27/06/2017 - Cineuropa caught up with Jean-Michel Cousteau and Jean-Jacques Mantello, the directors of Wonders of the Sea, which is screening today at the Deauville Green Awards

(© Birgit Heidsiek)

In the documentary Wonders of the Sea [+see also:
trailer
interview: Jean-Michel Cousteau, Jean-…
film profile], ocean explorer and environmentalist Jean-Michel Cousteau and his co-director Jean-Jacques Mantello show us an underwater world that has never been seen before. Travelling from Fiji to the Bahamas, they shot the film in 3D and 4K, and at high speed with macro lenses. After its world premiere at Cannes, Wonders of the Sea marks the opening of the sixth edition of the Deauville Green Awards, which kicks off today.

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Cineuropa: How did you manage to film this amazing underwater world?
Jean-Michel Cousteau: With this new technology, we are now able to show the public things that, even after my 72 years of scuba diving, I am not able to see by myself with the naked eye. We filmed in slow motion, came up close to microscopic things and put it all on the big screen. We had to bring that back to the boat, show it on a small screen and take a look at it. If the material was no good, we had to go back and dive again. We needed to have a tripod and lights in place, so it took a long time and we had to be very patient. We also had two scientists who were looking for interesting creatures, and then they told us where we needed to go. It was a lot of work. 

What makes this project so exciting for you?
JMC: After 72 years of scuba diving, it is exciting for me to see things in 3D on the big screen – things that I cannot see with the naked eye in the water. Bringing that to the attention of the public is one of the privileges that I am able to exercise thanks to my father and thanks to the technology that we are now able to use. My father, Jacques Cousteau, used to say, “People protect what they love,” and I kept saying, “How can you protect what you don’t understand?” We have explored maybe 5%, 6% or 7% of the ocean in shallow waters, but we don’t know anything about the hundreds of thousands of species that we have never seen up to now. Now we can go deeper and deeper, and discover a lot of species that we have never seen before, and that is exciting.

How deep did you dive?
JMC: The film was shot at a maximum of 90 or 100 feet. But I want to go down and stay much longer; that’s why I have a suit that enables me to go down 1,000 feet in five minutes. I can spend ten hours down there, and I can move my hands and pick up samples. I have a high-definition camera on top of my head and LED lights. With my right leg, I can go forward, back, left and right, and with my left leg, I can go up and down. I can adjust the air and make sure the air that I am rebreathing is healthy. I can be back up at the surface in five minutes because I am protected from the pressure. 

In Australia, the Great Barrier Reef is undergoing a second bleaching. Do you think that people understand the urgency of protecting the reefs?
JMC: I think there are more and more people who do understand. What we need to do is to make sure that decision makers in governments and industries understand how we are connected to the environment and how much we depend on it. It is important to coach them and to reach their hearts, their families and their children. We have to help them to understand their obligations to the future. We need to keep the ocean healthy, and that will allow a lot of people to create new technologies to capture chemicals and heavy metals before they get into the ocean. By doing this, millions of new jobs will be created for people all over the planet. We need to take care of the life support system that is the ocean. If you make an analogy with business, the planet is our capital, but we are abusing the system and are heading down the path to bankruptcy.

Is Wonders of the Sea an educational movie?
Jean-Jacques Mantello: The movie is family-orientated. Many environmental movies are too shocking for kids, so we decided to make a movie for kids, and we want them to fall in love with the ocean and those little creatures so that they will want to protect them. 

How optimistic are you about the future?
JMC: The choice is ours to make. We are the only species on the planet that has the privilege of deciding whether to disappear or not – there is no other species that can say that. Nature was there before we showed up as a species, and it can continue without us. A lot of people who will see Wonders of the Sea will ask, “What can I do to help?” And that’s what it’s all about.