Living Large
Premier IMAX filmmaker
Greg MacGillivray didn’t start out on the really big
screen, but he was always destined for it.
By
Terence Loose
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G |
reg MacGillivray
has lived in the same
Clearly the leader in IMAX
films, MacGillivray has completed 26, taking his
cameras into the eyes of hurricanes, the paths of avalanches, to the summit of
Everest and, most recently, for his just-released Coral Reef Adventure, 365
feet below the surface of the sea. MacGillivray’s
always made movies that celebrate nature, with strong messages on how to
preserve and protect her. But as a life-long surfer and diver, MacGillivray feels a special bond with coral reefs, known
as “the rain forests of the oceans,” so this film represents a return to his
roots as both a waterman and a filmmaker.
Greg MacGillivray
Those roots go back to
high school, when MacGillivray bought a used 16mm camera,
which he saw advertised in the Daily Pilot, for $300 and started shooting
footage of his friends surfing. It soon became his passion and when it came
time to go to college, in what would become typical MacGillivray
style, he chose his location for what it had to offer film-wise. “I went to UC
Santa Barbara so I could finish my surf movie,” he says with a laugh. “It was
about two-thirds completed, but I needed more footage, so I needed to go
somewhere with good surf.” Despite the fact that the university had no film
department,
There, he finished his
film and started showing it in high school auditoriums. Because there was no
sound, MacGillivray would cue up the Beach Boys and
other surf music and narrate his film live, which proved to be as much a
creative endeavor as the filming. “It was a performance,” remembers MacGillivray. “You were trying your hardest to be funny and
interesting and you didn’t want to look like a fool.” And a lot rode on pulling
off a good performance. “Surfers are really good at talking up things that are
really cool and down things that are really lame,” he says. So a sold out first
performance with boring narration could spell a second performance in front of
empty seats, or worse. One filmmaker of the day was thrown out mid-narration by
the audience for a less than stellar performance.
MacGillivray did more than survive the
sandy critics, however, he thrived. After his first surf film, 1965’s The
Performers, shot for $3,000, showed potential for making money, a radical idea
struck him: “I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I can do this for a living.’” MacGillivray left
At first it was a family
business of sorts. His father – a Corona del Mar lifeguard in the ‘30s and ‘40s
and school teacher at the time – his mother, even his grandmother, would work
the screenings for him. They’d drive up to
Soon, MacGillivray
teamed up with best friend and fellow surf filmmaker Jim Freeman. The result
was better and better films; they pushed each other to do only the best work
possible. In fact, their first film together involved a six-month trek through
12 South American countries filming two surfers discovering new spots and surfing
virgin waves. Their goal was not only to capture new and exciting places on
film, but to do it in breakthrough ways. And so it was only a matter of time
before the surf genre was left behind. This happened after completion of their
best-known surf film, Five Summer Stories, now considered a classic. With that
film, says MacGillivray, “we thought we’d done pretty
much everything creatively we could do.”
MacGillivray worked for legendary
filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Orson Wells, but
it wasn’t until 1976, when he and Freeman made To Fly, an IMAX film chronicling
the history of airplane flight, that he would find his niche.
To Fly made more than $150
million, becoming the highest-grossing documentary ever released, and was
chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film
Registry. MacGillivray’s celebration was muted,
however. His lifelong friend Freeman was killed in a helicopter crash while
scouting locations just two days before To Fly’s debut. In honor of his
partner, MacGillivray has kept the MacGillivray Freeman Films name.
Despite the tragedy, To
Fly was a turning point for MacGillivray; he had
found the film form that seemed to fit him best: IMAX, which uses an image 10
times larger than a standard 35mm movie, and is perfect for blending narrative
and documentary in a visual splendor. “For me, the film and the message is the
critical thing,” he says. “I try to be a storyteller and I try to affect people
emotionally with our films.” In that way, IMAX is no different from his first
soundless 16mm surf films that he had to narrate live. “I was trying to engage
people on many levels, humorously, intellectually, visually, and to educate
them,” says MacGillivray. With IMAX, his goals are
the same; he just has better tools.
But ironically, the
superior technology of IMAX makes the process even more difficult. Mainly, it’s
due to the IMAX camera, which is big, heavy and noisy. “One of our cameras
sounds like a lawnmower,” says MacGillivray. As such,
it’s rare that the crew gets something as it happens the first time; almost
always things are shot twice or three times. “So we try to combine the
documentary with the feature film,” says MacGillivray.
Which isn’t always easy. “There’ll be times when I say
things like ‘Don’t forget to stumble there again. Remember, you don’t know
about that rock.’”
The IMAX format also
dictates what subjects MacGillivray can go after. “We
have to look for big spectacles, big things that deserve the big screen. We
can’t make everything in IMAX, and we shouldn’t.” Luckily for MacGillivray, nature specializes in spectacular. Enter the
hurricanes, the avalanches and, in 1998, the film that would change IMAX
forever, Everest. For that film, MacGillivray
co-developed the lightest, most reliable large-format film camera to date, the
Mark II, which weighs 42 pounds and is weatherized down to -40 degrees. But
building a camera that could survive the world’s rooftop proved the least of
the expedition’s challenges. The year of filming was 1996, the same year Everest
claimed eight lives and recorded the mountain’s greatest tragedy. MacGillivray’s crew provided communications and other
support, and when the storm cleared, MacGillivray
told his climbers not to go up for the movie; they could return the following
year. But in what would be typical dedication and inspiration, they did summit,
and brought back unforgettable images.
Everest also represented
the first of MacGillivray’s 10-film, 10-year Great
Adventure Series, with the goal of making science adventurous (think Indiana
Jones) and asking people to take a more active role in preserving nature. Since
Everest, MacGillivray has brought audiences Dolphins
and Journey Into Amazing Caves, an adventure into the
most magnificent, most treacherous mountain, ice and under-water caves in the
world. Coral Reef Adventure is the series’ fourth installment. And while Coral
Reef represents Mac-Gillivray’s most expensive effort
– coming in at $10 million, it doubles most IMAX budgets – the film also
represents his most personally important film to date.
In 1998, due to a dramatic
increase in water temperature during an El Nińo
event, an unprecedented number of reefs died. It was a wake up call to divers
around the globe: coral reefs are extremely fragile and were worse off than
most thought. MacGillivray was alarmed enough to meet
with Howard and Michelle Hall, respected underwater filmmakers who had worked
with him on 1995’s Academy Award-nominated The Living Sea. They talked about
the plight of coral reefs for six months or so until MacGillivray
finally green-lighted a film. “I felt we couldn’t wait,” says MacGillivray. “That if we waited too long the reefs were
going to change and we wouldn’t get the beauty I wanted to get on film.”
He didn’t know how right
he was. Coral reefs are disappearing today faster than at any time in the last
3,000 years. In the last five years alone, 16 percent of the world’s reefs have
been destroyed and many scientists say that unless mankind resolves to save
them, coral reefs could vanish within 30 to 40 years. The good news is the
reason they are dying is clear: increased global warming, which scientists are
now united in attributing to human activities, over-fishing and siltation from land development. The bad news is it will
take major and sustained changes to reverse the trend.
But MacGillivray
is nothing if not an optimist, and proved it in the shooting of Coral Reef,
which proved harder than any of his previous work – and remember, this is the
guy who got a 42-pound camera up Everest. “When people understand that they’re
making wrong choices and have a clear solution, people do change their
behavior,” says MacGillivray. “It’s been proven with
the whales and the pelicans and other animals that were previously written off.
And that’s what we’re trying to inspire here.” In that vein, Coral Reef
represents an attempt at the first stage, understanding, which
is the hallmark of all MacGillivray’s films.
Shot during a 10-month
journey across the South Pacific – chosen because it is synonymous with
“paradise” the world over – Coral Reef includes footage of the Great Barrier
Reef (Australia); Gau and Tavarua
islands (Fiji); Bora Bora, Moorea, Tahiti and Rangiroa
(French Polynesia). But don’t let the beauty on film fool you, filming in
remote spots is never easy and filming underwater in IMAX format is downright
foolhardy. “Since the camera is 300 pounds (neutrally buoyant underwater), once
it starts going one way, it’s hard to turn,” says principal diver and
photographer Howard Hall. “Plus, it’s so noisy it scares the fish away.” Also,
there’s only three minutes in a roll. This didn’t create major problems in the
shallower dives, but MacGillivray and his crew were
determined to take IMAX audiences to uncharted territory, which meant going
deep.
An entire month was spent
diving to 365 feet, with 22 dives in all. On those deep dives, because of the
more than three hours of decompression per dive, says MacGillivray,
“the divers went down with the camera, shot three minutes and that was the
day.” And because the 11 atmospheres of pressure flooded cameras and imploded
underwater lights, images were only captured half the time “So you’re looking
at a month’s work for four minutes of film, that’s what made it into the final
cut,” MacGillivray says with a calm smile.
His smile quickly fades,
however, when he tells of the worst part of the filming, which also came during
the deep dives. At the end of a particularly arduous day, Howard Hall began
noticing signs of every diver’s nightmare: decompression illness. Better known as
the bends, DCI is actually a diver’s blood foaming in his veins due to a rapid
lessening of pressure (picture champagne after popping the cork). If a bubble
forms in the wrong place, such as the spinal chord, paralysis and death can
follow. “When you go down that deep, you’ve got to expect bad things,” says
Hall, “so we were prepared.” Prepared meant going back to 100 feet in the dark
of night for another four hours, then to a Fijian hospital where he spent a
week and underwent 17 hours in a recompression chamber. A stressful time for
the entire crew, it was especially tough on MacGillivray.
He considered insisting that Hall not participate in any further deep dives for
the sake of the film, knowing that a greater risk of getting the bends exists
after one episode. But Hall made the call to go on and returned to the deep.
That decision is
indicative of the commitment and sense of importance that surrounded the making
of Coral Reef and for MacGillivray, why he got into
filmmaking in the first place. “An underlying thing with every one of our films
is that if you follow your heart and your dream, life will be worth living. If
you have the courage to do what you totally believe in you’ll be happier and
more successful, and when your life is over you’ll feel better about the whole
experience,” says MacGillivray. “With Coral Reef I
think the biggest change I can probably help make is to inspire kids to become
oceanographers. And frankly, being an oceanographer is a joyous thing, so it’s
not like I’m leading them down the wrong path.” ţ