We were editing out of Craig’s attic.” Foster’s kelp-forest conservation group, the Sea Change Project, provided a stipend that enabled her to “just survive” as she worked through Foster’s 3,000 hours of footage and filmed him, without wetsuit or scuba gear, in the icy waters of the Atlantic. Ehrlich had to quit her job, while the film, she says, “had no budget. “He had captured pretty much the entire life of an animal underwater, and that’s almost impossible to do.” There was, she concluded, “no way I could say no”. “There was something in there that resonated with me on a level I couldn’t really explain.” Then, looking at Foster’s rushes, she realised he had - for want of a better word - befriended a female octopus. ![]() “I just read his treatment and started crying,” she says. After six months of diving together, Foster said he was working on a film project inspired by his encounters among the bamboo kelp - including “this crazy experience he’d had with an octopus” - and asked if she would like to be involved.Įhrlich was keen to direct a feature having made a few short films, but the biggest hook was an emotional one. It left a big impression on me.”įascinated by cold thermogenesis (“the process of adapting your body to the cold water”) and Foster’s underwater tracking skills, Ehrlich returned about 18 months later to be mentored by the natural history filmmaker. He was identifying and interpreting animal behaviours that I’d never dreamed were possible. Their first dive together was, Ehrlich says, “a fascinating and eye-opening experience. Raised in Johannesburg, she was working as a conservation journalist for the Save Our Seas Foundation when a mutual friend told her about Foster, who, feeling burnt out by his career, had started exploring and documenting the kelp forests near his home in Cape Town, swimming without a wetsuit or breathing apparatus. Is it fair to say the film has been underestimated? “Our experience with this film is that we underestimated a lot of things,” replies Ehrlich, “from the beginning to where we are now.”Įhrlich first met Foster in 2015. It dropped on Netflix on September 7 last year, with little fanfare, and did not strike anybody as an Oscar contender at the time. The film subsequently won best documentary at the Baftas, and has also been nominated at the Oscars.Įhrlich and Reed’s remarkable story follows the relationship between a man living with depression - former natural-history filmmaker Craig Foster, who also produces - and a common octopus in a South African undersea kelp forest. Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed speak to Screen International a week after their win at the PGA Awards, where their uplifting nature film was selected as best documentary over the likes of Time, Dick Johnson Is Dead and David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet. No-one involved in the creation of My Octopus Teacher expected the sheer extent of the film’s success, including its two directors.
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