Programme Notes

HE INTRODUCED US TO THE WORLD. NOW HE TELLS HIS GREATEST STORY. A LIFE ON OUR PLANET PROGRAMME NOTES BY DIRECTOR JONNIE HUGHES Throughout his career, Sir David Attenborough has a made hundreds of hours of iconic television, yet A Life on Our Planet is his first feature film. Why did he choose this film to make the move to the big screen, and why now? The film’s producer- director, Jonnie Hughes, explains its genesis. Sir David Attenborough is sandwiched in some kind of Soviet-era cage, his hands and feet on pads that make him appear as though he’s bracing to lift a wardrobe. A machine springs to life, buzzing, hesitating and then returning to its labours for a disconcertingly long time. Aerial shot of Chernobyl, Ukraine difference to me. It’s these two,” he motions to two younger members of our crew, Ilaira and Joe, “that we should be worried about.” In truth, none of us are in any danger – our exposure is carefully managed by our guides. But in a very real sense, David’s sentiment sums Sir David Attenborough & Jonnie Hughes in the Maasai Mara, Kenya up why he is going through such an odd ordeal, and why he has chosen to do this film at all. We’re in Chernobyl, at the end of our first day’s Thanks to his remarkable life spent exploring the filming here, and the machine is scanning us for wildest places of our planet, travelling perhaps radioactive particles as we exit the 30km exclusion more widely and deeply than anyone has ever zone. Eventually, to my relief, its red lights turn to done across the Earth, David has come to clearly white, signalling that the dust David is coated in see a danger that for most of us is as invisible as is not as radioactive as it might be, and the gate isotopes. swings open. He has witnessed a serious decline in the living world over his lifetime. He has seen the rainforests retreating and the grasslands emptying, and has searched ever harder for species hanging on in hidden corners of the world. He’s observed a downward trend that is set to cause a disaster far more profound and with more lasting impacts than the desolation of Chernobyl – a decline that will have a more limited impact on his life, but will come to define the lives of all those who follow him. He is dedicated to lending his considerable profile to efforts to halt and then reverse this decline, and he’s in a good place to do so. Sir David Attenborough pictured inside derelict building in Chernobyl, Ukraine “Saving our planet is no longer a technological problem, it’s a communications challenge,” David Here is a man I had first eagerly watched on has said on several important stages. To bring television in the 70s on the sofa with my parents, about the wholesale change required to transition and who had very much determined the course of to a sustainable existence on Earth, we all need to my adult life; someone who exists as an icon not hear a new story – a positive, inspiring one in which only for me, but also for tens of millions of others. we take control of our impact and aspire to a future And I’ve brought him into a place so dangerous, no in balance with nature. A key component of David’s one has been allowed to spend more than a few efforts to assist in this great communications hours here in more than 30 years. challenge is this film. “Don’t look so worried,” he says to me, “I’m in my A month later, David and I are with the crew in a nineties, it’s not going to make the slightest bit of very different setting – the impossibly vast plains of But right now, everyone needs to understand the value of nature’s diversity, because the greater the biodiversity of Earth, the more secure all life on Earth becomes, including – in fact especially – humankind. Homo sapiens is the most demanding species in nature. We may not be aware of it, but we need towering forests across one third of the land surface to lock away carbon and keep the climate stable. We need millions of pollinators, billions of soil organisms, and megatonnes of plankton to keep Sir David Attenborough pictured walking in the Maasai Mara, Kenya the food we eat in supply. We need weird plants deep in jungles so we can design our medicines; the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Surely here, if anywhere, marshlands in the valleys to prevent our houses wildlife is still thriving. We’ve timed our visit for the from flooding; and coral reefs and mangrove arrival of the wildebeest herds and, sure enough, swamps to protect our coastal communities. here they are below us, flooding in from Tanzania by the day. One and a half million of them, forming Our planet’s biodiversity provides all the things we orderly queues across the plains, trudging on their need for free. But it will only do so if there’s plenty eternal pilgrimage in search of the places where of it – and at the moment, it’s under attack. During the rains have just been and fresh shoots flash a single lifetime – David’s lifetime – the activities of lime green. our species have dramatically reduced biodiversity across the globe. We’re snuffing out habitats, reducing and removing thousands of animal and plant populations, and driving entire species to extinction. Wildebeest in the Maasai Mara, Kenya On some unseen cue, the wildebeest break from Palm oil plantation next to forested region in Borneo their migration lines and form huge feeding fronts. Each cell has more than a thousand necks arched down; mouths sweeping the grasses. The wildebeest ravage the grassland, yet they are essential for its continued existence. While their teeth slice the grasses off at the base, their hooves churn up the soil helping seed the next generation, and their manure fertilises it. Too few wildebeest and the grasses deplete. Too many, and they may be grazed to destruction. But the lions, cheetahs Land cleared for Coral bleaching as a result of and leopards dozing under the trees ensure there agricultural use global warming are never too many wildebeest. In 2014, when we at Silverback Films were working It’s the universal story of nature – all life is in with both WWF and David on the Netflix series Our balance, everything unknowingly relies on each Planet, WWF calculated that populations of wild other. Biodiversity is what drives our living world. animals had declined on average by more than half It’s the magic dust that enables life to do what it since 1970. This shocking statistic made real the does so well. It’s the millions of different species, steady dismantling of the living world that David the billions of different individuals, and the had become increasingly aware of throughout his trillions of different characteristics they all have. career. It quantified the terrifying extent of our The trouble is, we’ve tended to take it for granted. impact and qualified that, in addition to climate change, a second red warning light was now He soon learned that life had not progressively flashing on the dashboard of Earth – ‘biodiversity gained complexity, as he may have imagined. loss’. It also made us all decide we urgently Every few hundred million years it was violently needed to make a single film that broadcast this interrupted in its labours. On five occasions, biodiversity crisis far and wide – David’s witness a fundamental change in the environment statement and his vision for the future – a personal triggered a catastrophic destabilisation of nature account of a story that involves us all. – biodiversity suddenly slumped, the life-support machine glitched, and the living world fell into an unstoppable downward spiral, unravelling in a brutal mass extinction. Once the dust had settled, life had no option but to rebuild – painstakingly reassembling the complexities of its machine over millions of years by trial and error. “It’s difficult to imagine that it’s happening now,” he says in one of the interviews we record for this film. He’s dressed in a smart blazer, talking directly down the lens, but also directly at me, thanks to a clever mirror rig that Gavin, our director of photography, Young orangutan in Borneo has built in front of the camera. It has a powerful effect. With this contraption, he’s talking to me, and therefore, you. He is animated, instinctively drawing on all his skills as a storyteller to keep me engaged, and it’s working: “You wake up in the morning and the sun comes up and the newspaper comes through the letterbox… but I suppose I think about it most days, to some degree.” David is clearly troubled by the vision he has. He knows what happens next. We humans will, accidentally, clumsily, destabilise nature. We’ll tip Tiger in Boreal Forests of Russia’s Pacific Coast the world into a sixth mass extinction. Nature, our life-support machine, will seize up. We are, it is It’s a perversely hot day in July 2018. We find ourselves suddenly clear, involved in an act of self-destruction. in a deep, ferny gully in Leicestershire – a long- abandoned railway cutting – and David is in a jubilant Unless we build a new kind of life on our planet. mood. This is a place he used to come to as a boy.

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