Interview: Daniel Ferguson of “Jerusalem”

Posted on December 9, 2013 at 3:54 pm

Daniel Ferguson told an audience that making his extraordinary 3D IMAX film about Jerusalem required four years and “thousands of cups of tea.” It took four years. But he was able to persuade Muslims, Christians, and Jews to allow him to film the most sacred places of the city. He attended seders and Shabbat dinners, Easter celebrations, and Iftar dinners. His goal was to challenge assumptions, and “overcome fatigue,” to show “the same spots with different narratives.” While it was daunting to try to fit 5000 years of history into 45 minutes, he knew that “the best IMAX films are poems in honor of their subject.”

He talked to me about making the film, choosing the music, finding the three girls to represent the three religions of Jerusalem, and working with narrator Benedict Cumberbatch.

Let’s start with the music.

Michael Brook is the composer. We did license some music, obviously, but I would say 85 percent of it is Michael’s. And Michael has done all kinds of different films. He had done music for “Into the Wild,” the Sean Penn film and “The Fighter,” “Heat,” “An Inconvenient Truth.” He did the film about Palestinian Statehood, State 194. He did “Perks of Being a Wallflower.” He’s incredible. Michael’s background is he worked with Real World, Peter Gabriel’s label, so he knows all kinds of musicians. We worked with Michael on “Journey to Mecca,” and what’s great about Michael is he didn’t do a sort of typical era pastiche thing. Obviously, we have some sort of typical belly dance tunes or whatever to kind of play to that and make it fun for kids but I think what’s great is that Michael was able to find a musical language that was actually culturally, religiously, and maybe even emotionally somewhat neutral. Because the hard thing about music, frankly the hard thing about the film in general, but the music is the ultimate microcosm for this is Jerusalem is never one thing.

It’s a total leap off a cliff because the music could be too spot-on. I think both Michael and I struggled with the music. He’d send me a cue and I would say, “It’s gorgeous but for another movie.” “It’s too exuberant,” you know? I need something that has a bit more darkness in it, that has something that’s unsettled that sort of searching. How do you compose for that? It’s a totally abstract concept and yet we went back and forth. We tried to have a unified theme as well, sort of a Jewish return theme. The notes were very subtle and in fact, they were largely in the same key and all kinds of layers to work on a sort of subliminal level to convey the synchronicity between traditions.

Your narrator, Benedict Cumberbatch, is excellent. He seems to be everywhere this year.

We had a lot of narrators thrown at us and we needed someone who was sort of neutral in a way. I didn’t really know his work that well. I started to watch “Sherlock,” and I really got into it. He’s young; he’s sort of up-and-coming so he was the first one we reached out to. We thought of a woman’s voice, that was our first choice and, in fact, we had a woman in our initial trailer. But the reality was we had three girls and Dr. Jodi Magness and so everyone said, “You need a male counterweight to this.” We heard Benedict sort of doing books on tape and we thought, “Wow! This guy could do something understated, wouldn’t be bombastic about it, he’s an actor, and he’s a voice actor. Because the images were so big. Benedict was able to play the mystery and be respectful, and it’s like the kind of nuance when we do a line like Prophet Mohammad’s travel on a miraculous journey. I mean you could do that line like he did a reading and said, “No, that sounded far too fairytale. Let me do that again,” and he knew the nuance. He would make little tweaks and changes. He came totally prepared. He had notes all over the script, he’d seen the cut so many times. And he said, “Oh yes, this is where Farah comes in. Let me do this. How about a bridge like this?” It was amazing. He gave me at least four takes for every line. They were all totally different.

It’s a little poignant in the end where the girls say “Maybe someday, we would meet.”

I think it’s very poignant. We filmed alternate endings just because as a filmmaker, you should have everything in your back pocket. We were worried about audiences would be very upset with that as an ending. And I’ll be honest. We actually let the shot play a little longer in the earlier cut and our test audiences absolutely hated it. Do you know what it was? It was the fact that they literally passed each other and the audience said, “Oh my God! You took me through this whole time and you went and punched me in the stomach.” And it wasn’t my intent. It was just that was for me was the reality. It was the tragedy of the city that these girls have similar interests, they look the same. They have the same food. Yeah, that’s the point. And so the casting was somewhat deliberate for that. And yet there is no natural opportunity for them more so between the Arab Christian and the Arab Moslem because similar language and they would live a bit closer to one another but nonetheless, not as much as you would think. I mean there are coexistence programs in Jerusalem that’s fantastic. A lot of them funded from outside.

Have the girls seen the movie?

Only one girl has seen the movie. The Moslem girl, Farah, saw it in Houston. She’s studying in Dallas. She’s studying Genetic Engineering. It’s amazing because I meet her when she was 15. And now she’s just turned 18. And she’s so mature. Anyhow, Farah loved the movie. So I was so nervous. She wrote me to say the ending is perfect because we filmed so many different versions of it like we had a scene where the girls talked and they had a conversation. And it was thrilling, and interesting, and they would say things like “I thought you had to always wear that headscarf?” “No. No. I only wear it when I go to the mall.” “Oh really?” “And I thought you were not allowed to wear jeans. Don’t all Jews have to be in black and white?” “No! Are you kidding?” “Are you Orthodox? What are you?” It was really interesting. “What kind of Christian are you?” “Well, it’s complicated. My father’s Greek Orthodox, my mother’s Catholic.” It was like, “What? How does that..?” So that was like another movie. It could have gone on and on and on.

The problem is it took like two minutes and the whole film is not like a talkie movie so you had to find the same way to do that in a way it was more poetic, more cinematic, and frankly more poignant because the girls were good sports and they did everything that I asked but sometimes they would be uncomfortable.” So I had to find like a neutral place where they can all be there and even then, we started filming early in the morning. So it was really tricky, I think, especially in the old city because I think a lot of Israelis are sort of ambivalent about the old city. They feel like it isn’t the safest place so they have to be careful. They stick within a quarter and I was forcing them. I’ve maintained such a careful line where I have not stepped in the political camp and I don’t feel comfortable to do that. All I hope is that a film like this could just reframe the dialogues so that one could say, “I didn’t know your narrative before.” And that was really it. And that was my way of doing without getting into checkpoints, suicide bombing, and the heaviness of all that which the great films have been made about it but that isn’t the market for this. I firmly believe that.

I’ve been in it but I don’t think I’ve seen it on film before.

No. Western crews’ generally not allowed. I mean look, they would say flat out, “How do we know this isn’t like some propaganda film?” And so we had done a film in Mecca which helped. We were very honest about our mandate, who we were. I was Canadian. I’m not Israeli, I’m not Palestinian. I don’t have any stakes other than my job is to entertain and educate National Geographic brand is tremendously helpful. The IMAX brand is tremendously helpful. We brought key stakeholders to Paris, to London to see other films we’ve done. And I think the museum is a place like Smithsonian that carries so much weight for these kinds of permissions. So people say, “Wow! This is not just a television documentary or one of. Let’s take a chance on this” so people really put their necks out like if this doesn’t work, I’m going to lose my job. There was risk and heaviness. People invite me to their families, their homes. And these countless cups of tea would be over meals and it would just be like there’s no contract. It’s just a handshake. Don’t screw this up.

It was the same way with every community; Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, I mean Evangelical, Sunni, Even Shia, I mean even if there’s no market, try and weave a line where you get what you’re looking for at a picture, so if you’re Christian, you get to walk in the footsteps of Jesus but then you get to learn something about another community that’s outside your comfort zone.

I think it was very wise to focus on the three girls because they’re young and they’re the future.

And each one of those girls is curious about the other. That was the key for me. Even if they said things about “I grew up… I hate the other” Honestly, there was some of that and I said, “Why?” “I’m not sure. I inherited this.” And they’re willing to have that and that was honest for me. I didn’t get kids who were so politically correct that they were involved in coexistence, whatever the new dramatic tension. Anyhow, that was important for me.

It must have been a challenge to use the IMAX equipment in these locations.

We shot with five different camera systems. The IMAX camera itself and three of the cameras like bigger than a washing machine. It sounds like a machine gun. The film magazines are just three minutes and take ten minutes to load. So if you’re doing the Via Dolores procession which is once a year, sometimes you need three cameras at once. We filmed in Digital 3D, we had lightweight system, we built new rigs to put it on the body and have the person walk with the camera attached to them on steady cam so we could do all the Western Wall stuff and in the streets. So it was a lot of problem-solving. And then there was, “Okay, we got to get underground” so we need a lightweight night kind of low light cameras so that would be another set of test: How little light can we go? Can we go candlelight? A lot of testing, a lot of research and development which is the cool part about making IMAX films which is like taking a camera to space, taking a camera underwater, taking a camera to Jerusalem.

What did you learn from living there that you didn’t learn from all your research trips?

Oh, goodness, just the daily rituals and the idea of the ritual of having the three Sabbaths for example. I love that. I actually really love that because I was always invited somewhere else. Friday, Shabbat dinner was fantastic or meals in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem or something. And always so welcoming, and that’s the thing. Obviously I had the unique vantage point. I’m a filmmaker but I was curious and people had stories to tell.

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Behind the Scenes: Born to Be Wild 3D

Posted on April 11, 2011 at 3:53 pm

It was so much fun to talk with some of the people behind “Born to Be Wild 3D” following its Washington DC premiere at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Writer/producer Drew Fellman, cinematographer David Douglas, and Dame Daphne Sheldrick of the baby elephant rescue in Kenya spoke with me about making the movie.

3D and Imax requires some pretty extensive equipment — and yet you were able to get some amazing shots of the animals and the scenery. What was your biggest challenge?

Douglas: We had two camera systems. One of them weighs 300 pounds. It’s basically a massive fridge, and it sounds like a sewing machine and it has three minutes of film. So, that camera is used for certain scenes. But to get up in the canopy, to get an orangutan’s view of the world, we basically had to invent a new camera system for IMAX. And so we worked with IMAX to create their first camera that weighs less than 100 pounds, to get up on a 60-foot crane arm, and we build scaffolding in the middle of the jungle. Piece by piece, we trekked it up the river in small boats.

It sounds like “Fitzcarraldo!”

Fellman: I was actually reading Herzog’s book, Conquest of the Useless, his diary of the making of “Fitzcarraldo,” and it was really interesting because you’d read that book and think, “Okay, we’ve got it pretty good.”

Douglas: The shoot was really not just two animal but two challenges. The elephants were almost like a dream in a sense, we could be at ground level, we could get around them and we could use the big camera. But the orangutans, a big camera like that in the jungle is just too unwieldy. That small camera ended up being massively useful.

Fellman: One of the biggest surprises for us was how the animals ended up accepting our presence and the cameras. That was our biggest concern going in. One thing we had in our favor is that if it was between the camera and a bottle of milk, the milk was much more interesting than the camera.

Dame Daphne: They were a little bit suspicious at first, curious about these strange people around them all day who weren’t a part of their human family. But within a couple of days, it just became the norm and they were happy to ignore them and concentrate on what they were doing.

In the movie it says that it took you 24 years to develop infant formula for elephants that made it possible for the first time to raise them without a mother. What did you have to do to get it right?

Dame Daphne: Newborn elephants didn’t come in every day. But whenever they came in very small we tried different formulas. We knew elephant milk was very rich so we tried adding butter, cream, and then no fat at all. We didn’t have access to sophisticated baby formula in those days. We only had access to cow’s milk. I tried skim milk and the calves lasted a lot longer but they just wasted away. So I knew it was a fat problem. I went scouring the shops in Nairobi and all the zoos and asked, “What can we feed an elephant that has no cow’s milk fat?” Eventually, we settled on a base of SMA Goldcap. It’s not ideal. We still get stomach problems. But elephants need milk for the first three years of life. They cannot live without it. When they first come in we have a lot of problems with dehydration, lots of them are wounded or psychologically disturbed and in a mess. Stabilizing the stomach is the main challenge when they come in, getting them onto the new formula and calming them down.

Do you have to teach them about their natural predators so they can protect themselves when they return to the wild?

Dame Daphne: Fortunately for us, unlike the primates, elephants are born with a genetic memory, but in order to hone that, you have to expose them to a wild situation. We’ve learned that the younger we can get them there, the easier the transition is. We can keep them for as long as ten years. Generally, the ones that came to us older, that have the memory of being wild elephants, leave us sooner.

Fellman: There are lions all over that place. It’s part of Nairobi National Park, and the lions were walking around eating the warthogs. These elephants see lions and react to them.

Dame Daphne: The elephants are very fearful animals. They know the lions are there before the keepers do and they will run back to the keepers for protection. They are getting bolder, too.

Fellman: We were on a scouting trip in Tsavo and we were walking with the elephants with their keepers in the bush, and suddenly they stopped. This was a young group, maybe three or four years old. There were maybe three buffalo We didn’t know what to do. We had been told that the buffalo can be quite dangerous. We look at the elephants; the elephants look at us. We look at the buffalo; the buffalo look at us. And the elephants ran to go behind us! We got tossed aside like nothing.

Douglas: We were told to get behind the elephants, that they would protect us. But they had their own idea.

Dame Daphne: In the nursery, the keepers are very much a mother figure for the elephants. But once they get to rehab there’s a gradual change.

Do they ever come back after they go to the wild?

Dame Daphne: Some of the bulls come back, even after eight years One came back with a snare on his leg. He stood very still while we removed it.

Fellman: One scene we could not squeeze into the movie had two that came back. A whole group, maybe twelve, big elephants, brought them back. One had an arrow in his nose and another had an arrow in her rump. The mobile unit came by and treated them and then they went back.

Dame Daphne: One came back with a broken leg, escorted by another “ex-orphan.” The “ex-orphans” come and visit him, just like he’s in hospital. He’s made big friends with the small ones as well; they all have a hero worship on the big guy. They want to be close to him.

I admire the way you made it clear in the film that these are not pets or domesticated animals but respected fellow creatures.

Douglas: They weren’t patients, they weren’t study animals; they were friends.

Fellman: The thing that struck me when we started looking at his project is this idea that there’s an enterprise happening between people and animals as equals for a common goal.

Dame Daphne: The elephants are teaching the keepers. There’ve been occasions when one or two of the orphans have been left behind with the wild herds. The keepers are worried. They open up the gates and Yetta, the herd matriarch, sends two young bulls off and off they go to bring back the truants. The scientific community have had this huge block about not attributing human emotion to animals — that is anthropomorphizing. But I just came in as a lay person who loves animals. I could see very early on that all animals indeed have the same sort of emotions. We’re part of the animal kingdom and we’re not nearly as sophisticated as the elephants.

I have one adorable little stuffed orangutan to give to the first person who sends me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Born to Be Wild” in the subject line. Tell me your favorite animal and don’t forget your address!

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Behind the Scenes

Born to Be Wild 3D

Posted on April 7, 2011 at 6:06 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Orphaned animals, references to predators (including humans)
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	April 8, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	April 16, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0071L6T24

One way or another you’ll find yourself saying, “Awwwwww.” The adorable baby animals and the grace and kindness of the people who care for them are guaranteed to warm every heart in the theater.

In Borneo, Dr. Biruté Mary Galdikas rescues orangutans orphaned by developers who cut down the jungle to produce palm oil. In Kenya, Dame Daphne M. Sheldrick provides a home for the baby elephants orphaned by poachers. More than five thousand miles apart, the two women care for different animals but share the same goal: to raise the babies without taming them, so they can return to a natural life in the wild. Morgan Freeman narrates the story, taking us back and forth as we see the newest babies arrive and the adolescents “graduate.” The goal is to nurture them only as long as they need help and then find them a safe home in a nature preserve. They are “under human care but not human control; they need to retain their wildness.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO9fRd7eumA

Some of the animals arrive traumatized. A baby elephant who saw humans kill his mother has to learn these humans are different; they just want to feed and protect him. Amazingly, the other orphaned elephants gather around to reassure him that he is finally safe. They show him that a giant-sized bottle can be a good way to get milk. The milk, by the way, is a special formula developed by Dame Daphne over 24 years, making it possible for the first time to raise an infant elephant without a mother. Unlike mother elephants, humans are not big enough to cast protective shadows to prevent sunburn, so Dame Daphne and her colleagues rub sunblock on the tender ears of the baby elephants instead. And elephants do not sleep well alone, so the keepers curl up near them at night. These are the cutest pachyderms on screen since the baby elephants marched to the Mancini soundtrack in “Hatari.”

The elephants are social creatures who create a community of their own. In one very touching scene, when the now “ex-orphans” are brought to a sort of halfway house to get used to living away from the humans the current residents somehow sense that newcomers are arriving and come to the drop-off point to welcome them. The orangutans interact more directly with their human care-givers, draping themselves along their backs and hugging their chests. Dr. Galdikas and her crew have built a contraption for swinging and climbing to teach them the skills they need to find food and a safe place to sleep — a literal jungle gym. She teaches them more than skills for survival; she makes each one of them feel special and cared for. “As long as they feel loved,” she says, “they’ll have the confidence they need.”

The movie is empathetic but respectful to the animals. It enlarges our circle of compassion by reacquainting us with our fellow residents of the planet. Yet, it avoids getting cutesy or overly anthropomorphic. These are not pets and they are not being tamed. They are temporary guests, learning what they need to know so they can go home. In the early scenes, we see the orangutans covered with shampoo and sharing a plate of pasta with Dr. Galdikas to the tune of bouncy American pop tunes such as Hank Williams’ “Jumbalya.” Then as they return to the wild, the soundtrack turns African, more serious and stirring, and we share the mixed feelings of these dedicated people who have cared for the animals for so long. We are happy that they are going home but know they will be missed. We are hopeful for their future but worried that the wilderness left for them is shrinking every day.

This is everything a family movie should be: touching, funny, and inspiring. And with a brisk 40-minute running time no one has to sit still for too long. The IMAX 3D format may be overwhelming for children under five, but anyone older than that will find the baby animals hard to resist, the scenery breathtaking, and the devotion of Dr. Galdikas and Dame Daphne deeply moving.

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First Look at ‘Tron: Legacy’

Posted on October 29, 2010 at 8:00 am

Tonight select audiences at AMC theaters across the country got their first chance to see a glimpse of the upcoming “Tron: Legacy,” the sequel to the 1982 Disney film with Jeff Bridges that was one of the first to explore the then-new world of computer games.

Just as the first one did, this sequel, again with Bridges and with Garrett Hedlund as the son who goes into the grid in search of his father, is a stunning display of breakthrough technology. The scenes we saw in IMAX 3D were dazzling, with a gladiator-style disk throw, motorcycle race, and of course a high-tech chase. (Those who don’t mind spoilers can see the details on Gamertell.)

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Interview: Dominic Cunningham-Reid and Taran Davies of ‘Journey to Mecca’

Posted on January 19, 2010 at 3:55 pm

In 1325 a 21-year-old man named Ibn Battuta set out from his native Tangier on pilgrimage to Mecca that would take him 18 months. And now the story of that journey has become an extraordinary IMAX film, stunningly beautiful, soul-stirring, and genuinely historic.
The Hajj, or obligation to visit Mecca, is one of the core requirements of Islam. Battuta found it to be so important that he would return five more times over the course of travels that would take him 75,000 miles over 29 years. He was the greatest explorer of the Old World, traveling three times further than Marco Polo before returning home to write down the story.
“Journey to Mecca” follows Battuta (played by Chems Eddine Zinoun) on his perilous journey in the context of a compelling picture of Islamic civilization during the 14th century. The story is book-ended by a close-up look at the contemporary Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca that draws three million Muslims from around the world every year who perform rituals that have taken place for over 1,400 years.
Dominic Cunningham-Reid and Taran Davies took time to speak to me on their recent visit to Washington about why the film was important to them and what was involved in getting it made.
It seemed to me that if you had made a list of every single obstacle to making a film, you not only covered them all, you added a few new ones. You had everything but a temperamental star — or maybe that was the camels.
TD: The camels might have been a little temperamental. It was really our personal Hajj in a sense. It just had to be done; I think that was the point. The IMAX challenges are enormous, particularly in this environment. There are millions of people there. Each roll of film lasts only three minutes and then you have to change your magazine. And each roll is incredibly expensive and you need several people to change the magazine. It is an incredibly daunting process in any environment but put that into one of the largest gatherings of people on earth and have them pull that off and it’s almost impossible.
The Hajj has been filmed before but only in low-quality video. It is so difficult to film logistically with the massive amount of people. And so we chose to really rise to that challenge and bring the greatest quality of production to this extraordinary cultural and spiritual event that deserves to be documented in such a fashion.
The images are stunning, exquisitely breathtaking. IMAX was really made for those vistas.
TD: There is some CGI in the film. We re-created Medina and Cairo in the 14th century. But the contemporary Mecca material with the Hajj, that is as it is. You see Mount Arafat on the Day of Standing, the holiest day of the Hajj from a helicopter we’re circling at dusk just a couple of hundred feet above the ground — totally unique, never been done before shot — with literally two million people in that frame. If you asked why would anyone do this, why would anyone make this film, that is the reason.
That is such a powerful image. Tell me about the historians. You worked with a wide variety of experts who did not always agree about some of the most sensitive issues.
TD: One of the crazy things we set out to do was really make the definitive film about the most sacred sanctuary of Islam and its rituals and we needed to get it right. We were working in a very sensitive environment where getting it wrong is not an option. We wanted to make sure that we brought on board as many experts on this subject as possible to make sure that we got it right. We had the leading experts on the Hajj, on Ibn Battuta, on Islamic architecture, on the architecture of Mecca, from all over the world, the United States, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, Kuwait, amongst other countries.
DC-R: The Grand Mosque of the year 1325, we had no visuals to go on. We had history books with verbal descriptions. We had to translate with all of the experts and research into a visual representations. One of the great moments we had is when we had actually sunk 18 pillars of the mosque and then the lead researcher calls up and says, “No, no, they weren’t square, they were round!”
Oh, no!
DC-R: So we had to pull them all out. And start again. Very, very challenging.
The biggest of challenges had to be your subject matter. It could not be more sensitive both from the perspective of believers and people who are ignorant of or hostile to Islam. How did you mediate differences between your experts?
TD: As I look back through time it is such a rosy picture of collaboration, I can’t really recall any disagreements! I think that would be too strong a word to describe what was a collaboration. We needed to receive as much information as we could on the subject of Islam and so we reached out to as many people as we could to provide it. We wanted to get things right from the way the ihram, the white cloth is worn. Do you have the shoulder uncovered or covered? Off-white? How off-white? What material is the cloth made of? Do the pilgrims in the 14th century wear sandals? When they perform the tawaf, what prayers do they say as they are circumambulating the ka’ba. If there were disagreements often among the Muslim community, they have different ways of doing things. It is a very daunting experience for them and many of them don’t know precisely how they are supposed to do it. It was as if we were doing the Hajj because we had to learn how do it right. We were approaching the ka’ba. We had to learn the proper way to perform the tawaf to be able to represent it.

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