Louie Psihoyos - Director of The Cove

We don't usually like to give too much away when it comes to the contents of upcoming issues of Giant Robot, but The Cove is a movie that everyone should know about sooner than later. In it, Louie Psihoyos tells the story of Ric O'Barry, the animal capturer and trainer for the Flipper TV show who, after realizing that he was partially responsible for the establishment of a dolphin entertainment industry that treated its stars cruelly and unusually, became an advocate and activist for the highly intelligent sea mammals. After O'Barry became aware of dolphin hunts and slaughters in the Japanese town of Taiji, he allied with Psihoyos to document, expose, and hopefully stop the activity in its cove, which is not only harmful to the dolphins but local residents who are unwittingly fed and poisoned by the mercury-rich meat.

To help drive eyeballs to the DVD, which was released earlier this week, here's a rough, brief excerpt of a much longer conversation that will run in GR64.


GR: People who learn of the movie from its poster have no idea what it is about from the image and the title. The movie looks really tranquil and peaceful on the surface--kind of like the town, I guess.
LP: There is this illusion about the serenity of the town. You go across the bridge into Taiji, and there are two bottlenose dolphins flanking the structure. There is a big, life-sized sculpture of a humpback whale mother and calf with a sign in English: “We love dolphins.” Embedded into the sidewalks are every dolphin and porpoise known to man. There are whale tail sculptures, and in between the whale museum and the city hall is the cove. It is a national park, a nature preserve.

GR: The “We love dolphins” sign is almost like the Twilight Zone episode, “We Serve Man.”
LP: I went to the Melbourne Film Festival and was sitting with a bunch of directors, who happened to be horror film directors. I was really honest, and said, “I hate horror movies!” They asked me what I do, and I explained it to them and they all looked at each other and said, “You made a horror movie!” And it is true. The ironies made it a ready-made movie set of a horror movie.


GR: I thought it was interesting that while your friend who worked at ILM designed fake rocks to house the cameras, the blood was scarier than anything a special effects person could ever make.
LP: I didn’t want to make a horror movie, but I was still very interested in the structure of what makes a good one. The best ones leave a lot to the imagination, and The Cove is PG-13. A kid can see it because you never see the actual violence. You imagine it. We had a lot of graphic stuff, but left that on the cutting room floor.

GR: Even though you had surveillance cameras shooting nonstop, the actual depiction of the slaughter lasts less than 10 minutes.
LP: More like 3 minutes. We had about 40 hours of footage shot from four different angles, and it took about a year and a half to cut it down to 17 minutes. I spent a month of 2 or 14 hours a day looking at the last 17 minutes. A lot of it was just too violent, and would just turn audiences off.

To me, the most violent parts are after the killing scenes are over, when you see people smoking by the fire and the carcasses rolling up. They are laughing and lighting up cigarettes, and the banality of genocide is disturbing. The campfire scene where one guy is polishing off his motor and another guy smoking is holding onto fins--if you had scripted any of that, it would be way over the top. They were talking about the Old Guard talking to young people about how they had a hand in slaughtering the nearly extinct blue whales. That was when we knew we had a movie. Originally, it was supposed to be a television documentary.