Hard choices and sleight of hand

Kimberly Whistler: Perfect Bay ~Enlarge

In the early winter of 2008 I went into hibernation to edit WATERLIFE from 200 hours of footage shot all over the Great Lakes -- and was immediately reminded that this is the best, and worst, stage of making a documentary.

The concentration and continuous creative process of editing is great and the editor I work with, Chris Donaldson, is an old friend, so we have a lot of laughs. But the buck truly stops in the cutting room (because by the time you get there, the bucks have all been spent). Sometimes you don't have what you want or need, but you have to make do anyhow. With WATERLIFE, we had the opposite problem. Cinematographer John Minh Tran had done a brilliant job, the people we had met were wonderful and the places we had been were extraordinary. Going through the footage was like sifting through diamonds that were flecked with the odd bit of mud. It was a good problem to have, but one that, once again, illustrated the constant tension in documentary between showing the complexity of reality and making a product that will be palatable to an impatient and over-mediated public.

To make a six-month long story short, hard decisions got made on the way to a two-hour movie. Gone was the hilarious scene of the oblivious couple fishing beside a chemical factory outfall. Gone was the touching scene of a baby's baptism in Quebec City's oldest church. Gone was the sad tour of the St. Lawrence River with Akwesasne environmentalist Henry Lickers who told of the destruction of its age-old farms and fishery by factories that flourished briefly and then (guess what?) went bust. Gone, too, were hours of gorgeous shots of water in all its guises, captured through a wondrous array of technology: cameras operated underwater by divers or by remote control; cameras slung from helicopters and hung from cranes; cameras with super-fast shutter speeds capable of capturing every drop flung from a sprinkler; cameras that could slow the motion of water down by a factor of 40 to document its endlessly morphing grace. Of course, lots of this material ended up in the film - but when you've spent months dragging a quarter ton of equipment up and down the cliffs of the lakes' shores you really would prefer to use every last shot!

As we were dropping original images, we were also creating new ones. For WATERLIFE to help people feel the visceral impact of water in their lives, and its pollution, we had to devise ways of depicting it on every scale, including the atomic (which is impossible to film). We wanted to show the perpetual and mesmerizing dance of water molecules, what bio-concentration actually means and how endocrine disruption works. So artist Mark Alberts worked for months to create these shots with computer graphics. His particular challenge was to depict these scenes in ways that were scientifically accurate, artistically compelling and just slightly flawed visually -- so that they would integrate with the documentary footage that we had worked, in the field, to make perfect. If we could meet in the middle, his material would fit seamlessly with ours. The sign of his success is that, now, filmmakers in the audience (who think to ask such questions) wonder what's real and what's fake.

As the picture was taking shape, so too was WATERLIFE'S complex sound track. Since this is the story of a vast community, it had to be told through many voices. However, we wanted to avoid the traditional television technique of "talking heads", the better to concentrate on our central character: the water itself. Our solution was to craft a voice track made up of many unseen speakers who collectively tell the water's story. While this gave us a lot of freedom, it required countless hours of meticulous sound editing to piece together a collage that simplifies a lot of complex explanations drawn from about 100 hours of audio interviews. Our guide to this chorus was provided by Gord Downie, lead singer of The Tragically Hip and a trustee of Lake Ontario, who narrated the film.

WATERLIFE is essentially an aquatic road trip, which we hoped would appeal to young people, so we decided to eschew the usual enviro-doc musical score - classical or electronic; ominous and mournful - and try to use a lot of pop music. Practically, this meant that our producers, Michael McMahon and Kristina McLaughlin, had to go back out and raise extra money and that our researcher, Elizabeth Klinck, had to convince a lot of really hot pop acts to license their work. This is common in Hollywood, but rare in documentaries because pop music is so expensive. Success seemed unlikely. But, to our delight, every musician we approached showed that they cared more about a healthy environment than they did about money. Because they believed in the project, all of them - including legendary musicians like Phillip Glass, Brian Eno, Robbie Robertson and The Allman Brothers; great American independents Sufjan Stevens, Dropkick Murphys and Sun Kil Moon; Canadian superstars The Tragically Hip and Sam Roberts Band; and international sensations Sigur Ros, from Iceland - agreed to let us use their music for, relatively speaking, a song.

When, in the autumn of 2008, we had a nearly-finished film, we held a series of preview screenings for investors, friends, strangers and people from environmental groups - Great Lakes United, Pollution Probe and EcoJustice among others. We wanted to see how the film would play for an audience, to make sure it was scientifically accurate and to see if the environmental community would find it useful. It's an understatement to say that, after almost six years of work, we were relieved to find that it succeeded in all those ways. With feedback from those screenings we spent another month or so in the cutting room - trimming, trimming, trimming -- then several more months of mixing sound, adjusting color, making film prints and all the other technical steps required to get to a finished movie.

At the same time, we turned our attention to marketing the film, mostly through the internet. As we had been editing, the National Film Board of Canada, our co-producers, had been building a huge, comprehensive and dazzling educational website as a companion piece (http://waterlife.nfb.ca). It was designed to bring viewers to the movie and, more importantly, to provide students and interested citizens with additional in-depth information and a catalogue of suggestions for taking action on behalf of the Great Lakes. Working with Vancouver social marketing firm HelloCoolWorld, we also built a functional community website (www.ourwaterlife.com) to provide updates on the film's progress, to link audiences with a wide range of environmental groups and to provide an easy way for people to book community screenings.

WATERLIFE premiered in Toronto at Hot Docs, the world's biggest documentary film festival, in early May. That was a fun night: a sold-out house, a pristine film print, a rapturous reception by an incredibly appreciative audience and an intense feeling, among dozens of collaborators, that a lot of hard work had produced something that was both beautiful and useful.

Happily, too, the reviews out of the festival were ecstatic. Austin Texas-based critic Agnes Varnum wrote: "Please, please, please see this movie!... one of the most stunning films about the environmental crisis I've ever seen... AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was an important film not only because it is a doc that did well at the box office, but because it was the nudge that tipped public awareness to environmental issues. It brought together the evidence of environmental degradation into one, credible spot. WATERLIFE, to me, represents the next step."

Sentiments like that were music to my ears, of course, but not only for the obvious, egotistical reason. As I wrote earlier in the week, WATERLIFE - like dozens, maybe hundreds, of other environmental documentaries made in the last few years - would not have been financed were it not for the success of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. I think that film is not only an important work, but also a wonderful movie, and it was great to feel that we had added something to the momentum it began.

As I write, WATERLIFE is finishing a three-week run in Toronto cinemas. Over the summer it will screen in other Canadian cities. Though we were not able to get a commercial release in American theatres, we have dozens of invitations for community screenings on both sides of the border. Later in the summer, it will run on television - on the Sundance Channel in the US and History Television in Canada. Early in the autumn, it will be available on DVD (in a package that will include its inspiration PADDLE TO THE SEA).

Coincidentally, the week after the film opened, the American and Canadian governments finally announced the long-awaited renegotiation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. While the Great Lakes' community has been working toward this announcement for many years, as John Jackson, of Great Lakes United, said: the announcement is only the beginning of what will be a long, contentious process. My hope is that WATERLIFE arrives at a good time to be a useful tool for those who will argue for a tougher water quality treaty -- by showing our neighbors the threats we all face and by immersing them in the wonders we stand to lose. The paradox with a social documentary is that we would love it to have a long life, but we'd also love to see it become anachronistic as soon as possible, because the problems it documents have been addressed. Like cops and doctors and, of course, environmentalists, our ultimate goal is to put ourselves out of business.

You can view the trailer for WATERLIFE - as well a rock video cut from the film for The Tragically Hip's new song Morning Moon -- at www.ourwaterlife.com, on YouTube and at www.primitive.net