Common Curtis
Cliff Curtis will be the first to tell you that he’s no David Attenborough – or Morgan Freeman – but as narrator for new locally produced nature series Dynamic Planet, he has clearly given the subject matter a lot of thought. Shaun Bamber reports.
“Just be yourself.” Seems like solid advice right? But not – as it turns out – if you’re Cliff Curtis.
Granted, he is an actor and an in-demand one at that – Curtis has been making a living out of not being himself for at least 30 years now, racking up appearances in more than 60 movies and TV shows.
From a caddish 19th-century opium dealer in his 1992 feature film debut Desperate Remedies to blue-skinned alien Tonowari in Avatar: The Way Of Water – not to mention any number of Latino, South American and Middle Eastern characters in between – it’s rare that the Kiwi acting icon gets a chance to play anything close to regular old Cliff Curtis.
So when the job of narrating a nature documentary comes along – and a New Zealand-produced nature documentary no less – surely that’s just such a chance?
Evidently, the guy directing the narration thought so – until Curtis set him straight.
“He was like, ‘Just beyourself’andIwaslike,‘Bro, you don’t want me, bro. You don’t want me just being me’,” explains the 55-year-old actor, talking on the phone from Rotorua.
“And any time I tested it, I’d say, ‘OK, bro, if you want me to just be me’ – and then he’d be like, ‘Uh, could you just back that up. I didn’t really quite catch what you were saying?’
“Yeah, you don’t want me, bro. You want a revised version of me. I can’t just talk just like me because that won’t work. I’m not really a David Attenborough kind of fulla, ay? “But if I’m being a narrator, then I start to want to sound like a narrator, and in my mind the ultimate narrator is David Attenborough. He’s the
Jedi master of anything to do with anything like this.”
Curtis himself hasn’t worked on anything quite like Dynamic Planet before – it’s his first nature doco, his first time narrating.
Filmed over three years – “partly that’s because of Covid”
– the four-part series is beautifully shot, taking viewers to all seven continents, from Arctic to Antarctic, Himalayas to Amazon, Namibia to Doubtful Sound in New Zealand’s deep south.
“The whole production did a great job – travelling to all these places around the world. I don’t know how they did it.
“Some magazine shows are done as cheap as possible, and you don’t really get the full experience. But the standard and the quality of this show is very high.”
Climate change is the broad topic – or perhaps more accurately the backdrop to what you see on screen – but there’s a focus on innovation and adaptation as much as there is on impacts.
“The series isn’t trying to talk about a theory, or statistics, or anything like that – it’s not trying to get into the discussion or the argument around climate change,” says Curtis.
“It’s just a show that’s looking at what people are doing, really – people who are doing interesting things in the world.
“So (for example) in this region there is ice melting and, therefore, people have to move, or vegetation or animals have to move further up the mountains in order to exist.
“Now that’s just a fact. That’s what’s happening. You can say it’s because of climate change, you can say it’s because of anything you want. You can say that it’s got nothing to do with climate change. But the fact is that it’s happening.”
As for his own views on climate
change, Curtis says he has
“a very sort of uneducated, unsophisticated, pragmatic view of environmentalism”.
“In practical terms it’s like, ‘OK, no one’s been doing the dishes and the dishes are getting stacked up on the bench – that’s a fact. Is anybody going to do the dishes?
“And if you don’t want to do the dishes, that’s fine. But somebody’s got to do the dishes. Otherwise we’re not going to have any plates to eat off, you know?
“And that’s OK. Some people don’t want to have plates – fine. Don’t have plates. Some people do – wash the dishes. That’s it, you know? It doesn’t have to be that complicated.
“It’s just clean up the mess that you’re leaving, right? And sometimes you have to clean up a mess that someone else left. And you might not be happy about that.
“That’s kind of my attitude towards climate change. I don’t wanna argue with anyone, I just want to know, is anybody interested in doing the dishes?”