Since its first IMAX movie, “To Fly” in 1976, Laguna Beach-based MacGillivray Freeman Films has produced more than 30 movies out of its OC headquarters,25 of them in the IMAX format,and its staff has grown to 26 full-time employees. The company produces a film roughly every nine months, and currently has three IMAX features playing in theaters: “Everest,” which has grossed more than $107 million since its release last year; “Adventures in Wild California,”which opened in March, “Dolphins,” which was released last month and had grossed $35 million as of Oct. 31. The company is editing “Journey Into Amazing Caves” for a release next year and has begun shooting “Coral Reef Adventure” for a March 2002 opening. Company President Greg MacGillivray was interviewed by the OC Business Journal’s Susan Schaben at the recent opening of “Dolphins” at the Irvine Spectrum Center.
What role did you play in the production of “Dolphins”?
I conceived, wrote the story, then produced and directed and also photographed all the above water and a little bit of the underwater scenes. But for most of the underwater scenes I hired the two best underwater cameramen of dolphins, Bob Talbot and Paul Atkins. They have a lot of experience filming dolphins all around the world. There are a lot of tricks to filming dolphins, so I wanted to make sure I got the best people.
Our shooting ratio was really high: about 35 hours for one hour of film. About as high a ratio as we have ever had, because dolphins don’t take cues, they don’t come when you want them, and sometimes you turn the camera on and they disappear on you. You can’t really direct a dolphin like you would a human or like you could a trained animal.
I wanted to make a film about wild dolphins, not about trained animals or dolphins like Flipper that you show as a wild animal but it’s actually trained. I wanted to have truly wild animals and show the scientists and others working with those animals out in the ocean, not in tanks or elsewhere. It just requires many more days of filming and many more hours of work and a lot more film and expense, but you end up with something that the audience relates to. …
We tested the IMAX print with audience members in three IMAX theaters to find out people’s likes and dislikes and then changed the film around for the final version. It’s a documentary so there is never a fixed script, it’s always in flux. We continually re-evaluated the work and the story and how well the characters are developed.
What are you doing right now?
We are finishing a film about two women who journey into caves. We are also in the middle of shooting a film about coral reefs that follows my plan to release films about the health of the the ocean so the audience can gain respect for the ocean. My main personal goal is to save the ocean. I want to make sure that the ocean and its animals and plants survive to the next century. “The Living Sea,” “Dolphins” and “Coral Reef” are three of five films I want to make about the ocean.
What did you like the most about shooting “Dolphins”?
The thing that most moved me is encountering how intelligent dolphins are and how curious they are about humans. It’s a mark of their intelligence. There’s really not any other animal I know that has that same level of curiosity about us or about their own environment.
When you locate a group of dolphins and jump into the water with a camera they immediately come over to check you out and try to figure out who you are and what you are doing, what this camera is that you have in your hands. Why does it have shiny things on it? What are those knobs? Why does it make a whirling sound? And that is what I think separates them from other animals. All other animals in the ocean would flee from a roaring camera.
How do you get big-name actors such as Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan to narrate?
It’s a struggle. You have to do a lot of work and you have to talk them into it because they are accustomed to making large salaries. Pierce Brosnan gets something like $20 million a movie, so he doesn’t have to do narration for 40-minute films. So you have got to more or less talk them into it. Get them invested in what your love is and why you are making the movie.
In this case, Brosnan loves ocean conservation and he feels like I do that oceans are important to us on land. So first of all, he listened to us and once we were finished he said this film is really great and loved the film to begin with and said yes I could really get behind that. We pay them, but it’s minimal. Same thing is true with Sting, he believes in the same conservation causes. His central cause is the rainforest, but he feels very strongly about the oceans.
What are your favorite films?
I think “The Living Sea” was the most fun, because my family was able to go with me on most the locations. I really enjoyed showing my children and my wife different places and having them experience every joy I have seeing the world.
What films are you most proud of?
I think I would have to say four films. “To Fly” was the film that started the IMAX format and that was the last film I worked with my partner, Jim Freeman. And then “The Living Sea,” “Everest” and “Dolphins.”
Why has MacGillivray Freeman Films nearly doubled its staff to 26 in the past couple of years?
“Everest” caused us to expand because the marketing and distribution was so humongous and it happened all at once. We changed from releasing going for three years to releasing a film all at once in all theaters. That was a completely different shift, and we needed more people to do that.
What do you do in your spare time?
My passion really is surfing. I’ve surfed since I was 14 and I live in Laguna Beach, a surfing beach for 27 years. I really love surfing. I love the rhythms of the ocean, the freedom and the sense of meditation you get when you are out on the ocean sitting on a surfboard. Not even riding a wave, but sitting there is a meditative process. It clears your mind and gives you spirit in a way that no other sport has really done for me. I love other sports, too, particularly volleyball and scuba diving since 1984. I was particularly excited about filming “Adventures in Wild California” because it told the story of Jeff Clark, who did what we all envision is the perfect thing: to find the perfect surf spot and surf there all alone. He did it with a big-wave surf spot which is really treacherous and so he’s kind of a hero in the surfing world.
Do you miss doing surfing films?
I used to shoot surfing films, but don’t miss it because I’m able to do it with “Wild California.” One of my specialties was shooting films from the water where I would be swimming with the camera getting into the right position and conserving my film and getting the right shot.
One time at Sunset Beach on a very big 20-foot day, I got pinned by a wave and the impact and it held me under for a long time. When the wave washed away and I felt I could come up and get a breath of air, I was all of a sudden in these conditions that I had never seen before. I was in water like soapsuds and I couldn’t swim. It was like being in quicksand. It was really scary. Finally got my head above the suds and got a breath of air before the next wave hit me. I got to the beach and laid there for about an hour.
What about non-70mm films?
I don’t do any 35mm. I used to do a lot, but I don’t now because the 70mm IMAX large-frame format is so much more interesting for me. It’s a challenge every time you make a movie and there is a lot of experimentation that we can do with these films. It’s much more interesting to me than trying to do stuff in 35mm. This is a new medium and I have learned so much about it.
Your opening scenes for Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” were really memorable. Have you been asked to do any mainstream movies since, or have you turned any down?
Yes, Stanley Kubrick, the film he made after “The Shining,” called “Full Metal Jacket.” He wanted me to work for a year with him on that, but I couldn’t really do it because I was busy on an IMAX film, “Behold Hawaii.” He wanted me to do what I did on “The Shining” and work as a second unit overseeing direction and photography shots outside London and working with him in London.
I regret not doing it. Particularly now because he is gone and I admired and learned so much from the way he made films. Not only the films he made, but production techniques that he used and the production management that he used. He was a really clear thinker and understood how to get quality on film. Sometimes Hollywood does not teach the same values that Kubrick had.
Are you friends?
When we did “The Shining” it got to be a really close relationship. I kind of got the sense that he looked at me as a son because I was the same age as his daughter and his daughter was working on the film. I just got this minor sense that he wished he had a son. It was a great relationship because the work we did from outset was really beautiful. He was really open and sharing with me. I could ask him any question and he would spend time answering it, because he knew I understood what he was after and he knew I was after the same thing.
It was really an interesting time for me because I did learn so much and I reflect on that often. I wrote a little 10-page story about the whole experience after he died. I felt so sad because I never really got the chance to go back and tell him how much I appreciated him. I wrote him every three or four years. It wasn’t a lot of time I had with him. The nature of the film industry is such that you establish fond relationships with people from different fields and experience an intensity, a sense of camaraderie. It’s almost like you would in the army or war, but when the film is over, we split and go back to our normal lives.
