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Fisher Stevens Interview
 Vicki Hogarth - AskMen.com
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March 07, 2010
If the pre-Oscars buzz is correct, Fisher Stevens, the co-director/producer of The Cove, will be going home with the Academy Award for Best Documentary on Sunday night. And if filmmakers like Supersize Me’s Morgan Spurlock, An Inconvenient Truth’s Al Gore and Fahrenheit 9/11’s Michael Moore have taught us anything, it’s that the best documentary category might actually be the most important category at the Oscars - a celebration of the movies that incite change, particularly at this critical time in the earth’s history.
The Cove takes place in Taiji, Japan, where a dolphin can earn a fisherman up to $150,000 if sold to a dolphinarium or, at the very least, $600 for its mercury-filled meat. While the town masquerades as a dolphin-watching hot spot for tourists, it’s actually one of the largest dolphin-massacring sites in the world, done in secret in a nearby cove. Enter our hero, Ric O’Barry, who once upon a time trained five dolphins to play the title role in the 1960s sitcom Flipper and consequently incited a worldwide obsession with trained dolphins. "I spent 10 years of my life building up the dolphins-in-captivity industry," says a teary O'Barry famously in the film. "And I spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down."
O’Barry teams up with the Ocean Preservation Society to bring to light what is actually going on in the cove with the help of underwater sound and camera technicians and expert free divers. The result is a gripping film that Stevens describes as "eco-Ocean's 11."
AskMen.com : You’re the frontrunner for Best Documentary at the Oscars. Is that a lot of pressure?
Fisher Stevens : You want to win, but you go: “Well, just being there is great.” A lot of my friends have been nominated and have not won, and they say that you think that being nominated is great until you lose. But I’m prepared either way. Obviously, I want to win, but if we lose, we lose. They’re all good films [in the Best Documentary category], they’re all interesting.
AM : Well, if it makes you feel better, we have an Oscar pool at the AskMen.com office, and I put my money on you for your category, as did about 80% of the office.
FS : Wow. I wish AskMen.com was giving out [the Oscar].
AM : I looked at the list of awards you've won for it already, and that's pretty impressive - at Sundance, Cannes.
FS : It’s pretty amazing. I’m amazed that this movie has done so well, and I hope it has a long life and that it closes down the Cove, because that was one of the many intentions of making the film, that the Cove gets closed down in Taiji [in Japan]. We’re opening the film in Japan in April. It’s going to take the Japanese people to close it down. It’s not going to take Americans to do it. It’s very exciting.
AM : The film was blacklisted in Japan before. How did you get around that?
FS : Thanks to a couple of friends of mine - Ben Stiller and Alejandro Inarritu - the film was finally accepted to Tokyo Film Festival. And there was a Japanese distributor there [Medallion Media] - a brave company - and they’re going to take it on and put it out. We blurred all the faces, so we’re protecting the fisherman. But to get the story out there is remarkable because what we found was that most people in the country of Japan have no idea that this slaughter is going on.
AM : It was filmed over a long period of time. Have you noticed a change in Taiji?
FS : There was a change originally in September. The slaughter season goes from September to March. This year - because of the publicity from Sundance and since the film came out - there were film crews from the BBC and CNN and for the first time Japanese film crews were down there filming. So they stopped killing for two months. They were still capturing some dolphins and sending them off to dolphinariums, but they did stop the slaughters. And then after a couple months when the press got bored and started covering other stories, they went back in and started killing again. Now there are some rumors that they’re not going to kill in the Cove, but they’re taking nets and killing in the middle of the ocean, but we don’t know if any of that is founded. Ric O’Barry who is one of the heroes of the film and one of my heroes, he said that after the Academy Awards he’s going to find out if this is really still going on. We’re on it. His organization, Safe Japan Dolphins, they’re on the case.
AM : We learn that there's a lot of mercury in certain types of fish and dolphins from this movie, and that dolphin meat is often disguised as other forms of seafood. How did making this movie change your diet? Did it even effect how you feel about red meat?
FS : Well, before I was working on The Cove, I was working on a film in the rain forest, and I realized that the main culprit of the rain forest is deforestation, and the forests are being cut down for cattle. I just stopped eating meat, and felt much better. I saw some slaughterhouse footage and thought, forget it. So that’s when I started going to fish. And fish turned out to be full of mercury, and now I’m eating small fish and lots more vegetables, and unfortunately I’m still addicted to dairy, but at least it’s putting something in my stomach. It’s tough out there. Food Inc. is a very good film and is another one of our competitors [at the Academy Awards]. It deals with a lot of those issues, which is good. The more docs like this, the better.
AM : The seal hunt is obviously an issue in north America. But dolphins - do you think because they are close to humans in terms of intelligence, it makes the massacring of them somehow worse than any other species?
FS : Oh yeah. They have feelings. Look what happened in Sea World in Orlando. They have feelings for sure. Ric wrote a book called Behind the Dolphin Smile that just tells the world that these dolphins are not really smiling. Like we say in the movie, they do get stressed and they feed them Malox and Pepto Bismol.
The other thing about the dolphins is that they are truly good creatures. They have saved human beings. In ancient Greece, if you killed a dolphin, they would kill you because they saved so many people’s lives. They’re just magnificent, and to swim with them in the wild is one thing, but then putting them in these tanks is so sad. I mean, there are a million causes you can get behind. I’m not saying that this is the only one, but really the film is dealing with a lot of other issues.
As Ric says in the film, if we can’t solve this, we can’t solve anything. The oceans are deteriorating rapidly. We can’t continue. It has to stop. We’ve got to wake up, or we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. I’m going to the Galapagos Islands for three weeks with Sylvia Earle who is kind of the female Jacques Cousteau. Through The Cove I’ve gotten to know her. If you want to learn more, you can listen to her lecture that she did at the TED conference. It’s really interesting. I’ve become obsessed with this cause.
AM : I heard you described this movie as an "eco-Ocean's 11." For anyone who hasn't seen it, what do you mean by that description?
FS : I get bored really easily in movies. These guys were so exciting and what they did was so ballsy that it was the perfect opportunity to turn this into kind of an action movie, like a thriller. Documentaries, to be really effective, need to be told in a really exciting way. We had the perfect material to do that. We put it in that form, building all these guys up as they should be. We even have the free drivers in their crazy suits - they look like super heroes. Hopefully we really keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
AM : In the film, you say that the only way to stop something of this magnitude is through exposing it, but in the act of exposing it, did you ever find yourselves in dangerous territory?
FS : I wasn’t, but the guys definitely were. You never know - the fisherman are carrying harpoons, and they can get violent. They definitely risked their lives, and that’s when I thought, wow, we can make this thing into a thriller. This is a crazy story.
AM : When you guys showed the Head of the Fisheries in Japan the video of the dolphins being massacred, do you think he had seen it before?
FS : Oh, he knew what was going on, but no one had filmed it in years. He basically knew he was going to get fired after that. He was like: “I’m screwed.”
AM : Do you think he actually ever imagined it looked like that though?
FS : Oh, I think he did. I can’t say for sure, but my instinct knows he does. He knows there are 23,000 being killed every year. So he knows what that looks like. Sadly.
AM : Is the main reason all these dolphins are being killed because they eat all the fish and fish is such an important part of the Japanese diet?
FS : That’s the excuse they use. They’re making money. They’re making up to $150,000 for the ones who are caught [and sold to dolphinariums to be performers]. They’re making up to $600 to $800 for the slaughtered dolphins, and that adds up. It feeds there families, I understand that. But feed them another way. Turn them into dolphin-watching boats.
AM : At the end of the film, you offer a couple of ways regular people can get involved in this cause. What would you say to the average reader of our website? What is the best way he can get involved?
FS : I would say, don’t go to dolphinariums, don’t support them. Stop eating tuna and stop eating swordfish. Those fish are about to be extinct, and they’re full of mercury. Write the Japanese ambassador to say that you can’t believe that this is going on in their country, and if you have any friends in Japan, tell them to go see the movie and to help support closing down the Cove. And be conscious of what goes in the water. Be aware.
AM : Hayden Panettiere and Isabel Lukas get arrested in the movie. Can they go back in the country?
FS : I think they can. We’d like them to go with us for the opening of the movie. It would be good to take them.
AM : At the very end of the movie, Ric goes straight into an International Whaling Commission conference with video footage of a dolphin massacre strapped to him. It was an awesome way to end the film, but I worried what happened to Ric.
FS : He was thrown out.
AM : Arrested?
FS : No. He was thrown out of the country. He was escorted out. That was in St. Kitts.
AM : I remember an episode of Full House growing up where DJ and Stephanie went swimming with the dolphins. To me at the time, that was just the coolest thing when I was 11 years old, and that’s been a perpetuated idea of fun for vacation. Does Ric feel that he has played a role in that? Does he still feel guilt?
FS : Yeah. He was all part of it. I think he does, and that’s why he wants to shut them down. They don’t enjoy being grabbed onto. They like it if you’re swimming in the wild with them. They dig you. But they don’t like it if they’re like your slave pulling you. |
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