’Deep Blue’ Breaks The Surfaceff

London’s Andy Byatt's love affair with the ocean began at age two, when the world was at the brink of nuclear holocaust. It was in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis that Byatt, the son of a Scotsman working for the British Foreign Service on the Communist island, would watch his father go spear-fishing to put protein on the dinner table in a country where food was sparse.

“The annoying thing was, because I was very small and couldn't swim, I wasn't allowed to go out and see all the things he saw. The only way to rectify this was to take up diving,” recalls the London-born director of “Deep Blue,” a feature-length documentary compiled from the award-winning BBC series, "The Blue Planet." But suffering from a hearing problem, Byatt was kept by his parents' concern from taking his first plunge until he was 21. From that day, he never looked back.

Later earning a master's degree in hydrogeology from University College London, Byatt joined the BBC's Natural History Unit in 1989 as a safety diver and went on to work for several highly acclaimed wildlife documentaries such as “The Swarm” and “The Really Wild Show to Wildlife Special: Whale” before signing on as a producer for “The Blue Planet” in 1997.

The series of eight 50-minute programs probed into the furthest reaches of the world's oceans and required five years of filming to complete, twice bringing Byatt to Japan's coasts to film sequences on firefly squid and bluefin tuna. In some cases, photographers were able to capture unprecedented images of uncharted waters, and of previously unknown creatures. "Deep Blue" is a 90-minute-long highlight of footage from those five years at sea.

“With ‘Deep Blue,’ the idea was always to make this an emotional ride and to find the strongest emotional path through the film,” explains Byatt, pointing out that his job isn't to lecture the public, but to enthuse it. Several scenes in ‘Deep Blue’ are indeed heart-rending, including footage of killer whales foraging the coast for unsuspecting sea lions, pummeling their victims tens of meters clear of the water with their immensely powerful tails.

In another instance, a pod of orcas target a vulnerable baby Grey Whale swimming alongside its mother, ultimately suffocating it. Other scenes are simply dazzling — swordfish swimming through a gyrating school of sardines, writhing reef sharks in a feeding frenzy, and an army of crabs crawling across a distant, wave-swept beach.

As critics state, ‘Deep Blue’ is more an artistic piece than scientific, and no corners were cut when the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the world's finest orchestra, was appointed to provide the soundtrack composed by Byatt's longtime friend George Fenton.

“Classical music is wonderful and timeless,” says Byatt. “With great classical music, you can characterize and pick out elements of the animals, and drive an emotional spot,” a characteristic that holds especially true during scenes when the ocean's largest animals, the Blue Whale and Whale Shark, swim grandiosely to Fenton's score and Michael Gambon's imposing narration.

But ‘Deep Blue's’ true climax arrives as submersibles descend to 5,000 meters below the surface to document the creatures and landscapes of the abyss, traveling above a deep gorge that appears to penetrate the planet's core.

“In terms of constructing the movie, it was always in our minds that the furthest out, the deepest in an emotional sense, should ideally be the end points of the film,” says the Scotsman, who claims filming the deep ocean proved one of the most difficult, involving infiltrating an alien environment while negotiating relationships with scientists to gain access to submarines and ROVs.

Even the Berlin Philharmonic's melodious tunes are swept away in favor of electronic sounds. “In a way we've created a vision of heaven and hell — we've had biological hell, which is the bottom of the abyss with the hot vents roaring away, and then we come out and we're floating through space with dolphins, and there's no sound.”

The spectacle is not without a message, however. Gambon's narrative ends with the words "we continue to plunder our secret world" as the big blue sea on screen makes way for the credits.

“The ocean would be a great deal happier if we didn't exist,” Byatt confesses, “and we need to regulate ourselves or we won't have an ocean to play in; the next generation will not have the same amazing spectacle that we have.”

Byatt, who enjoys free diving among mullet in an estuary near his home in Brittany on his days away from work, is naturally one of the first proponents of marine conservation. “My hope,” he adds, “is that people will come out of that film thinking what a spectacular, incredible place.”