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Making a documentary film requires the building of a virtual community. Documentary makers are always dependent on the kindness of strangers for access to the people and places we need to tell a story. At it's worst, of course, that means wheedling into people's lives and making a spectacle of them, as so much "reality television" does. But, at its best, documentary is a collaboration between filmmakers and a community which presents a reality that is important to some group of people - sometimes all of us, sometimes a particular few -- and that will, as a finished product, be somehow useful to some or to all.
WATERLIFE, a film that spans the whole Great Lakes and explores the factors bedeviling them, was designed from the get-go with community in mind. I wanted to make a film that would reveal the lakes to the millions of people who live on them, consume them, and are, literally, shaped by them - yet who ignore them and what's happening within them (and, thus, within themselves). Practically speaking, my collaborators and I wanted the film to bolster the work of the thousands of environmentalists, scientists, policy makers and citizens who spend endless hours trying to educate their neighbors about what's really going on beyond the beautiful blue horizon. As Brent Gibson, communications director for Great Lakes United, said about the film after seeing it: "WATERLIFE translates into images a story told too often with facts, figures, and numbers. To truly understand how powerful - and especially vulnerable - the Great Lakes are, you must see them and you must experience them." So, it's kind of like what scientists call a "mutualistic symbiotic relationship", like sharks and remoras - documentary filmmakers can speak in ways that environmentalists can't, but without their knowledge and help, we would have nothing to say. (Which, I guess, makes us filmmakers the attendant, parasitic remoras.)
As we traveled around the Great Lakes filming during 2007, it was fascinating to realize who saw the benefit of helping us, and who didn't. One of the initial surprises was that there were several environmental organizations - some local, some national - that would not even return phone calls or who were incredibly untalkative when they did. My guess is that some environmentalists are inherently suspicious of The Media -- for all the obvious reasons. And, doubtless, a lot are simply overworked and/or have hierarchical structures which allow for only one spokesperson, who is usually the boss and therefore the busiest. Most understandably, we encountered some environmentalists who were working below the radar, doing good works by bending the rules, who refused to talk to us because they feared the exposure. But I have to report, also, that I did occasionally encounter the offputting righteousness some folks develop when they know so much about something that they find the ignorant inquiries of outsiders (i.e. me) irritating. ‘You will never really understand', they seemed to say, ‘so I can't be bothered to explain'. Now, I've been a reporter for almost 30 years, so I am well aware that a lot of my colleagues are morons. However, this sort of attitude, if understandable, is not all that helpful to the cause.
Let me rush to say that the majority of people in the environmental community were hugely and eagerly helpful. Among them were Mary Muter of the Georgian Bay Association, who twice organized boats and even accommodations which allowed us to travel with McMaster scientist Pat Chow-Fraser studying Huron's wetlands. St. Clair Channelkeeper Doug Martz showed us the deteriorating conditions on Lake St Clair - and gave us one of the most amazing scenes in the film, in his own backyard. His friend, environmental consultant Jim Ridgway helped us gain access to the Detroit water system. Joe McBride, in Bay City, introduced us to the nightmare of toxic muck in Saginaw Bay. Mark Mattson, Lake Ontario's Waterkeeper, pointed us toward hidden outfalls on the lake and those who suffer them. Margaret Frisbie, from Friends of the Chicago River, arranged for us to film her group canoeing that beleaguered tributary. Ada Lockridge, of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, helped us gain the trust of her community, infamous for its unnatural preponderance of female births.
Dozens of scientists also led us to places that we could never have found on our own. Doug Haffner from the University of Windsor showed us the toxic shores of the Detroit River and the zebra mussel-encrusted bottom of western Lake Erie. Chip Weseloh, of the Canadian Wildlife Service, brought us to the denuded landscape of Snake Island, off Kingston, wholly inhabited by cormorants. Susan Schantz of the University of Illinois, introduced us to subjects she has been studying to determine the effects of PCBs on brain development. Scott Parker of Fathom Five National Marine Park revealed wetlands that are disappearing because of global warming, turning into mudlands. Véronik de la Chenelière and her fellow researchers at the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals took us to see the charming and beautiful belugas of the St. Lawrence. The people at Environment Canada's water lab in Burlington showed us how they do the detective work of hunting toxins in the environment. The friendly crew of the EPA's Lake Guardian hosted us for a couple of nights so we could film their field studies. And so on. Moreover, all these people -- and dozens of their colleagues -- gave us long, detailed interviews explaining everything from the physics of water to the physiology of lamprey to the politics of regulation.
Surprisingly, we also received a lot of help from people and organizations with nothing to gain and, potentially, reputations to lose. I'm thinking of companies like Bowater Paper and Ontario Power Generation, or of the Little River sewage plant in Windsor, or J.F. Brennan, which is dredging PCBs from the Fox River. Or Meeker's fish farm on Manitoulin Island or Baur Farms near Bay City. The people in these organizations all knew they risked being the target of the finger-pointing that characterizes a certain kind of documentary. That's not my style of filmmaking, though I do believe that the problems of the Great Lakes, and the remediations they require, are much more the responsibility of governments and big industry than of individual citizens. So I saw the openness of some companies and governments to talking with us as a hopeful sign. Then again - reality check! -- the worst offenders would have nothing to do with us: US Steel told us to get lost and nobody in Milwaukee - not the municipality nor a single business that we approached - would allow us to film their facilities.
In the end, there were many more in the Great Lakes community who helped than refused. And that is why WATERLIFE exists. It takes money and skill to get a documentary made but, more important than all that, it takes a village. Years of research had given me a fair grounding in the issues, but I needed people who knew the lakes and their shores to show us the secret places of beauty, the physical evidence of pollution and the people it hurts. You can probably write a good book without all that, but you can't make a movie. Film is a tactile medium that requires the physical, emotional and visceral.
And, to really sing, it requires a certain magic too. That was given to us in the form of Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinabe grandmother from Thunder Bay. We had already been shooting for a couple of months when I heard about Josephine. In 2003, she was "moved by the spirits" to speak out for the Great Lakes and decided to circle them on foot and tell everyone she met that "the water is sick". Every spring, Josephine and a small band of friends had walked around one of the lakes. By the time we caught up with them, they were clipping along the southern shore of Lake Erie, just west of Cleveland. True to her nature, Josephine had done nothing to draw media attention to her quest. She was well-known in the native community, but just a strange apparition in most of the towns she passed. Yet, she was happy to have us along with her and we walked and talked for a couple of days and, later that summer, filmed with her on Lake Superior. If the water of the Great Lakes is the main character in WATERLIFE, Josephine would end up being - without either of us actually intending it - the film's heroine.
Before we'd started shooting, when I was still trying to imagine the structure of the film, I had thought about the classic story PADDLE TO THE SEA. A little boy carves a canoe with an aboriginal voyager in it and sends it off, floating, from Lake Superior to the Atlantic. I had rejected the idea of adapting the story, but decided to follow the Great Lakes' water on that same journey. In the adventure of shooting, I had forgotten about the story. It was only in 2008, as we started to sift through the 200 hours of footage we collected, that I realized that Josephine was that traveler, sprung to life. She would, in the end, come to represent the spirit of all the people who work for the lakes: tirelessly, mostly anonymously and, often, quixotically; knowing their successes - cleaning a beach here, talking to school kids there, advancing scientific knowledge by a tiny amount - will be fleeting. Yet they do it nonetheless, simply because they must.
Tomorrow: "Hard choices and sleight of hand"