An interview with Doug Allan
The wildlife cameraman discusses memorable moments from his career
In a career spanning four decades, Doug Allan has made a name as one of the world’s top wildlife camera operators, with credits on many of the BBC Natural History Unit’s series. He is best known for filming in extreme environments, including in polar regions, mountains and underwater. From polar bears and walruses to emperor penguins, gorillas and great white sharks, his work has won five BAFTAs, not to mention several Emmys. In the words of his old collaborator and friend David Attenborough: “Wildlife cameramen don’t come much more special than Doug.”
Doug was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. His assignments are usually about three to six weeks, or longer in remote locations such as the Antarctic. Some years, he’s spent as much as 230 days away filming. Features editor Ben Hoare caught up with him between shoots in Bristol.
What was the most satisfying shoot?
For Planet Earth [2006], polar fixer Jason Roberts and I went to film polar bears emerging from their den in February and March. I’d done that before but, for this series, we were granted permission to go to a fabulous place called Kong Karls Land, a protected area 200km east of Svalbard. The BBC had been trying for years to persuade the Norwegian authorities to allow a visit, ever since two scientists, based in the Bogen Valley, watched 28 polar bear dens emerging in one season. That’s a really high density.
The Norwegian authorities finally said: “OK, you can go, but only two people, only two helicopter flights – in and out – so you’re going to have to take everything you need in one trip. And no snow machines.” My initial reaction was, what a pain that’s going to be, but it ended up being the greatest experience, because when you’re forced to walk, you really become immersed in the environment. You learn to ‘read’ the snow. If you do it right, it’s like walking on a pavement, but if you don’t, you end up to your knees in ‘softies’. There’s also the possibility of meeting a polar bear…
We were staying in a cabin and had regular visits from polar bears, because it was located where the sea ice meets the land ice. All along the shoreline there are cracks, which the seals use to stick their heads up to breathe, and the polar bears know that. Any bear hunting within a few miles downwind is going to smell you and come looking, so we got frequent visitors to our cabin. It was magical. Just the bears and us – totally simple. There are few chances of a shoot like that nowadays. The style of filming today is much more cinematic, with more sophisticated equipment.
And your most frustrating shoot?
Looking for snow leopards for Planet Earth. I had already done a six-week shoot for an independent film about snow leopards. We had discovered a rock where the leopards scent-marked, and we had success with some remote-camera footage. But, to me, that’s not the same as seeing it for real. So, Planet Earth came up with a share of the costs to let me try again.
This time I spent much of my five weeks in a hide, peering at a path that wound over the mountainside, hoping a leopard would use it. In all that time, I only had one snow leopard visible for one hour. And it was asleep for 50 minutes of that! Hardly BAFTA-winning stuff!
In the meantime, the Planet Earth researchers had found another location in Pakistan. Cameraman Mark Smith and assistant producer Jeff Wilson went to try there. After three weeks, they had some excellent material and were scheduled to fly home. But, due to bad weather, their plane was cancelled. Rather than kill time at the airport, they went back up to the valley. And that’s when Mark filmed the full snow leopard hunt with the slips and final jump into the river – the classic sequence that everyone knows and still talks about.
Is patience the greatest virtue of a wildlife film-maker?
People always say to me: “You must be very patient.” I reply: “Fact is, I’m being paid to be patient!”
Like anyone, I don’t like waiting for delayed buses or trains. When it comes to animals, however, patience comes easily. I’m sure David Attenborough would say the same. But there’s a difference between
“Ten below is nothing. When it gets to between –30°C and –40°C, that’s really cold. Especially if there is also 20 knots of wind chill.”
patience and tenacity. Patience is a kind of passive thing, whereas tenacity is where you’re always asking yourself: “Can I do more? Can I get up earlier? Is there a better place to be?” Even though it’s a rubbish day and raining, you are going to go out and sit there. If the weather clears, you’ll be in position. You won’t film anything from inside your tent or cabin.
What’s been your hairiest moment?
I was snorkelling off the ice-edge up at Baffin Island in 1996. I had just finished taking some stills of guillemots diving. I was treading water, looking around for where the birds might pop up, when something grabbed me. Tight. It was like somebody had wrapped their arms around my thighs. I looked down and saw the top of a walrus’s head under my right arm. I pushed hard, hit it on the head and, luckily, it let go.
It was a youngster and thought I was a sleeping seal. Walrus usually feed on mussels and clams on the seabed – they waft their flippers to sweep away the mud, then put their lips down and suck the flesh out. But, occasionally, they go looking for seals. And the easiest seal to catch – polar bears take advantage of this as well – is a seal sleeping at the surface.
A seal swimming in open water is too fast for a polar bear or a walrus. But when seals go to sleep, they just bob up and down like bottles. Now a walrus slips underwater and swims so it’s below the seal, which is silhouetted against the sky. A perfect target.
My Inuit friends explained in more detail how walrus kill the seal. They grab it higher up the body, pin its flippers to its sides, so it can’t swim away, then bend over and suck the seal’s brains out. Walrus can really suck. A walrus in an aquarium in the Netherlands had no problem sucking the big plug out of the bottom of its pool.
You know how people in Africa are scared of hippos in the water? Well, walrus are the Arctic equivalent. I’ve never met a goodtempered walrus. They’re always grumpy!
And the funniest?
Normally on a shoot, we try to get back to civilisation with a few hours to spare, maybe have a shower, and pack the kit properly before the flight. But we once got held up by a blizzard in Svalbard and I just had to chuck everything together. Now, one of the other things you miss when you’re on a cold shoot is a comfortable toilet. So, I made my way through the airport restaurant to find one… and fell asleep on it!
I woke up to an announcement in Norwegian, which sounded like the last call for my flight. But when I went to open the door to the concourse, it was firmly locked. I began pulling at the door, and started banging and shouting. Then I turned around to see four faces looking in. I’d gone the wrong way and had been trying to kick my way into a broom cupboard! Every time I returned to Svalbard, there always seemed to be somebody at the airport who’d point and giggle, remembering the madman making all this noise in the toilet.
How has wildlife filming changed over the years?
One of the standard bits of kit now is the Shotover, a stabilisation system that enables you to use a very long lens from a helicopter, boat or moving vehicle. You can be in a Land Rover and track alongside African hunting dogs when they’re at full pelt, and the Shotover will give you a steady image.
While I’m familiar with new equipment, it’s not my strength. What I enjoy using are my field skills, my feel for the animals, and figuring out how to do things on my own for the first time. Partly because of health and safety considerations, and partly because the kind of image that you’re expected to bring back is just different, the crews these days are bigger.
Back in 1994, I filmed great white sharks breaching to take their prey. With film, there was no way you could let the camera run, roll after roll, getting nothing. So, we had to be ready and waiting and as soon as we saw a shark burst out, we’d press the
“A cameraperson is like the astronaut on top of a rocket. We go to amazing places as part of a big team, but we have all the fun. We’re the guys who actually get to walk on the Moon.”
trigger. But your reaction times always meant that you missed the instant that the shark actually came out of the water. Now, with digital cameras, there is cache recording. Your camera is constantly recording and then overwriting, so it never misses anything. You can set the camera to ‘10-second pre-record’, wait until you see a shark jump, then press record and it will keep the previous 10 seconds of footage. You have the entire breach, from the moment the shark’s nose emerges until it splashes down.
What has been your most life-changing encounter?
One of the first shoots I did was with narwhals for Trials of Life [1990] – David Attenborough’s third big series. We went to this remote location at Baffin Island in August, when there was open water. From the shore, I could see the narwhal gathering every afternoon about a mile offshore – too far to swim. So, I borrowed a kayak and paddled out to this spot, where I managed to ease myself out of the seat and slip into the water. With the kayak tied onto me with a length of rope, I could drift around on the surface, and hopefully the narwhal would come close enough to film.
These narwhal were females – I didn’t know at the time, but they are friendlier than males. On the third day, this mother came up with her little calf and became really, really friendly with me. She swam in close, I dived underwater and she came down with me. When I ran out of film – you only had 10 minutes in those days – I eased myself back into the kayak and started paddling back to shore. And she was right there alongside me – so close, I had to lean out with the paddle to make the stroke properly. She followed me all the way back to shore.
It was my first realisation that there were wild animals willing to be friends with you, that wanted to be curious about you. That was my first experience of it, with an animal that was pretty rare. People had said how difficult it was to get close to narwhal, and my experience was completely different.
What have you always wanted to film but haven’t?
I’m more conscious these days about the impact of flying and about my own carbon footprint. Should we, the wildlife film-makers, have addressed climate change much earlier? We’ve all been watching it happen.
So, I would like to make a film about climate breakdown in the poles. I’ve seen it first-hand – you see how less predictable the ice is, you see how the ice is breaking up early in summer, being less reliable. Spring is arriving sooner. Rain is coming when there used to be snow. Fewer polar bear cubs are being produced, and more cubs are dying when they’re young because they’re lighter when they come out of the den, so they don’t survive as well for the first six months.
The Arctic is ice – basically a frozen ocean surrounded by land. And the amount of ice is changing dramatically. I could show you graph after graph… it used to be about 8m thick on average in winter, now it’s about 5m. The ice used to cover seven million square kilometres in summer, now it’s between four and five million.
You can’t visit those regions for over 40 years and not be scared about what’s happening. I fear we’ve lost the battle with the Arctic. It is going to be a radically different ecosystem in five to ten years’ time.
“Part of the psychology of a wildlife cameraperson is getting used to the idea of failure. If you go after hard things, you have to accept that some of them are not going to work.”