Wanderlust Travel Magazine (UK)
Behind the camera with... Sophie Darlington
The acclaimed filmmaker and cinematographer’s latest project has seen her capture astonishing footage of gibbons and red crabs for A Perfect Planet. She gives us the view from the other side of the lens...
So how are you?
I’m considering myself very lucky, because [after] nine months being locked down, I got out on a few shoots. I’m meant to be going on more, but I’ve got to make sure I don’t have COVID-19 because I don’t want to take that somewhere else. So I’m being incredibly careful, self isolating, not seeing friends or family, for a couple of weeks before I leave.
But I have nothing to moan about because I get to sit under massive African skies and see nature raw in tooth and claw. So how lucky am I really? I am in the fresh air, and we all know how nature heals and inspires and fills our endorphins
We’re all gripped by Perfect
Planet at the moment. Which sequences did you work on?
I was involved [shooting the] gibbons and crabs sequences with a team of others… you never do this by yourself. We were in Vietnam filming the gibbons, and we were in Christmas Island for the red crabs.
It must have been a challenge filming the gibbons swinging in the trees?
Yeah, it’s really challenging. You’ve got to find a fig tree in fruit, and then you just sit and you wait and you wait. I was working with another cameraman called Tom Walker, and he was doing the movement stuff. He would be on ‘trajectory’ – when you knew where they were going, he would be below them, moving with them, so that you get that incredible feeling that you were brachiating with the gibbons.
It’s an extraordinary thing to witness because they’re effortless. You just sit there going, ‘Ah, it took me 10 minutes to get up this tree, and you do it in a nanosecond.’
We have featured the Christmas Island crab migration in the magazine before but to see the footage was still mind blowing. What does it take to film that?
It takes time and planning; they do it at a particular tide at a particular moon at a particular time of year, when the rainfall is right. You get this sort of first movement as the males come down, and then two weeks later, the females come down. But it is like a sea of crabs and the whole island just turns over to the crabs and roads are closed.
You don’t know exactly which beach they’re going to go on and you don’t know exactly which time or night they’re going to go on. So, for about five nights, you’ve got to get up every night and go down and check.
I think they’re really beautiful. They’re releasing 100,000 eggs into the sea and they are these tenacious, nothing-will-stop-them creatures. It’s like a mini rave at ankle height, and it’s quite the most amazing thing to see.
That must feel like a privilege? I didn’t work for eight years when I had my son and when I got back to filming again I promised I’d never take it for granted. If anything, this lockdown has reinforced that yet again; just how immensely privileged we are just to be able to see it. But it also really rams home how we’ve got 10 years before this has gone. People, we’ve really got to get our act together.
Do you think that we will sort out climate change and all the things we’re doing wrong?
I would say that it is within our powers if we act now. We have to get into long termism. I think there are so many solutions that can be done. And we need to take those brave decisions.
We are all going to have to change the way we live. And if lockdown has taught us anything, it’s given us a chance to recalibrate and to reassess the importance of nature and I think that so many people have. We have a chance. We just have to go for it.