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Almost everyone is compelled by the sight of water, regardless of its form. We are rejuvenated and calmed just by watching it, whether in a hard rain bouncing off the road, waves sculpting a sandy shore, clouds rolling by or drops sending ripples across our bath. For filmmakers, water imagery is pure catnip; its endlessly changing patterns, moods, colors and meanings - from baptism to drowning -- are the reason you see it so often in movies and commercials. As a documentary filmmaker, I love it as an image and metaphor, but also care about it as a subject.
My first feature documentary, The Falls, was about the kitschy culture and toxic nature of Niagara. In the 20 years since, I've woven water imagery into films on topics ranging from aboriginal history to communications theory. When I finally decided to go all the way, and make a film with water as a central character, it was obvious that my subject had to be the Great Lakes. Last month, that film, Waterlife, premiered at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto (where, I'll immodestly add, it was awarded the Special Jury Prize). I was happy when the editors of the Great Lakes Town Hall suggested readers might like to know how the film was made, because it gave me the chance to reflect on the six years between those two events - decision and premiere - which were the most challenging and interesting of my career.
I often think that documentary filmmaking is like fishing: liberating, dangerous and often fruitless. Even on your best days you barely make enough to get by, yet some weird mixture of allure and compulsion makes you keep going out there. Making Waterlife, I realized that we share a lot of traits with environmentalists too. They, too, have an inexplicable (maybe pathological) need to let people know the unbelievable truths that lie beneath the world's placid surface. They, too, struggle to stuff vast visions for the greater good into the meager containers of the daily do-able. And they, too, will work for free if they have to, just because the work needs doing. We are both, in a way, volunteer civil servants - though, obviously, there's much more social value in saving a wetland than in making a film, even one with a social conscience. (In fact, people who work for environmental improvements provide one of the best examples of what I call the Inverse Rule of Social Value: the pay people get for their work tends to have an inverse relationship to its social worth. Compare the relative salaries of kindergarten teachers and game show hosts, or social workers and hockey players, and you'll see what I mean.)
The first four of the six years I spent making Waterlife involved no filmmaking, but lots of proposing, pitching, requesting, wheedling and begging for the money to get the job done. In Canada, where I live, documentary makers are relatively blessed. Our federal and provincial governments sponsor various funding programs, commercial broadcasters are forced to buy a percentage of documentaries and we have the National Film Board of Canada, which makes more documentaries than any other institution in the world. Yet, even in this market, selling a documentary about the Great Lakes was not easy.
What I was pitching, basically, was a film that would celebrate the beauty of the lakes and look at the growing multitude of threats churning within them. Given all the stats that Town Hall readers know too well - 35 million basin inhabitants, 20 per cent of the world's surface fresh water, the world's third largest economic unit, etc - I thought this would be a fairly easy sell, if only because of the subject's importance. But, no.
All the executives we met acknowledged the lakes' vast presence - how could they not? - and all thought them lovely, in a scenic way, if not especially relevant to the day-to-day lives of the average Torontonian or Chicagoan. Most also understood the lakes' economic importance, but saw that as a "historical" story. And they could not easily be persuaded to link "the economy" - which was all about the tigers on Wall Street in those heady, pre-cash days - to the water that powered the cities, cooled the forged steel, irrigated the crops, carried the wheat out and brought the trinkets in. Even the drinking water argument fell flat: these folks (who are, for all intents and purposes, The Media) just assumed their governments were making sure the water was sufficiently laundered both coming and going.
Most of all, they thought the story of the Great Lakes had, long ago, "been done". That is, they all assumed the lakes were polluted, had been for as long as anyone could remember, though with exactly what, they were at a loss to say - soap suds in Lake Erie, they supposed, and yucky stuff from the factories at Hamilton, Ontario and Gary, Indiana and other links in the Rust Belt where, they argued, people watch television to forget where they live, not to be cruelly reminded.
That was the thing. ‘This film is not,' the executives would say, ‘what people want.' To the degree that people wanted non-fiction at all, the belief in The Media was that the non-fiction people wanted, in the "post-911 world", was either a good laugh at somebody else's expense via low-brow reality TV or a good scare at the prospect of terrorists bombing the local Walmart. As many environmentalists have noted, the vague threat of some creepy fellow in a balaclava poisoning the drinking water would have commanded attention, but the fact that our own society was doing it was of marginal interest; indeed, was considered a special interest argument (some said "rant").
My producing partners - Michael McMahon and Kristina McLaughlin - and I heard variants of this sort of line over and over for years. Finally, we found a couple of supporters who committed for reasons other than craven market considerations. Mark Achbar, maker of the hit documentary The Corporation, came on board, offering money he had come into through that project. Michael Kot, a commissioning editor at Canada's History Television did too - though it was far outside his brief - simply because he understood the subject's importance. And my old friend and co-producer Gerry Flahive, at the NFB, was supportive, as ever.
But, by documentary standards, Waterlife would be expensive - well over $1 million - and the support we had would not be enough to get the film made. By 2006, after three years of flogging this horse nearly to death, we had run out of people to pitch and were nearing despair. And then, out of the blue, along came Al Gore and, overnight, everything changed.
Reposted from Great Lakes Town Hall's The Daily Post.