Among the 15 shortlisted docs, 'My Octopus Teacher’ captures the unusual bond between a burned-out filmmaker and a cephalopod.
Celebrated for his 2000 film The Great Dance, South African documentary filmmaker Craig Foster found himself, a decade later, exhausted from the pressures of trying to survive as a documentarian. Feeling a sense of detachment from the outside world as well as the people closest to him, Foster attempted to rekindle his passion for life by free-diving in the freezing temps of the Atlantic, vowing to do so every day for a year. It was there, in the kelp forest outside his home on the Western Cape, that he encountered an octopus that would help him reconnect with life, both above and below the surface.
Foster and his friendship with a cephalopod are the subject of Netflix's first South African nature documentary, directed by first-time South African filmmaker Pippa Ehrlich and British documentarian James Reed. Fellow free-diver and conservation journalist Ehrlich was introduced to Foster's story in early 2017, after diving with the documentarian for about six months. By then, Foster's year with the octopus had come and gone, but the experience had been meticulously documented by Foster and his friend Roger Horrocks, a blue-chip underwater cameraman he would frequently free-dive with. "He hadn't told me much about it, I just knew that he'd had a very meaningful experience with an octopus that he had visited regularly," says Ehrlich. "The opportunity that we had to tell a story that wove feelings and science together in this way felt serendipitous."
The real challenge for Ehrlich and Foster was going through the hours of material and assembling a narrative that wove together the unlikely parallels of a burned-out documentarian and a common octopus in the Great African Sea Forest. "Our original treatment was much broader, and we probably cut the beginning of that film 50 times," says Ehrlich. "But once we started telling the story of the octopus, the narrative just told itself."
Feeling that there was even more they could convey with the material, the two contacted Reed, whose 2015 film Jago: A Life Underwater had won several accolades, including the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival's Grand Teton Award. "It came completely out of the blue," says Reed. "They sent me a clip of all this amazing footage. I was trying not to be interested and just got really sucked into it. It was just fascinating."
Contrary to conventional blue-chip nature documentaries, where the action is observed at a vast distance through long lenses, My Octopus Teacher is an up-close-and-personal view of a friendship between two species. "That was the amazing thing about what Craig did — he didn't spy on her," says Reed. "Purists of old might have thought, 'Well, that's not the way to do natural history. You shouldn't be interacting with the animal.' But I think that's a very dated view. And I think if you're responsible, like Craig is, that bravery to reach out and let them decide whether they like you or not is what Octopus Teacher is all about."
To Reed, it was clear that what the film was missing was the inclusion of Foster, who at this point was the narrator of the story but not the focus. "There was no point in imposing anyone else's understanding of it," he says. "There were two people in that relationship, and she couldn't speak, but in all the footage she was expressing herself. My view was that we needed to base the film around Craig's testimony of what happened."
For three days in Cape Town, Reed interviewed Foster about his underwater experience, which formed the frame of the finished film. To his surprise, he found himself getting emotional listening to Foster tell the story of how his relationship with the octopus reignited his connection to the world above the surface. "If you're interested in human psychology, you're drawn in because of how Craig deals with his mental health issues and how he comes to terms with this relationship," says Reed. "If a man can make friends with an octopus, it says a lot about what we should be able to do with societies and different social groups. He bridges the gap that people thought was impossible."
A recurring conversation throughout production was whether to take a more traditional approach and make the documentary an issue-based conservation story. "That was something that I was fighting hard against the whole way," says Ehrlich. "There are a lot of very important films that fill you with the truth about what [humans] are doing to the natural world, and where we're headed as a species if we don't change things. But something that I learned in my experience as a conservation journalist is that if you focus too much on the scary stuff, people tend to turn off." What Ehrlich hoped to achieve with My Octopus Teacher was to reach a broader audience, one not normally drawn to nature documentaries. "It feels a bit strange to say 'Let's make a love story about a man and an octopus,' but if an outsider comes in and finds the idea acceptable, then you can really run with it.”
This story first appeared in the Feb. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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