wild things
It’s eat, prey, live on BBC America’s ‘The Hunt’
PLENTY of nature documentaries include sequences of predation, that dramatic dance between hunter and prey, but according to the filmmakers of BBC America’s new series “The Hunt,” they’ve all been doing it wrong. “We felt that nobody had ever really captured it in the right way,” executive producer Alastair Fothergill tells The Post. “There are lots of shows — ‘ Shark Week’ is full of them — where predators are purported as ... the villains. And actually they’re not. They are the hardest working animals in nature, and they usually fail.”
Fothergill has made a career producing visually stunning series like “Planet Earth,” “Frozen Planet” and “The Blue Planet.” Whereas executive producers are usually after the “kill shot,” as he calls it, “The Hunt” (premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. on BBC America) sees that as the least interesting footage.
“Once they kill, you know what’s going to happen — they’re going to eat the prey,” he says. “It’s like a murder. Once the murder’s happened, what’s interesting is how it occurred.”
That’s good news for squeamish viewers turned off by gory scenes or hunting, as he says, “I don’t think you ever see any blood in the whole series.” Some may even end up rooting for the kill, as the documentary has tried to stay true to the natural ratio that most hunts are unsuccessful.
“There’s an arctic episode that features a polar bear that keeps on failing. Through the episode she gets thinner and thinner. We showed that in a big screening, and when she finally gets the kill, the whole auditorium cheered,” Fothergill says. “I thought ‘Great, we’ve done what we wanted to do.’ ”
For “The Hunt,” the production crew spent three years filming on all seven continents in more than 100 different diverse locations, including the Arctic, jungle, ocean, plains and coasts to document the specific challenges to predators in every habitat. Each location presented specific hurdles for filming, too. To shoot polar bears in the arctic in early spring, producers had to hire an expensive ice-breaking ship for five weeks. To capture action shots, like driving 45 mph alongside wild dogs, they would use a Cineflex, a special long lens gyrostablized camera system originally developed for “Planet Earth,” that got mounted on elephants, four-wheel drive vehicles and helicopters.
Their efforts paid off in the form of at least two segments in every episodes of wildlife behavior that has never before been filmed, according to Fothergill, including a blue whale feeding in the ocean, which he’s been trying to capture for 25 years.
“They’re utterly amazing images,” he says. “A scientist satellite-tagged the blue whales, it took four different shots to get it. We had the Cineflex on the boat, we had divers in the water. These whales go 20 to 25 knots so you can’t really catch up with them ... It’s a mega-challenge.”