DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Sir David Attenborough - the globally famous host, narrator and creator of nature films - marked his 100th birthday last week. His celebrated and popular natural history programs, since he began hosting and producing them for the BBC in the 1950s, have included "Planet Earth" and "The Blue Planet" series, "The Life Of Birds" and "Life On Earth," which traveled the globe to trace the history of evolution. London's Natural History Museum noted the occasion of Attenborough's 100th birthday by naming a new genus and species of parasitic wasp after him.
PBS did it by presenting a new special with Attenborough as host, allowing him to look back on what he considered one of his finest achievements - the series "Life On Earth." Today, we're noting the occasion by listening back to his 1985 interview with Terry Gross, where she asked him about making his "Life On Earth" and other nature documentary series.
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TERRY GROSS: When you're a cameraman looking for animals to display - a bird to display its feathers or whatever, are you sitting there with the camera waiting and waiting, having it poised, ready to be turned on?
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Well, of course, it's the - sort of the classic thing for the natural history cameraman to say modestly, well, I'm afraid we have waited nine months and 27 hour - whatever, you know, to get that shot. In point of fact, if the truth is to be told, the better cameraman you are and the better naturalist you are, the less time you have to wait. If you really know enough, you know - well, I mean, it's like, turning up in England and hoping to get cuckoos in December. I mean, you know, they don't occur in December. Cuckoos go cuckoo in spring. And so you turn up in spring, when - if you really know, you know which week to turn up.
And similarly, if you decide that you really want to have - what shall we say? - a monkey, the alpha male of a troop displaying at a certain time, you find out the man who knows about that particular species, and perhaps has been working with them for a year, and he'll say, oh, well, if that's what you want, I can take you. You want to meet Fred, who is the alpha male of group 3, and Fred always turns up in the morning about half past 5 with the troop on that log there just by the riverside. And he always sees Willie from the other side of the river, who is frightfully - very fed up, and they're great rivals, and he always displays. And you go down there, and there - and you get there half an hour before Fred's due. You set up the camera. Fred turns up, and he does it.
And so you go away, and you say, fine. I've got the shot I wanted, and I did it in a day. But that is a measure of - not in this instance, that instance - your success. It's the measure of the skill of the scientific observer who has spent his life studying that troop. And that's the fact of the matter, so that actually boasting how patient you were and how long it took you to get the shot is a kind of confession of inadequacy (laughter).
GROSS: Have any of your camera people ever gotten hurt or attacked by one of the animals who they'd come to shoot?
ATTENBOROUGH: No. None of my friends - thank goodness - have ever had - I mean, we've all had sort of mild occasions to climb a tree rather faster than one would think.
(LAUGHTER)
ATTENBOROUGH: But...
GROSS: Are you good at that?
ATTENBOROUGH: I have no idea whether I'm good. All I know is that when the rhinoceros charges, you find yourself 12 foot up a tree that has no branches beneath you...
GROSS: (Laughter).
ATTENBOROUGH: ...And you can't imagine how you got there (laughter). But actually, again - that, again, is a sort of - the wrong kind of boast. If you're a good enough naturalist, you should know how close you can get to an elephant before it charges. You should be able to read the way it moves its ears and the way it shakes its head,and which way the wind is going, and so on, to know that that is as close as you ought to get. And it's not my job or any of our - of any of us, our job, in order to demonstrate to be brave. Our job is to get the pictures. And you don't actually get pictures by persuading an elephant to charge you and pound your camera to little bits of cogwheels into the dust.
GROSS: Just curious, how close can you get to an elephant before he charges?
ATTENBOROUGH: You can get - it depends on the wind.
GROSS: On the wind?
ATTENBOROUGH: Yeah. I don't mean the elephant's wind. I mean...
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GROSS: Yeah. What does the wind have to do with it?
ATTENBOROUGH: Well, because of your smell.
GROSS: Oh.
ATTENBOROUGH: I mean, if the wind suddenly - what you do if you want to get close to elephants - which isn't a particular ambition of mine. I've spent a certain amount of time close to them. You get one of your silk stockings or nylon stockings, and you put talcum powder in it, face powder. And you hold it in a little bag, and you continually bob it up and down so that you can see from the way this very fine talcum powder is drifting which way the - this is less than a wind. This is just the faintest breath of air. If - as long as the talcum powder keeps coming towards you, which is how you should have been approaching the elephant in the first place, that's OK. You're smelling the elephant. He's not smelling you. But if that talcum powder starts to move away from you, then you can bet your bottom dollar that the elephant is going to smell you quite soon, and this is the time you ought to retreat.
GROSS: So the elephant's not really paying attention to seeing you or smelling you.
ATTENBOROUGH: It doesn't like human - the smell of human beings. Its eyesight is not all that good. It has very small eyes. And, of course, one on either side of its head, as it were, so it's viewing from the side all the time. And you are, you know - so it's - it is smell and sound which particularly get it upset.
GROSS: You've been making naturalist movies for over 30 years. Film technology has changed a lot during that time. Is what you're able to show us different because of how the technology has changed?
ATTENBOROUGH: It's changed beyond recognition. The first films I made back in 1952 in Africa - where you had a clockwork camera. I mean, you had to wind it up, and it only ran for about, I think, 40 seconds or something. That was the longest shot you could take. There was no way in which you could actually record sound at the same time, synchronously. The lenses were small focal lengths so that you could really never get any decent close-ups - without, that is, getting much closer than you would wish to be. The film stocks were extremely slow, so that you couldn't actually film unless the light was very bright. You couldn't film in the jungle, for example. Color - at least you couldn't film color, certainly. It was just not enough light.
Now, of course, you have cameras with marvelous lenses, very sensitive stocks, very fast lenses, very long-focused lenses, so that you can do with the cameras all kinds of things that you couldn't do before. You can get resolution definition of your picture much better than it was. But also, there are many other sort of things you can do. Recently, I mean, in the last - well, for "Life On Earth" for example, we wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel. Nobody had ever shown a mole running down its tunnel. Perhaps nobody had ever wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel, but we decided we did. And so we went to the local hospital and bought - borrowed their fiber optics, you know, which they know - they used to put down people's throats and look inside their stomachs or inside their lungs. And we used that fiber optic device to put it in a mole's tunnel.
GROSS: Sex and violence is such a big issue in television programming. How much of sex - parentheses, mating - or violence - parentheses, one animal killing another for its food - do you think it's proper to show for a documentary series on television?
ATTENBOROUGH: Well, the curious thing is that if you show one sequence of copulation, it may last - I mean, in terms of actual technical - of when it starts and when it finishes, no more than about, say, perhaps - let us say, for the sake of argument, a minute and a half - people will be convinced afterwards that the program showed nothing else. I mean, they'll say, that program, I mean, why you went on and on and on and on about that sequence, we can't possibly understand. It was really awful of you. And that, of course, is because the images - these images are so powerful that hit us subliminally and psychologically so powerfully, that we are knocked right off balance by them.
As you say, I used to be a film director. I used to be a director of programs, and I remember very well, we had a fairly liberal view about that - those sort of scenes that you can do. And - but on the other hand, we had a financial program, which was devoted to doing an item about blood stock and horses and the value in terms of economics of what thoroughbred stock was and so on. And they had an interview in it, in which a man was talking to a breeder about this. And over the breeder's shoulder in the background, there was a stallion servicing a mare.
Now, (laughter) I don't know how familiar you are with stallions servicing mares, but I can tell you, it's a fairly spectacular proceeding. And I was as mad as anything as a - as the network director that the irresponsibility of doing that, because actually it was totally irrelevant. I mean, of course, he thought it was quite - the producer thought it was quite entertaining, because it was marginally, peripherally appropriate. But it was not centrally appropriate, and it was not about the economics, and the result - but the image was so powerful that nobody could possibly listen to - about the economics while this extraordinary drama was going on behind. Now, that seems to me irresponsible and totally indefensible.
But if you're doing a program about the nature of display or the techniques the scorpion had - it being a very antique organism and how, in fact, the evolution of sexual behaviors developed amongst the - amongst that group of invertebrate animals, then it seems to be totally proper that you should do it. Of course you can be lascivious about it, just as you can be lascivious and obscene about violence, and you can use shots of lions tearing the entrails from some poor wildebeest. I mean, it happens. You didn't organize it, and there it is. But is it what the program's about? And is it necessary for it to be an accurate truth? If you actually sanitize it so that you never put any of that in, that's just as bad, because that gives a totally misleading idea as to what the world of nature is like.
BIANCULLI: David Attenborough speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1985 interview with David Attenborough. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday.
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GROSS: Did you grow up in the city?
ATTENBOROUGH: I - in a town, yeah. Well, it was a city, yes - but one that I could get to the country fairly easily on a bicycle.
GROSS: Yeah, 'cause I was kind of wondering how you became as comfortable with different physical environments, 'cause I think a lot of people who grew up in the city adapt less easily to exotic locations and climates.
ATTENBOROUGH: I'm not sure that's true, actually. I think a lot of us who grew up in cities developed a great hunger for these kind of places and a sufficient hunger to kind of quell the uncomfortableness of - involved in going there. I grew up - I certainly spent a lot of time in the countryside looking for fossils or hedgehogs or whatever. But I was certainly a city boy.
GROSS: When did you decide that you weren't going to live the academic life and write textbooks, but instead, you were going to write popular books and make movies that a popular audience could appreciate?
ATTENBOROUGH: Well, in - when I was an undergraduate studying zoology, it sounds amazing now to say this, but it is true - and this was in Cambridge in 1944, '45. The kind of zoology that we learnt was a zoology which was laboratory-based. Most of the animals you dealt with were dead. You were cutting them up to learn about their anatomy. Or if you were studying live animals - behaving as it were - then there were rats running through mazes or frogs jumping in front of a checkered board or something. What you didn't do was to go out and look at exciting animals like elephants or lions in Africa. That was not zoology. That was either big game hunting or natural history or something - but it certainly wasn't science because you couldn't - it was kind of thought that science involved manipulating in an experimental way the animals you were studying.
But unbeknownst to me at that time, the great pioneers of animal behavioral studies - Konrad Lorenz, for example - were actually working on this behavioral science that we now call ethology. And - but I was then called up, and I went to the Navy. And when I came out of the Navy, it still seemed that they were still cutting up dogfish and watching mice in mazes - and I thought, well, this is not for me. And I went into publishing and then got into the BBC and persuaded them to let me make animal films.
GROSS: Did they reach an audience right away?
ATTENBOROUGH: Yes. Yes, animal films have always had a huge audience - in Britain, at any rate - and I suspect here. I really think that people - and I'm with them - think that there are few things more beautiful than a butterfly or a hummingbird, and that there are few things more dramatic than a party of warrior ants invading termites. There are few things more extraordinary than some of the breeding techniques of amphibian, and so on. And it's always had a huge audience.
GROSS: You think it's the beauty of it?
ATTENBOROUGH: No, I think it's all those things - the beauty, the drama, the fascination, the unexpectedness, the uninhibitedness, the truth in a curious way. I mean, animals don't lie in - to suit the camera, as it were. What they do is what they do. They may lie to one another. In fact, they do. But they don't lie to the camera.
GROSS: Do you ever find yourself, though, doing the equivalent of only looking to photograph pretty people, you know, like looking to photograph animals who are especially photogenic or landscapes that are especially dramatic or beautiful?
ATTENBOROUGH: That, in fact, is one of the reasons why I determined to do those two series - "Life On Earth" and "The Living Planet" - because there's a great temptation, as you say, to do the pretty ones all the time. I know perfectly well how you can get a very good - an enormously popular program. If you want an enormously popular animal program, it's not difficult. You make - just put a chimpanzee in it. And it's...
GROSS: It's the equivalent of having an infant, of...
ATTENBOROUGH: That's right. If you make - want to make an unpopular program, you put a snake in it. Now, if you are - but if you - on the other hand, you say, I wish to survey the animal kingdom, you have to do programs about snakes and chimpanzees. And so you have to do programs entirely about insects - which are not all that pleasant. I remember starting "Life On Earth - because I said we've got to start at the very beginning and go from the beginning of life all the way through - the first program was going to be almost entirely about algae and single-celled organisms, you see? And I was trying to sell this to a television executive to make sure that I get some money, a decent budget for this. And he said, it's very - the first program is of great importance, you know, and that's what the audience is going to judge it on.
So what's your first program going to be? And I told him it was going to be about this. And he said - how the hell, he said, are you going to get 10,000 people grabbed by the throat by green slime, he said - which indeed is a question. Making programs about green slime is not as easy as making it about chimpanzees - but if you're going to be comprehensive and responsible, you should try and do so.
GROSS: Did you keep that as the first show?
ATTENBOROUGH: Oh, yes.
GROSS: And did it work? Did you get the rights?
ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, it did, fortunately.
GROSS: Is there a desired response you'd like viewers to have to your programs?
ATTENBOROUGH: Well, I - I'm - if I'm totally honest, I have to say that the reason I make these kind of programs is because I find the subject matter fascinating. And I - and therefore, find them very enjoyable. There's nothing I enjoy more than watching animals doing things. And I would hope that other people would enjoy them - that's the primary thing. Now, of course, if you think that the wildlife and animals and plants are enjoyable and important and somebody says they are in danger, then you have a sort of obligation to make sure that you can do what you can to help them and protect them. And so, I am delighted if a subsidiary purpose, or subsidiary effect of these films is that people also say, not only is this wonderful and marvelous to look at, but it is valuable. It is threatened, and therefore, we must do something to make sure that it's not destroyed - then I'm delighted.
BIANCULLI: Sir David Attenborough speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday. His new TV special, "Life On Earth: Attenborough's Greatest Adventure," is available to stream at pbs.org and the PBS app. Coming up, critic at large John Powers reviews the new film "The Wizard Of The Kremlin." This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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