Mark Lewis' first film, Cane Toads, launched him as a unique director of films about animals (and humans). As we show all his films on BBC Four, he speaks to us about his work, from nappy-wearing chickens to the finer points of bulls' testicles.
BBC Four: Do you think your films fit into nature filmmaking in the broader sense?
Mark Lewis: I find what's called 'nature filmmaking' often concentrates on the A-list animals. There have been so many films about tigers and elephants or the lions of the Kalahari. They're all valid but I find the animals that I make films about much more interesting. We live with chickens and cats and dogs and rats. They are entwined with us and to fail to understand them is, I think, sad. As a reaction to the traditional natural history filmmakers, I find animals that are regarded as being banal, like the chicken, and celebrate them.
BBC Four: I read a comment on the internet from someone who rented The Natural History of the Chicken. They were disappointed that it wasn't a straight-up natural history film about poultry.
Mark Lewis: The whole genre of natural history filmmaking is a weird one that needs to be shaken up. A chicken that's wearing diapers in a house in Florida, that's its natural history. Their natural history has been bastardised by humans. I deliberately use titles. The Wonderful World of Dogs was probably the first. I didn't think it was a wonderful world for dogs because I was treading in their poo and getting woken up morning and night living in a city that was full of them. At the same time we had The Wonderful World of Disney on TV every Sunday night full of all these sweet animals.
BBC Four: Cane Toads was your first major film. What drew you to that subject?
Mark Lewis: I live in New South Wales and we call Queensland our 'Deep North', it's a very conservative state. The first time I went to Queensland I remember riding my motorbike at night. I was on some sub-tropical coast road which was covered with these green things. That was my first introduction to the toad - trying to dodge them at night. I am a devotee of keeping newspaper clippings and interesting stories and several years later I noticed a story about how the cane toad was spreading. The research led me down all of these diverse paths. Some people smoke the cane toad, some turn it into leather - so there were many different facets of the story. It really fascinated me that one small animal could be pulled in so many different directions.
BBC Four: Your films have a very distinctive style. Did that arise from thinking hard about how to tell all these stories about the toad?
Mark Lewis: The style I developed for Cane Toads came absolutely naturally. I wrote a treatment, sequences and a lot of storyboards. I made it a very structured film because I wanted to visualise certain elements. I guess the greatest influence on natural history filmmaking at the same time had been the BBC and David Attenborough's programmes. There was always one person leading you through all of
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the stories. In this case the lay person was so much more interesting and had such a good connection to the animal that I found them much more appropriate to use than the so-called experts. So it evolved through a combination of things: finding great characters and deciding that they were the best people to tell the story.
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Filming rats (at their level) |
At the same I decided to do all of the interviews directly to camera because I felt the interviewee engaged with the audience in a much more direct fashion - the audience became a receiver of information rather than being a witness to a conversation. The other element that I really thought a lot about was filming the cane toads themselves. I never tried to look down on the cane toad with the camera; instead I always tried to shoot it from its own eye level. That was instinctive too: that if you're telling an animal's point of view you want to be looking across at it as if you're another cane toad.
BBC Four: The rat film is probably the most acute example of that...
Mark Lewis: [Laughs] It certainly is!
BBC Four: What sort of preparation do you have to do filming animals like this?
Mark Lewis: It's like directing real people. In order to direct a cane toad or a chicken you've got to know what motivates them from one side of the screen to the other. I find with most animals it's usually two things: food or sex. Obviously if you put a chicken out of frame left and put chicken feed out of frame right you know it's going to go along the line you want it to walk. So a lot of directing animals is learning what makes them tick. Rat was probably the most challenging film because when you encounter a rat it runs in the opposite direction. In order to do that film we used a lot of habituated rats. Also, depending on the various re-enactments you also have to prepare props and sets ahead of time.
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