we shouldn't be eating them.
We pride ourselves on our large brain which is supposed to separate us from the “lower” animals, yet we are doing what no wild animal will do -- fouling its own nest. The burning of fossil fuels is poisoning the oceans and fresh water supplies by releasing vast amounts of mercury into the environment.
