01 Dec “Racing Extinction” In the News
Found this story by Stefanie Spear about Louis Psihoyos’s latest, very buzzy documentary, “Racing Extinction.” The interview was posted on EcoWatch. Next Tuesday, December 8, Telluride Mountainfilm, with support from the Telluride Ski & Golf Club, will be screening the documentary, at once alarming and reassuring. The event takes place at the Telluride Mountain Village Conference Center. (Telluride Inside.. and Out is posting a more detailed story from Mountainfilm about the event on Thursday, December 3. Stay tuned.)
If there’s one film you should see before the year is out, it’s Racing Extinction.
In this riveting film, Academy Award-winning director Louis Psihoyos, with a team of artists and activists, uncovers the hidden world of endangered species and mass extinction. The film exposes the two worlds that are driving global species extinction—the international wildlife trade and the fossil fuel industry.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Psihoyos the day after watching his film at AREDAY in Snowmass, Colorado this summer.
“I’m trying to make a documentary so that your butt doesn’t hurt after 45 minutes,” Psihoyos told me as we sat overlooking Snowmass Mountain.
“I want it to feel like a thriller, because what we are doing is thrilling,” Psihoyos said as we discussed the value of documentaries compared to dramatic films. “We made a film that is like the Avengers, but it’s real. You have this incredible group of people with special skills and you bring them together to try and save the planet.
“We are using the same devices that you would with a narrative film. I loved Avatar. I’m working on a film right now where James Cameron is the executive producer. But I’m not so sure what people’s call to action was after Avatar. Maybe it warmed people up to the idea that we are destroying the environment, but when it’s fictionalized the call to action also feels a little fictionalized. There isn’t a call to action. So that’s the part that’s missing.”
Psihoyos won an Academy Award in 2010 for his film The Cove, a true story of how an elite team of activists, filmmakers and freedivers embarked on a covert mission to penetrate a hidden cove in Taiji, Japan to uncover a dark and deadly secret—the slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises. The film exposed that dolphin meat, often labeled as whale meat containing toxic levels of mercury, was sold in Japan and other parts of Asia, and the remaining dolphins were sold to dolphinariums and marine parks around the world to live a lifetime of captivity.
I asked him what he thought the overall impact was from that film and he shared a converastion he had with Cameron.
“I talked to James Cameron and he said, ‘The Cove was a great film but never hit the numbers to make a difference.’ That really hurt me to the core. Because I felt like we made a great film, the team made a wonderful film and it is making a difference,” he replied. “Not at the pace we would all like but it is out there doing good. At the end of the day I am not a filmmaker, I’m more of an environmentalist, I’m an activist, I’m using the genre of filmmaking to reach people that normally wouldn’t think about this subject.”
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