The prestigious French film production company, Galatee Films, has spent 115 weeks and over A$100 million filming ”Oceans”, a new concept of film-making blending documentary and fiction. 

The film, directed by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, and sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has shooting locations all around the world. Scientific and technical partners for the production are IFREMER (France), the French Navy, the French National Museum of Natural History and the Census of Marine Life. 

Five years in production; a 50 million Euro budget; 14 French, Japanese, and Swedish cameramen dispersed across all the seas of the world; teams clad in yellow slickers on board rubber dinghies defying waves, rain, and tempests; several hundred biologists on hand across practically every time zone; crazy inventors; genius tinkerers; the European Space Agency and the scientists of the international project Census of Marine Life; working overtime. The result: millions of images that will end up in a single, immense opera – Oceans, the latest creation of Jacques Perrin, with a release date projected for the fall of 2009. It took God seven days to create the world.  Jacques Perrin has been slaving, with 115 weeks of shoots, a screenplay in constant development, cutting-edge technological inventions made at the last minute, inventions such as an underwater microscope manipulated by a robotic arm with the sole aim of filming larvae as they’ve never before been filmed! And that’s not counting the dreams to be fulfilled before next winter, when the filming will end: to shoot the birth of a humpback whale in Polynesia, a spectacle so secret that no human eye has ever before witnessed it. To bring back images of sea lions and small Cape penguins diving into a compact ball of sardines as though rushing into a larder. Or get an unedited underwater shot of 30-meter-long blue whales swallowing a cloud of krill in the Sea of Cortez.

Oceans isn’t a documentary. Like Galatée’s recent film Winged Migration where an ultralight was used to accompany geese on their migration south, Oceans is cinema – pure, true cinema; not an external view, not the underwater world observed by a scientist or a filmmaker. With no commentary, the image must speak for itself. A single rule is repeated over and over to the cameramen at every shoot: the world of the sea must be seen through the eyes of its creatures. Be a fish among fish. Pass unobserved, go in front of them, graze them, but do so without altering their behavior. It was necessary, therefore, to create tools that didn’t yet exist.

What is amazing about Jacques Perrin as he talks about his film is his childlike jubilation over the incredible mobilization of scientists and the accumulation of technical prowess that Oceans has generated. Perrin seems inspired by Jules Verne and his Captain Nemo. Since The Roaring 40s (1982), for which he invented cameras with revolving mirrors in order to avoid raindrops on the lens, then Microcosmos (1996), filmed on two square meters of lawn, the laboratory-films produced or co-produced by him have continued to advance cinematographic technique.  In 2002, on first thinking about Oceans with Jacques Cluzaud, the film’s co-director, he reached out to the biologists who collaborated with him on Winged Migration: Yvon Le Maho, research director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Strasbourg, polar science expert, and a member of the French Academy of Science. This world expert on sea birds, penguins, and seagulls will be the guarantor that ethical parameters are met to the satisfaction of the scientific world. And Stéphane Durand, 37, biologist and ornithologist, soon promoted to “whale expert.” It is up to them to decide which species to film, to learn everything about their behavior and their biotope.

This is not an easy task: there are as many whale experts as there are species in the oceans. Blue whale from the Atlantic? From the Pacific? Stéphane Durand feels his way around. Yvon Le Maho introduced him to the Sloan Foundation. In 2000, this private American foundation launched The Census of Marine Life, a program that has united thousands of scientists, from specialists in the bacteria of hydrothermal springs in depths up to 4,000 meters, to eminent experts of albatross or whales.

Thus the production benefits from the precious information of an entire network of experts spread out over the planet. Thanks to the Census of Marine Life, the teams at Galatée Films, Jacques Perrin’s production house, will be able to film in certain territorial waters where marine mammals are protected by extremely strict legislation. In exchange, the scientists gain from Galatée’s sophisticated technology and logistics whereby they are finally able to go up close to animals they’ve thus far only observed from a distance. A bargain for researchers used to working on shoestrings. The images sometimes give them information that was heretofore beyond their reach. Stéphane Durand recalls: “For Winged Migration, we worked with ornithologists who, of course, had never flown with birds. When the pelican experts saw the rushes of their adored animals in the air and had the impression of flying right beside them, thanks to our cameras that were mounted on ULM (ultra light motorized vehicles), they watched with their mouths open!”

Interview with Jacques Perrin http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/LeMondeInterview.doc