Frozen Rewards Director Ravetch Spends 15 Years Crafting an Arctic Tale
The thought of taking fifteen years to do anything, let alone make a film, sounds pretty daunting to the majority of us, but that is exactly how long it took for married filmmakers Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson to bring their saga of polar bears and walruses Arctic Tale to the silver screen. In the middle of a concrete and stone waterfall park smack dab in the center of Seattle’s urban jungle, I sat down with the male half of this filmmaking duo and couldn’t help but ask him if all the time spent on this project was actually worth the effort.
A polar bear and her cubs in Paramount Classics' Arctic Tale
“Oh yeah,” says Ravetch with a confidently beaming smile. “It’s been such an incredible personal journey between me and my wife. The two of us met 16 years ago and I was just back from the Arctic. I remember I was going up there to film whales but I was told to not get out of the water if a walrus pops up because it was they type of animal that could hold me against my will and smack my head off to use its tusks to suck my brain out.”
He laughs a little thinking about this last statement before continuing, the gleam in his eye telling me immediately this is a man with great passion and love for what it is he does for a living. “So, it’s this monster story, and I remember coming back [home] and talking to Sarah and soon I found out there wasn’t much known about this animal and I wondered how there could be such a large animal we don’t know anything about. So, Sarah had a background in writing and journalism and mine was in cinematography so we decided to combine our efforts and started going North.”
On paper a great idea, but at what point did the duo know they had the makings of a real drama human beings could relate to on their hands? “By working with the Inuit people of Canada,” states Ravetch, “we discovered that when we went out on their hunts, [walrus] mothers would grab their babies and take them away and protect them. It was amazing how intense that was, that devotion, and we thought wouldn’t it be amazing if we could capture that in a natural way we would really have something. I mean, their hug is just so human-like!”
“And it kind of began with that. We also discovered in our research that walruses protect their young for three years, they have an auntie who helps them and the herd is really a family raising [their] young. With the polar bear, we came across the same parallel story, the solitary animal, a single mom, taking care of her cubs for three years until they can survive on their own. And that’s how it all began.”
Pretty astonishing, especially when you consider just how universally human the story of these arctic creatures turns out to be. “Arctic Tale celebrates the amazing qualities of these animals,” says the filmmaker emphatically. “Their boldness, their spirit, their intelligence, their remarkable acts of courage and we found out just how remarkably similar that is to us.”
“When the brother bear dies, Nanu’s [the young female cub in the film] sitting there and you would expect the mother to console her. Instead, she’s licking her mother who is obviously depressed, and it is such a mature act. Or, when Auntie goes back into the [walrus] herd to save the little calf, sort of sacrificing her life for the betterment of the herd that is remarkably and is so humanlike.”
With scenes like these scattered throughout the picture, I can’t help but wonder if when Ravetch was out there in the frigid snow filming all of this did he sometimes just step back in awe as to what it was he and his team had just captured. “In the moment, there is a certain pressure and a certain stress level of getting shots and of capturing behavior on film,” he answers. “It is always with you and you can never relax, you can never let that go. There are even years where you come back with nothing and you failed and you have to live with that. No executive wants you to come back and give them excuses. Oh it was hard. Oh it was cold. They want results.”
The vanishing ice flows of Paramount Classics' Arctic Tale
“When you’ve sat for six years waiting for a bear to show up and go into a herd and you capture that moment you’re just focused on the getting of it. When it is over, and you’ve gotten it, that’s when you have this great emotional release and you play it back in your head just exactly what it is you’ve got and you realize you’ve gotten something remarkable. Then, the idea that you can take [it] back and show people something they’ve never seen before, it’s amazing.”
And which of those moments truly took the director’s breath away? “That bear going into the [walrus] herd, it’s one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen,” says Ravetch without hesitation. “What was amazing enough was the bear doing the attack. What was the surprise, and this is what always happens to us, something [different] reveals itself, and this was when the Auntie walrus goes up the rock. I didn’t expect that. It was amazing.”
Still, I have to wonder what makes a person keep going back year after year to the deep frigid cold of the artic and keep filming even knowing that they might come back to civilization without a single thing to show for it. “I always wanted to make a better connection with the land,” claims the director, “to live more sustainably with nature. So what the last ten to fifteen years for us has been an incredible survival experience. Just to build igloos with the Inuit people, to live in tents, to tow our gear out there, to survive the elements; I remember growing up I wanted somehow to be very physical and I wanted to have a career where I could challenge [myself].”
“But not like an adrenaline junkie. It was always with this purpose. With this goal. I’ve always been goal-oriented and I was inspired by the generation which came before me and I wanted to live up to [them]. These people who went into the unknown and didn’t know how an animal would react, I always felt an obligation to make a contribution. So, yeah, there are times where you want to give up, but then you get a nugget and it makes you want to come back again and again and again.”
And how much time did he and his crew really spend in the Arctic? “It’s more like a seasonal thing,” admits Ravetch. “We worked in seasons. The Spring Season is when we went after the walrus birth, and that’s a four-to-six week season and then it is over and you have to move on.”
“But it is hard to really know. I know I’ve worked every month in the Arctic except for December when there is 24-hour darkness. I’d say it is about seventy-percent of that fifteen years that we [were] up there.”
I can’t help but imagine there are things looking back on it Ravetch now slaps himself a bit realizing just how much danger he was in, moments where he was so engulfed in peering through his camera he didn’t notice he was in jeopardy. The filmmaker chuckles and nods his head in affirmation.
Walrus get up close and personal in Paramount Classics' Arctic Tale
“I’ll never forget,” he stars with a smile, “when we were out on an Inuit hunt [for walrus] and, while they were hunting and harvesting animals on the ice, I was trying to get close to mother and baby in the water. And, you know, I’m ducking behind ice flows and I get out of the water and I was telling the other cameraman about what I just did when, not thirty seconds later, this bear gets out of the water. It was right behind me and I didn’t even know it, and he went in where the Inuit were actually cutting up this walrus and stole the meat, and they were shooting at his feet trying to scare him away and he went right into the water. And, if that had had happened while I was still in the water than I could have been what he grabbed instead of going in for the meat. That was a scary moment.”
With any ecological documentary, climate change cannot help but be a big part of the story and Artic Tale is no exception. “We purposely constructed the story to show the effects [of climate change],” says Ravetch plainly. “These were things that were actually happening. But what is refreshing is the way we tell out story. We use a narrative construct, we’re telling a dramatic story stealing a bit from the feature film sort of format, but we’re using real footage.”
“By telling the tale through two characters we’re basically able to celebrate the most remarkable qualities of all the walrus and bear experiences we’ve ever had. The boldness, the courage, and we’re able to follow from their point of view the here and the now. Bears and walrus don’t read the newspaper. They don’t know there’s climate change. They don’t watch [television]. And we knew we needed to stay true to that and just show the audience what they were experiencing as they were going along. We picked the benchmarks of their lives to show the dramatic moments when they had to make bold decisions. We want people to take a look at [this] and say to themselves if these [animals] can adept and change then why can’t we?”
Ravetch takes a moment to catch his breath and collect his thoughts before continuing, his eyes still sparkling brightly as he tries to bring things to some sort of summation. “I think we’ve hit people on an emotional level instead of lecturing to them. When they leave the theater, I really believe they are feeling for the animals’ plight and they are really hopeful they can survive. And they’re asking themselves, ‘What can I do to help?’ We make that connection.”
“We actually never say the words, ‘Global Warming,’ in our movie; we just say it’s getting warmer. I think people get that. We really didn’t want to lecture. We wanted to inspire.”
