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Nature's delicate balance: An interview with the creators of A Perfect Planet

By Tim Augustin - 31 Dec 2020

Nature's delicate balance: An interview with the creators of A Perfect Planet

Image: BBC

Saddle up for a tour of Earth. 

Sir David Attenborough is back to narrate another breathtaking documentary: A Perfect Planet, on BBC. This series explores the delicate balance planet Earth strikes to support life, with footage from some of the most isolated parts of our world. In doing so, it will examine five forces of nature that shape the planet: weather, ocean currents, solar energy, volcanoes and humans. It was a massive production, filmed across 31 countries. 

Some of Asia’s most iconic natural habitats were also included in filming: Queen Sirikit Botanical Gardens, Thailand; Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam; Shennongjia National Park, China; the Gulf of Thailand; Lembeh, Indonesia; and the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. The series was shot over 1,113 days, accumulating more than 3,000 hours of original footage. One can only imagine how much was left on the cutting room floor. 

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with the creators of A Perfect Planet: series producer Huw Cordey, director Nick Jordan and producer Ed Charles. We also got to attend the series’ press launch with Sir David Attenborough! How did a series this ambitious manage to come together in such a beautiful way? We have the answers. 

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

What makes A Perfect Planet so unique?

The BBC have produced many, many incredible documentaries in the past. The Perfect Planet is just the latest of these, so what sets it apart? Series producer Huw Cordey thinks it’s the animals. “For me, the big natural history series that the BBC has made before are really concentrated on animal behaviour and I think what this series does is combine Earth’s sciences with behaviour.”

The show portrays animals from a different perspective, showcasing how perfectly balanced the planet’s forces are, as they come together to shape the lives of these creatures. “It’s the intimate animal stories and the big global picture of these forces which I think is what makes it different to other BBC natural history series.” Nick Jordan points out another difference: the series gives, “a fantastic view of Earth from space,” to visualise these forces. According to him, this extraterrestrial perspective helps the series feel fresh and unique. 

Despite these differences, the creators found the series’ production not too different from what they’ve done in the past. It did present unique challenges, though. Ed Charles points to Oceans, an episode of the series that focuses on the invisible ocean currents, which posed quite a challenge to capture on camera. One can see why. Another challenge was deciding what footage to use for the series, and what to leave behind. Says Charles:

What we were very keen to do on this series is that we didn’t just want to pick a cool story that happens in the ocean. It had to very much speak to the narrative of the force, which is ocean currents. But that’s not always easy when you can’t see the force. So that proved challenging. We had to sort of really work hard on our stories, making sure we found the right one. We found some great stories which we would have loved to have told. But they weren’t really relevant to our actual narrative, so we had to search a bit harder and work a bit harder.

 

A Perfect Planet is important right now

Image: BBC

But why now? Why is it so critical to draw attention to these forces and how they operate in our world at this point in time? Sir David Attenborough answers, “Because, I think everybody understands now, worldwide, that we are at a critical point and that our planet is close to real big disasters. We can stop them, but if we’re going to stop them, we’ve got to understand what they are and how they work. And that’s what this series tells.” 

Attenborough also points out that there are now three times as many human beings on this planet than when he first made a television programme. It’s an effective way of putting things in perspective, as he stresses the need for humans to change the way they engage with the planet. “That’s easy enough if we all behave in certain ways. But to start with it, you’ve got to recognise the problem and that’s what this last programme shows.” It boils down to reducing the demands that we make of the planet, in terms of how much we eat and what we throw away. He elaborates, “We should act with some restraint in how we treat the world around us. And if all of us did that on the Earth, the problems will be solved.”

A Perfect Planet comes out at a very strange time, when most of us are stuck inside and working from home. It’s the perfect time to take stock of everything we might have taken for granted in the past, including the world we live in and how we treat it. Attenborough notes that the pandemic has made a lot of us become much more aware of the natural world.

Executive producer Alastair Fothergill calls the show’s timing extraordinary, and informs us of a big climate change-related meeting (Conference of the Parties) that’s happening next year. A Perfect Planet comes right before that meeting, and addresses themes that will be discussed at the conference, which Fothergill calls, “probably the most important meeting for the planet for a generation.” Four years in the making, and the show happens to come out in the midst of a pandemic and right before a big environmental meeting. You can’t make that stuff up. 

 

What was making A Perfect Planet like?

Image: BBC

A Perfect Planet’s production was a humongous effort, with different teams tackling different episodes in various parts of the world over a long period of time. It took 60 weeks of post-production, which Cordey thinks is a record in natural history. I was curious about how the team came up with the five specific forces of nature the show highlights. To answer my question, Cordey simply says, “those forces chose themselves.” Once it was decided that the series was going to focus on the forces of nature, picking them out was a simple effort. 

The real challenge was collaborating with different teams across the series’ production to make sure the ongoing storytelling was as cohesive as possible. “You want to have a variety of different animals, you don’t want it to feel the same from one episode to the next. So, there’s sort of like an overview as well and that was my job as series producer. More than anything, you have to be ambitious. People expect a lot from these series. You have to push the boundaries, you get the time to do it, we get good budgets, and we have to retain that sense of scale and ambition so that our viewers are wowed and impressed by the results.”

Clearly, there was a lot of pressure on the documentary team to produce this series - but the results speak for themselves. Unbelievable visuals and stirring music accompany A Perfect Planet’s first episode, Volcanoes, where we learn about the titular structures and the forms of life that depend on them. Personally, my favourite part of the entire episode focuses on the life cycle of flamingoes residing near a volcanic area, and the trials that small chicks must go through to survive. Apparently, the sequence stayed with Sir David Attenborough, too:

The flamingo sequence is one of the most memorable sequences I've seen on television, shot under extraordinary difficult circumstances. It's impossible not to identify with these poor little chicks who have to make it to the edge to get away from the nest in the centre. But apart from that, it has been filmed so beautifully. The use of drones, that is to say, cameras that can take you up into the sky and see whatever you want to see, was so skillful. And the pictures are so indelibly planted on the mind. 

Image: BBC

While the team often managed to capture incredible sequences like this one, they weren’t always so lucky. Cordey mentions that pretty much everything the team filmed went into the series, and there was no wastage - but that doesn’t mean they captured everything they wanted. In the episode Volcanoes, the team wanted to film a lava lake in Ambrym Island in Vanuatu. Unfortunately, the shoot was postponed three times over the course of two and a half years, due to dangerous levels of volcanic activity.

Cordey says, “this went on time and time again to the point where we had to cancel it, because there was a massive earthquake on Ambrym and the lava lake that we hoped to film, one of only seven lava lakes in the world, disappeared completely. So, it went from being this incredible visual of a huge and powerful waterfall-like lava lake, to absolutely nothing.”

 

Life on planet Earth

Image: BBC

A Perfect Planet might prove to be essential viewing when it comes out in January, with its impossibly grand visuals and carefully laid out stories of Earth’s wildlife. Behind all that however, lies an even more essential message: Cordey states, “We are damaging this planet, but we need to sort of have a reset. As James Cameron the film director once said, we need to go from taker to care-taker.” 

Nick Jordan has high hopes for what lessons the show might impart to viewers, saying, “hopefully people will appreciate how interconnected our planet is and how we now are upsetting that interconnectivity that makes our life habitable. We are a closed bubble of atmosphere passing through space, so everything we do affects all other life around us."

“Hopefully as Huw said, we can start to live more in balance and become better stewards of that system so the future can be bright for the next generations to come.”

***

A Perfect Planet will be available to stream on BBC Player on January 4, 2021, with a new episode premiering every consecutive week. The show will also premiere on StarHub’s BBC Earth (Channel 407) on January 11, 2021, with new episodes weekly after that. Check out all the new TV shows and movies from December you should watch here. 

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