Frozen Planet’s Vanessa Berlowitz Ate Braided Seal Intestine
First there was Blue Planet, then there was Planet Earth, and now there’s Frozen Planet, the latest installment in the BBC/Discovery Channel’s amazing nature-documentary series, and the first episode airs in the U.S. on Sunday. Vanessa Berlowitz, one of the show’s producer/directors, emailed with me about it. Her life is pretty boring, definitely do not read.
Vanessa! I hear you filmed polar bear cubs on an Arctic archipelago while you were five months pregnant, which is incredible. Were you tempted to name your baby something Arctic-themed? And how close did you get to the bears?
Filming a polar bear mom with two naughty three-month-old cubs was an absolute delight. I was pretty grumpy at the time and getting bad backache from spending 10 days searching by helicopter. My mood was transformed when we found this family. We stayed with her for three full days, and shot almost continuously by doing five-hour blocks and then landing so we could all get a few hours sleep in the helicopter. I had tears rolling down my face because I was laughing so much watching her trying to discipline her cubs. A classic moment was when she gently knocked one of the cubs into a dip in the snow — time out! I’ve definitely given a few of those to my three-year-old since — I like to think I picked up a few tips about discipline from my time with the polar bear mother.
No one has ever filmed such intimate footage of such a young polar bear family, as new moms are particularly wary and will take their new cubs away if they even smell a crew from up to two miles away. Shooting from a helicopter was the only way we could achieve this filming. The entire sequence is shot from the air — we hovered down wind of the family and stayed half a mile above them. The reason we could get such close shots was because we were using an unbelievably powerful zoom lens which is stabilized — this rig is called the Cineflex, and I pioneered it on Planet Earth. I wasn’t tempted to call our son something Arctic-themed simply because we had always wanted to call our baby Cameron, whether it was a girl or boy. He was actually conceived in India and then visited the Arctic later on! Mind you, I think that Aurora would be a lovely girl’s name!
I also hear that while filming in Greenland your helicopter was almost sucked into a waterfall in the ice (!), which sounds insane but is actually kind of difficult to imagine. What happened? (I’m envisioning like a giant magnetic frozen waterfall, although I know that’s probably not right.) Was it one of those slow-motion, life-passing-before-your-eyes scenarios?
You’re actually quite close to what happened. In the opening show, The Ends of the Earth, you will see an aerial shot that goes over the lip of a giant waterfall that plummets one mile down into the Greenland ice sheet. Being a typically ambitious director, I was really keen to get closer and closer to the water level and then do a classic Planet Earth-style shot where we rotate the camera through 180 degrees so you’re looking back at the waterfall while hovering over the big black hole into which the water was plunging. On take four, I started to feel that something wasn’t quite right. I don’t suffer from vertigo but began to feel really dizzy as I was watching the image rotating while also keeping an eye on the water below. Just as I noticed that the waterfall was coming closer to the lens, the pilot shouted that we were being sucked down into the shaft — cold air was pouring over the edge of the waterfall and pulling us down with it. I stared into the abyss and calmly thought “this is it, it’s all over” — there was only one way to go and it was down into the ice shaft where we would have been mangled by the torrential water and would soon crash into the ice walls. Fortunately our Norwegian pilot was unbelievably skilled and managed to maneuver us out. He calmly announced that that was our last take … I was not too disappointed to leave that waterfall behind.
(Oh my god!) Did you eat anything strange while on location? Any locally caught food?
Most challenging meal I had on Frozen Planet was fermented seal intestine — the Inuit make this traditional dish by plaiting together the intestine when it’s fresh and then burying it underground for about six months. It comes out green and slimy and smells a bit like blue cheese. I nearly passed out when it was offered to me as I knew that it would be such an insult to turn away such a highly prized food, which they only tend to offer to special guests. I took as little as I could and tried to swallow it without chewing. I had to stop myself from vomiting as it tasted like high meat mixed with stilton but with a jelly-like texture.
(Oh my god!!!) How did you bathe?
Bathing soon becomes a distant memory when you’re in the poles. You have to remember that we wear up to 10 layers at a time, so thankfully any smell gets trapped inside! We also work really hard to ensure we don’t sweat (by removing clothes so that the sweat doesn’t evaporate and then make you cold, which in turn can lead to hypothermia). Plus we wear special wicking fabrics like silk close to the skin. I would quite often go without washing for four to six weeks, which is less gross than it sounds as you don’t smell as much in the cold. Even if you do smell, no one notices because they probably smell too! The worst problem is when your gear gets covered in penguin poo, which absolutely stinks of rotting fish and seafood. I had to throw away a down jacket that they pooed on because I couldnt get rid of the smell.
Did you bring home any souvenirs? Has anyone thought to make you a “Literally the COOLest Mom Ever” mug?
I always try to bring back little things from location so that I can show my son when he is older and can understand what they are. My most prized souvenir is a two-inch-long crystal that looks like kryptonite, which was ejected by Antarctica’s only constantly active volcano, Mt. Erebus. I had been waiting for over six weeks for the weather to clear so that we could get up to the summit and film into the lava lake. I had a particularly scary flight as the wind had suddenly changed and blown volcanic fumes towards us, just as the weather had closed in. We had been forced to make an emergency descent. Just after showing the volcano scientist the footage that we shot, he gave me one of these extraordinary crystals as a reminder of that death-defying aerial shoot. My son Cameron has it on his mantelpiece in his room now.
Nice idea about the mug. Liz White, one of the directors on the series did make a great doll — my nickname on the series was Helicopter Barbie, which I earned because I did so much of the aerial directing on the series. Liz dressed up a Barbie doll with a miniature replica of my flying suit and wrote ‘Helicopter Barbie’ on the lapel! I was very touched.
Where are you now, and what’s next?
In New York for the launch of Frozen Planet. I’m already working on a really exciting two-parter on grizzly bears, which we’re shooting this summer in Alaska with multiple camerapeople and loads of hi-tech HD remote cameras. We’re going to show grizzly bears in a way you have never seen them before. We are also starting to develop the next big landmark series to follow Frozen Planet. That’s still top secret, so you’ll have to wait and see!
You are the coolest person I have ever interacted with.
Frozen Planet premieres in the U.S. on Sunday, March 18, at 8 p.m. on the Discovery Channel. (The David Attenborough-narrated version is also available on DVD.)