‘Elephant’ in the room
The 2019 Envelope Live screening series kicked off early this month at the Montalbán in Hollywood with “The Elephant Queen.” The Envelope welcomes a select audience of guild members and awards voters during the season to consider some of the year’s most talked-about films, followed by Q&As with cast and filmmakers, moderated by journalists from The Times. For videos of these sessions, please visit latimes.com/envelope.
Directors Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble and composer Alex Heffes were on hand to discuss with The Times’ Michael Ordoña why they made the nature documentary, and to describe some of the extremes they went to in order to capture its unique footage — including run-ins with poachers. At one point in the film, Deeble dug a hole in the mud to hide himself and his nimble RED camera rig in a man-sized metal box to spy on the tenuous ecosystem at a rainy-season watering hole in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park.
Stone said the whole process took about 10 years from conception to completion, including four years spent in the field with the animals. “It took a year and a half to find Athena,” she said of the titular heroine, the matriarch of a group of elephants trying to survive a brutal drought. “We always feel she actually found us. She appeared behind camp one day, in the shade of a tree with her family.”
“The Elephant Queen” debuts on Apple TV+ on Friday.
“THE ELEPHANT
Queen” producer Lucinda Englehart, above left, with composer Alex Heffes and co-directors Vicky Stone and Mark Deeble at the L.A. Times Envelope Live screening Oct. 1 at the Montalbán Theatre.
We want to make a film to reach the broadest possible audience, but also we really want to make a difference on the ground in Kenya. VICTORIA STONE CO-DIRECTOR
We’re losing, I think the figures are something like 30,000 elephants a year; so one every 15 or 20 minutes. MARK DEEBLE CO-DIRECTOR AND CINEMATOGRAPHER
It was the balance between the music and the sound effects and knowing when to pull back, where to let the natural sounds play and where to go for heightened emotion. ALEX HEFFES COMPOSER