Taira Malaney has spoken on her documentary ‘Turtle Walker’, which has been making a lot of noise off late due to the theme it presents. It chronicles the life of Indian sea turtle conservationist Satish Bhaskar, and is produced by Taira Malaney, Vikram Malaney, Angad Dev Singh, Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar.
Talking about where the idea of the documentary came from, the director explained in detail, “I think the core cinematic idea for Turtle Walker was to make a film that would appeal to a youth audience, coastal communities across India. India has a vast, vast coastline. I realized in a brief stint that I spent in the Andaman-Nicobars when I was younger working with kids. It was a marine conservation program we were running there, that was being run by Reef Watch Foundation. And I realized during that time that, you know, that the children had, they lived on the edge of one of the most beautiful coral reefs that I had ever seen. But very few of them had actually been underwater and experienced it.”
She added, “And when I kind of prodded more just to understand why I started to realize that some of them were quite fearful of the ocean. That’s something that extends to other parts of our country too. Many of us grew up not learning how to swim or not really having a relationship of understanding and comfort in the ocean. It was more a place that was so unknown and quite scary. And so, the main focus is to introduce this space- the ocean as a space of wonder and beauty.”
The filmmaker also explained the colour palette of her documentary and revealed, “This is a documentary, so we were out in these spaces. You’re basically working with what you have before you, so I think with that limitation in mind, we sort of knew very early on that filming in these islands, there’s going to be a lot of blues and a lot of warm-like browns and earthy sort of tones of the sand. We leaned into that and even with the recreation scenes, we tried to pick certain props and even with his clothing and accessories and stuff like that, we tried to lean into those yellows and blues and sort of more earthy browns.
I think with a documentary, your color palette is, in many ways limited by what is happening and unfolding before you. And so, in that sense, a lot of it was just learning to play with what we had there before us, but of course for the recreations, we did have some creative liberties there, where we sort of were able to control that a little bit more.”
The director continued saying, “But when we got to the edit and the editor saw the rushes, he and I sat, discussed and realized that there was so much power in being able to see the beautiful landscapes in their entirety and not cut those out. And so we decided to go ahead and keep the original aspect ratio. And Satish was such a shy and reserved person and early on, when we were filming a lot of the more cinema verité scenes with him, we decided to start filming a lot more close because we realized that there was a lot of power in his eyes and his expressions.
On her research for the documentary
So, in terms of research I had been watching some films through the years, different wildlife films that had been playing at this festival in the US called Jackson Wild, and I’d been seeing trailers, and this one trailer had really, like, piqued my interest back in 2016 before I’d even started making this film, and it was for a film called Jago. It was directed by this man called James Reid who also co-directed My Octopus Teacher, and when I’d seen the film at that time I was really inspired by it, and they’d used a lot of recreations as well and it had a lot of similarities. And James ended up being the EP on Turtle Walker.
Another film that inspired me was The Serengeti Rules, which came out in 2018. Our DOP is trained in narrative storytelling and cinematography for the narrative form so when he sort of said, “Okay, you know, I think we can do this,” it gave me a lot more faith in experimenting because I knew that there was someone who already had that understanding of how to frame and how to compose for these kinds of scenes.
Planning for medical emergencies while shooting
I think that was a very interesting learning experience for us because most of us didn’t come from a wildlife filmmaking background. This was our first experience doing it, and so there was a lot of learning through this process. Working in these remote natural locations in terms from a directing perspective, like you really need to go in, um, prepared for all sorts of scenarios. You may end up actually going and spending several days and not getting that, so these more wildlife scenes were quite challenging and I think it really required us to work with a small team because you can’t go in there with a lot of people, so how do you maximize the skillset of people. At times, you’re sort of playing multiple roles on a project like this, so I think that was something.
It was having a really lean team but also sort of planning for various different scenarios, so I think for me it was important just to go in prepared to shoot various scenes, like a whole number of different scenes, and then sort of adapt. If we weren’t able to shoot something, what else could we film during that time? It was always sort of like a trial and error and re-sort of structuring to figure out what we were able to best achieve at that moment in time. Even with the elements, you know, for example, there was one shoot that we had planned in Lakshadweep and the day we arrived on Agatti Island, there was a huge cyclone that hit the islands, and so all of a sudden our plan went from traveling…. to three to four of the outer islands that are quite far. We were suddenly restricted to just Agatti and the neighboring islands. We had this task of having to completely restructure the entire shoot and plan. But I think that’s what partly what documentary filmmaking is about, being prepared for every scenario.
The collaboration with our cinematographer, our DOP, Krish, who has made several films with him before, and in fact, we grew up together. Like, we spent our childhood together, all went to school together. So, we really sort of have a good synergy working on set.
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