Jeremy Berlin – National Geographic Society (blogs) Ideas and Insights From Our Community Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:39:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 102104349 The Story Behind “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Tue, 17 Jul 2012 22:00:34 +0000 Pop Omnivore spoke with director Benh Zeitlin and co-producer Michael Gottwald about the myths and movie magic in their new award-winning film, Beasts of the Southern Wild.

How did you choose aurochs—an extinct but real animal—to be the mythic creatures in your movie?

Benh Zeitlin: They came from cave paintings I’d seen—Lascaux, Pech Merle, and a bunch of caves around there. The young girl in the film, Hushpuppy, sees herself as the last of her kind, on the verge of extinction. “How are people going to look back on my civilization?” she wonders. And she sees herself as being in the same position as cavemen: We look back on them and understand them by their paintings. So it’s that parallel that inspired us to use the aurochs. What Hushpuppy sees as coming to destroy her is literally what a caveman painted.

Michael Gottwald: Benh’s always been interested in the cave paintings at Lascaux. And our film plays best as a myth. So he was looking for some sort of frame of reference for the film being its own myth: an animal—a bygone large mammal—that had been prominent earlier but had gone extinct, yet could cause destruction.

So the aurochs tattoos that appear on a character’s leg in the film—that’s a direct nod to the Lascaux cave paintings, where aurochs are depicted?

BZ: Yes, absolutely. In the play that the film is based on [Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, who co-wrote Beasts of the Southern Wild with Zeitlin], the teacher refers specifically to Lascaux as she teaches a lesson about cave paintings. We sort of reinterpreted that. Plus we thought aurochs would make a great tattoo!

MG: The film is trying to create its own intrinsic mythology. And it makes sense that the character Miss Bathsheeba—as the passer-down of knowledge, an educator who understands the past and the way things work—has the aurochs on her body. In our movie, the equivalent of an animal appearing on a cave wall is the tattoo on her thigh.

What do aurochs represent or symbolize in Beasts of the Southern Wild? What might it mean at the end, when Hushpuppy stands up to a whole herd?

BZ: I think [the aurochs’ meaning] evolves over the course of the film. At the beginning, Hushpuppy’s relationship with nature is that she’s a morsel of food that’s going to be consumed by a larger force. The only way she understands death is a big thing eating a smaller thing—the food chain. All the things that are bigger than her and that have created her are being consumed by things bigger than them—her father being consumed by his illness, her home being consumed by storms and floods and saltwater intrusion and land loss. That violent relationship is the way she begins her understanding of nature.

But over the course of the film her view evolves into a more enlightened, complete view of nature as a flowing system—something in which everything has its place and everything plays its part. She comes to peace with it.

The idea of the aurochs really began at the end of the movie, and I worked back from that confrontation. What interested me is that you have these two animals on the verge of extinction that are designed by nature—one is supposed to eat the other, and the other one is supposed to kill its predator in order to stay alive. But both creatures are these wise, honorable animals that understand at the end of the film that the greatest sin you can commit is to kill an animal on the verge of extinction—to kill the last of a kind. So it’s not just about your own survival. It’s about allowing each other to go on.

MG: If nothing else, the film is a new way of rendering a story from a child’s perspective. We went to great lengths to really represent Hushpuppy’s reality. When you’re a kid of that age, there’s no separation between reality and fantasy. In Hushpuppy’s world, her dad dying and the storm coming means the world is falling apart. And the aurochs are a key reflection of that. As she says in a voiceover, “Everything has to fit together just right. If it doesn’t, it all falls apart.” So the vision of her dad shaking on the ground while a storm brews above her—for a 6-year-old, that’s larger than those two elements.

In terms of facing the herd, I think that’s her recognizing the harmony that she’s always talked about in nature. Everything is its own being. There is a natural point at which organisms in nature show weakness and allow for each other to exist—the same way she learns from her friends in The Bathtub [the fictional Louisiana community where Hushpuppy and her father live] to take care of each other. The aurochs recognize her as a similarly ferocious beast. And so they give way.

In the movie, aurochs are encased in Ice Age glaciers, then set free by the same storm that floods the protagonists’ Louisiana home. Tell me a bit about this.

BZ: The way we developed that stuff was very unscientific, very literalist—in the ways you understand how matter works when you’re a young kid. Lucy, my co-writer, is the first to admit she’s really bad at science. So I would explain something about, say, particle physics to her, and she would explain it back to me as well as she understood it. And then I would explain that back to her. So we sort of played this game of telephone until the science got really surreal and basic—the way a kid might understand it.

Louisiana is in the most precarious place in terms of sea-level rise. I thought the way Hushpuppy would understand the sea rising is if an ice cube melts, the water will rise. And one way she would understand death is if something freezes, it becomes still; when it thaws, it goes back to the way it was. So she might understand that the Ice Age froze all these creatures and they “died.” But if that gets reversed, then the Ice Age unhappens—death unhappens—and these creatures come back to life. We extrapolated the mythology through her logic.

MG: Where we shot the film in southern Louisiana, the environment is changing in a way that’s extremely visible and more aggressive than it is in a lot of other places. People say, “Twenty years ago, that was a field. Now it’s not. Now I have to take a bridge to get there.” What the film does—and what the aurochs do in their transition out of the ice—is take that already accelerated process and accelerate it even more.

Aurochs were actually ancestors of modern cattle. But in your film they resemble tusked, horned boars. Why the shift from bovine to porcine?

BZ: The source of that was my visit to where Lucy grew up, in the northern tip of Florida. She was the one who brought the aurochs into this story, and I wanted to see where her sensibility came from. She had these two gigantic Vietnamese potbellied pigs in her yard. They’re so big they’re practically unable to move. They just sort of haunt the yard, these two monstrous animals.

The film emerges from Hushpuppy’s view. And I felt like these two monstrous creatures may have haunted Lucy as a child. So those same fears could be extrapolated from the idea of a horrifying, all-consuming creature—pigs that are out to devour the entire universe and pass it through their body. And something about that made sense for how Hushpuppy might create this creature for herself. We weren’t trying to be scientific.

MG: Obviously aurochs are more like cattle than the animals in the film. But like anything with this film, you won’t get very far if you interpret the film literally. People tend to think, “Well, that storm is definitely [Hurricane] Katrina.” Or, “That’s definitely a place that exists in Louisiana.” I think in this case the aurochs are a descriptor of an extinct species that could come back to life. There was no attempt, ever, to accurately portray them.

If the DNA breeding program, Project TaurOs, succeeds and aurochs can be genetically re-created, would you use the real thing in another film?

BZ: Definitely! I’m always up for taking on nature in the name of cinema.

MG: We are not scared of using wild animals in our features. But I would think that if we found actual aurochs and filmed them, we’d portray them as being ten times more ferocious than they actually are. Or we’d have to invent a new mythology with a new word, so we’d be using actual aurochs to “play” a new species that we’d created.

— Jeremy Berlin

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Exclusive: The Secret of the Aurochs (Those “Beasts of the Southern Wild”) Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:46:09 +0000 In Beasts of the Southern Wild, real-world villains (terminal illness, indifferent authorities) and folkloric foes (an apocalyptic storm, a rampaging herd of mytho-prehistoric creatures) prove no match for a brave young girl, her dying father, and a ragtag bunch of bayou dwellers.










How did you make them look like fearsome beasts?










What is the contract? What did you offer the pigs?







Right. They didn’t go extinct till the 17th century.

So we were factually inaccurate on multiple levels.

Did you set up a separate soundstage to film them?


How did you film them?






And the other pigs?



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Would Real Wolves Act Like the Wolves of ‘The Grey’? Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:45:16 +0000 The nominal star of The Grey, America’s top-grossing film, is Liam Neeson. The real stars are the hungry wolves that pursue him and his fellow plane-crash survivors through Alaska’s pristine wilderness. The CGI-enhanced wolves are big, smart, and scary.

But is their behavior based in reality? To parse wolf fact from fiction, we caught up with Daniel MacNulty, a wildlife-ecology professor at Utah State University whose research on Arctic wolves is funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

First off, would wolves see men as prey and stalk them in the wild? I’d think that in a remote area like this one, wolves might fear or avoid humans.
In my 16 years of studying wolves in Yellowstone National Park, I have never been approached by a wolf or wolf pack. On the contrary, when I’ve inadvertently bumped into wolves they turn and run away—which is a problem when my objective is to observe them!

One of the characters in the movie says these wolves a) have a 300-mile hunting radius, b) will attack anything that comes near their den, and c) “are the only animal that will seek revenge.” Is any of that that true?
No. Nonsense, all of it.

Would a wolf attack a man standing next to a fire, with other men nearby, as happens in The Grey?
Not a chance.

At one point two men are running alongside a riverbank in the middle of the day. Two wolves race out of the trees and charge them. Possible?

Some of the wolves in the movie are huge—not Twilight size, but larger than I’d expect. How big can a gray wolf get?
In Yellowstone, the average weight of adult male wolves ranges between 100 and 120 pounds. The average weight of adult female wolves ranges between 84 and 93 pounds.

Do wolf eyes really glow in the dark, as they do in this movie?
The eyes of wolves and many other wildlife appear to “glow in the dark” because of a layer of tissue in the eye called the tapetum lucidum. It reflects visible light back through the retina, which improves vision in low-light conditions. So when light shines into the eye of an animal [with] a tapetum lucidum, the pupil appears to glow.

The cooperative hunting nature of the pack is played up a lot in this film. Is that accurate?
The extent to which wolves cooperate while hunting in a pack is greatly exaggerated. In a recent study, I showed that wolves are often freeloaders. That is, most wolves keep up with a hunt simply to be on hand when a kill is made. Imagine tackling a moose or bison with only your teeth, and you can start to appreciate the incentive a wolf has to hold back during a group hunt.

Speaking of cooperation, in one scene a lone wolf enters the men’s nighttime camp. The protagonist says it’s an omega wolf “sent in” by the alpha wolf to test the humans’ defenses. Does anything like that ever happen with wolf packs?
No. This is pure fiction.

At the end of the movie, the hero finds himself in the wolves’ den. It’s littered with bones and carcasses. Is that a realistic depiction?
In the dens I’ve examined, most of the bones and carcass remains are on the outside of the den rather than in the inside.

In the final scene, the protagonist prepares to fight the alpha wolf. He tapes broken mini liquor bottles to his hands. Would that give him a chance against a large male gray wolf?
If I was lucky enough to encounter a large male gray wolf in the wild, he would turn and run before I could tape the first bottle to my hand. Most people don’t realize this, but wolves are wimps.

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Looking Back: Steve Jobs in National Geographic Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:56:15 +0000 Apple co-founder and computer-age visionary Steve Jobs died this week after a long bout with cancer. It’s no overstatement to say that the 56-year-old Californian transformed how we live, from the way we communicate to the way we share and consume media.

Jobs changed the world from Silicon Valley, whose fortunes and rise mirrored his own. Back in 1982, National Geographic magazine chronicled the burgeoning tech hub in “High Tech, High Risk, and High Life in Silicon Valley,” recognizing that the “former prune patch an hour’s drive south of San Francisco” was becoming the “heartland of an electronics revolution that may prove as far-reaching as the industrial revolution of the 19th century … Silicon Valley may well be a glimpse of a computer-and-communications culture that is the prototype of the future.”

He may be hard to recognize without a black mock turtleneck, but that's 27-year-old Steve Jobs on the motorcycle. Photo by Charles O'Rear.

That story also contained prescient words about Jobs. Even then, it was clear that his distinctive taste—and taste for distinctions—was firmly in place:


So was his role as corporate, revenge-of-the-nerds idol:


But the most fun reason to read about Jobs in an old National Geographic? It might be to see a bearded, booted young man zooming about on a boss 1966 BMW motorcycle.

“Although Jobs drives the requisite Mercedes,” adds the article, “success seems not to have spoiled the first folk hero of the computer age. In plaid shirt and jeans, he still prefers, as a friend said, ‘to drive his motorcycle to my place, sit around and drink wine, and talk about what we’re going to do when we grow up.’”

Jeremy Berlin is an editor at National Geographic magazine.

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