Mark Fletcher may be credited as the director of Patrick and the Whale, but he insists on a lower billing.
When introducing the documentary’s World Premiere screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Fletcher jokingly admitted that “the whales started to direct the movie.” The packed theater let out a hearty laugh, but he was only half-kidding.
“Making wildlife films is a bit like making films about people when you don’t speak their language, you don’t understand their culture, and they haven’t invited you,” Fletcher jokingly elaborated the day following the screening. “You just film them randomly and then try and tell a story of what you think they are doing and what you think they think.” Naturally, this doesn’t give a director much ability. So the whales, sporting brains five times larger than humans, knew they had to take over.
“They said, ‘we’re gonna help you out here. We need to teach you a bit more and try and take you into our world a bit.’ I don’t think anyone realized that during the shoot. It was when looking at the rushes afterwards that you suddenly saw this pattern of how the whales were making the film.”
It’s appropriate that Patrick and the Whale, the story of ocean videographer Patrick Dykstra’s emotional journey in learning to communicate with sperm whales off the shores of Dominica, would be so driven by the animals themselves. As Dykstra attempts to study them, primarily two whales named Dolores and Can Opener respectively, he forges a deep spiritual bond with the species that has him re-evaluating his relationship to the very nature he’s documenting.
“The first time they put the camera on one of our [whales], she was sort of fine about it, but you could tell she wasn’t enthusiastic,” explains Fletcher. In the film, Dykstra attempts to plant an underwater camera on one of the whales to further study their behavior. “The next time they thought, ‘oh, we’ll do that again.’ She wasn’t having any of it. It was like, ‘If you think sticking a camera on me and me showing you how I hunt gets to the heart of who I am as a whale, you’re crazy.’”
Fletcher speaks about whales with palpable admiration. His whimsical, calming English accent makes it sound like he’s constantly narrating his own wildlife documentary, dipping into insightful factoids and observations on the species with ease. As he describes the species’ ineffable emotionality, an infectious smile comes across his face.
“I absolutely love whales,” says Fletcher. “I think what I find really emotional about them is that they are one of the animals that are really reaching out to us. They’ve gone through 300 years, 400 years of persecution [whaling] and then they have the generosity to turn around and say, ‘I’m going to come and approach you.’ You can pet it, you can go after it, you can have a relationship, you can fall in love, and then forget that this is the biggest predator on the planet by far.”
In-between screenings at TIFF, I sat down with Fletcher to talk about his role as director and editor on Patrick and the Whale, what went into the film’s musical end-sequence, the best question he received during a Q&A, and much more.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
–
Larry Fried: To start, how are you doing? Have you been enjoying the festival?
Mark Fletcher: I’m loving TIFF, it’s amazing. I’m having such a good time. I mean, the privilege of being able to go to the cinema and then meet the people behind it and hear the stories behind it…it’s like a childhood dream.
Larry Fried: Is this your first time in Toronto?
Mark Fletcher: This festival? Yeah. I mostly go to natural history festivals where it’s a small community. Everybody knows each other, so this is a much bigger deal and it’s amazing.
Larry Fried: Talk to me a little bit about your experience with Patrick and the Whale so far, which had its World Premiere just a few days ago [at the time of this interview]. How has the response been to the film and what has it been like to watch it with audiences for the first time?
Mark Fletcher: It’s been wonderful. The audience was amazing at the premiere. We had questions afterwards and they were so on it. They absolutely got it and that’s incredible with an audience, particularly if you are trying to convey ideas but don’t want to say them. In the final lines of this film, Patrick [Dykstra] says “You can’t necessarily see the things that are important. You can’t necessarily hear the things that are important. They have to be felt.” As a filmmaker, how do you say that in a film without saying it or [the audience] hearing it? How do you make an audience feel something like that? That’s been the challenge. It’s something that, until you’re with an audience, you just don’t know at all. It’s an act of faith.
Larry Fried: One of the most fascinating parts of this film is how it tackles the dichotomy between observing nature and then having a relationship to it, or experiencing it, which is something that Patrick has to reconcile throughout the film. You’ve been working in this field for many years now. Is that something that you think about when working on documentaries? Is there a feeling that sometimes you, yourself, have to reconcile recording it, and capturing it on film, with also understanding your place within it?
Mark Fletcher: One of the real excitements of working with animals is you want people to connect directly with the animals and you can do it with science. You can tell people that these whales, or whatever it is, behave in a certain way. You can explain them in terms of science or you can explain them in terms of what their lives are actually like––the emotions. I did a lion film once––I’m a zoologist––and I discovered a scientific article that was about how lionesses have brains that are slightly larger than the males for their body size. The final line said, “we think that this might have to do with the social need for deception, which applies more to the lionesses than to the lions.” The lionesses are smarter because they have to lie more. That’s what the science is telling us. If you are a lioness, you have to, in order to keep your kids safe, tell the males that [these are] their kids. You also have to tell the males around who might come in and take over the pride that those might be their kids too, so that they don’t kill them. That’s sort of the dichotomy between the science and getting your head into the minds and the emotions of the animals.
With whales, they’re so much cleverer than we are. Their language is richer, their brains are five times our size. [So we tried] to get into their minds and thought that the science would help us find out something that would open a window into their lives. Patrick says this in the film, and he really believes it, that if they could show us their world, they would take us down there. They would guide us if they could speak. They have tons to say to us and they really want us to understand them. As filming progressed, it became clear that they wanted to tell their story in their own way. We just sort of had no control over how we told their story. They wanted to tell it their way.
Larry Fried: You made a fascinating comment right before the film started [at the premiere], that the whales started to direct the film.
Mark Fletcher: Yeah, they did. [laughs]
Larry Fried: Can you elaborate on that? From a technical perspective, for you as a director and an editor, what does it look like to see them directing the film?
Mark Fletcher: It was often you could see in the rushes that Patrick and the camera team would set out to try and achieve something. The first time they put the camera on one of our [whales], she was sort of fine about it, but you could tell she wasn’t enthusiastic. It was like, “oh, okay, I’ll do your science experiment for you.” But then the next time they thought, “oh, we’ll do that again, that’s great.” She wasn’t having any of it. She practically killed Patrick to try and make her point. It was like, “you can plan whatever sequence you want, but I’m bigger, I’m brainier, I know what you’re trying to do and I’m not having a part in it because you are completely missing the point. If you think sticking a camera on me and me showing you how I hunt gets to the heart of who I am as a whale, you’re crazy. I’m gonna show you something else, which is that I make my own decisions.” The whales are very empowered.
Making wildlife films is a bit like making films about people when you don’t speak their language and you don’t understand their culture and they haven’t invited you. You intrude. You just film them randomly and then try and tell a story of what you think they are doing and what you think they think. Obviously, with people, that would be hugely insulting, difficult, and pointless. [laughs] For the first time making natural history films, I felt that the whales got it. They said, “we’re gonna help you out here. You clearly have one word in whale and it’s ‘hello’ and we need to teach you a bit more and try and take you into our world a bit,” and they did that. I don’t think anyone realized that during the shoot. It was when looking at the rushes afterwards and the dates of when things were filmed that you suddenly saw this pattern of how the whales were making the film. They were trying to tell Patrick something and then right towards the end, in fact, when Patrick and I were working out what the story should be and how we should do, we suddenly realized they’d been doing that all along right from the start.
Larry Fried: Was there a challenge initially to find the story or was it immediately clear that the whales had given you that story?
Mark Fletcher: You know, “a challenge” makes it sound difficult, but it wasn’t like that at all. For me, it felt like going to a party where you didn’t know anyone and all you can say is “hello,” and then suddenly all these people are listening and you feel bad as though you can’t say anything, but then they’re just lovely and warm and take you in and are amazing. Whales are like that.
Larry Fried: You are the director of this film, but Patrick is also a director and a cinematographer and he’s providing a lot of the footage. For you, what did directing this film really mean under that context? What were the primary responsibilities and how did you and Patrick divvy up that responsibility?
Mark Fletcher: Well, there were a series of shoots and some of them happened before the project started. Then there was one big shoot and that wasn’t planned to be directed at all. There was a[n above water] cameraman and an underwater camerawoman––they were both brilliant––Patrick was there, there was a drone operator, and everyone thought that it would just be [putting] the camera on the whale. There was no directing. Then it started to unravel and Terra Mater Studios just rang up and said, “How do we find a story? What do we make the story?” My instinct was [to] look at the footage and understand whales. In anything, whether you’re editing it or writing it or anything, it’s not so much about the craft of doing it. It’s about the understanding of what they’re telling you. You’re a cipher, a scribe. I just write down whatever it is I see. I didn’t really direct, in a way, and if I did it would’ve been completely pointless. [laughs]
Larry Fried: Talk to me about scrubbing through that footage. How much was there and how long did the editing process take?
Mark Fletcher: There was [thousands of hours] of footage because there was all the footage from each of the years [they followed the whales]. They filmed a lot because they didn’t know during any of the shoots what the story was. So it was really trying to figure out why things were happening. Once we understood that then we could cut the sequence according to that, but it takes a lot of figuring out. It was just hundreds of shots of whales swimming, so the first stage was to learn all the whales. There were about 150 whales and you get these whale books with the [different] flukes [the shape of a whale’s tail]. I started to learn [about] each family and spend a lot of time with Patrick sitting down saying, “this is the F family and this is the Z family” or whoever it is––who the moms are, who are the grandmoms, you know. It’s a very matriarchal society, so they’re all females. There’s young males, but they’re mostly females. Once you can understand that, it no longer becomes two whales swimming together, it becomes, the grandmother and the granddaughter and the aunt’s watching and making sure that the baby–you know, and it becomes a completely different thing. It’s really understanding, that’s what takes time.
Larry Fried: I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the musical moment at the end of the film, in which you feature the song “Nostalgia” by Alice Phoebe Lou. During the Q&A following the premiere, one of the audience members referred to that scene as a ballet, which I think is a pretty apt description. Talk to me about why you chose to use that song and why you felt like a musical sequence was needed for the ending of the film.
Mark Fletcher: One of the ways we express things that we can’t say in language is through music. I think the same is true of a few animals, that they’re able to express things in terms of music. I was just desperately looking for ways of expressing some of the things that I discovered about [whales] and Patrick was telling me all this amazing stuff, so much stuff that we couldn’t put into the film. I was just trying all sorts of things and then I remembered that the film is basically a love story. I remembered my misadventures as a young guy in love, being dumped and all that sort of thing. There’s a soundtrack to that. There’s a soundtrack to human emotions and it’s songs usually. That’s how we rationalize what we’re feeling. It’s in music and songs and then lyrics. You can read almost anything into them. With some of the really great pop songs, you don’t really know what they’re talking about, but you turn it into being about what you feel. I guess I thought that what we wanted to say, what Patrick was saying towards the end of the film, was unsayable. What do we do as humans when we get to that point? The answer is, you know, we go on Spotify and find a song, or we get our big box of vinyls out and we say, “oh, maybe there’s this.” How do you capture that feeling?
We found [“Nostalgia”] and it was just luck. It was a sweet song, but one of the lines that resonated with me, when she talks about rolling and nostalgia and lots of things, is “Until you see my insides.” The whales can see through us. It’s like we’re naked and very vulnerable. But the one thing that really got me was when she sings.”Remind me your name again.” I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt that our relationship with nature is like that. It’s like we’re sort of seeing everything through a slight fog and grasping, trying to understand clues. Suddenly, you get something, a little thread that you can hold onto, and then you think “oh, what’s your name again?” [laughs] It was that that thought of never being as close as we want to be, never understanding as much as we would like to understand that really resonated with me in that song.
Larry Fried: Were you thinking about the theatrical format at all while working on this film? While I was watching the whale cinematography and the majesty of it all, I couldn’t help but think that this demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
Mark Fletcher: It’s lovely of you to say that, thank you. I think it would be great if people would see it, but I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was thinking much more about [how] it is a huge responsibility, in any format, to just get this message so that it’s comprehensible. If you try and do something for one format, then when people are looking on their phone, they’re not gonna get it. How do you just say the right thing at the right moment, or find the right bit of music at the right moment, so that people get it, even if they’re watching somebody else’s phone across the room. Do you know what I mean?
Larry Fried: Absolutely.
Mark Fletcher: That’s what’s really hard about filmmaking. Even if you have something to say, it’s really hard to articulate it. Patrick and the Whale was particularly difficult for that, because you are trying to articulate a thought or an emotion that you imagine, you ascribe to another creature, a creature that’s smarter than you and has taken over the directing of your film. [laughs] I’ve done quite a lot of theatrical, mostly for the BBC. I did a big concert series for Planet Earth and Blue Planet and Frozen Planet. The composer and I put together an evening of stuff and then went on tour with it. Well, I didn’t go on tour, he did. I went to see it, but we did a lot of stadiums. We did the Hollywood Bowl for two nights and we did a big stadium in Amsterdam and all over the place. They’re the same thing. You don’t have any narration. You just have natural history footage, so nobody knows what’s happening. You’ve got a live Philharmonic orchestra, you know, a 100-piece orchestra. How do you capture something [so that] 18,000 people there feel it? Sorry, does that answer your question?
Larry Fried: It absolutely does. I just think about how nature documentaries have largely been ascribed to, in our current era, televised programming and streaming services. That’s largely how people view a lot of those programs. While I was watching this film, I just felt like this really benefited from the theatrical experience. They’re huge creatures, so you would think if I wanted to see a documentary about whales, it’d be good to see it in the theater. But I just felt like the experience of this film is heavily elevated when you add the theatrical experience.
Mark Fletcher: I hope so, and I hope it’ll be a film that a family will be able to go to. Each of the sequences speaks to different members of the family. I hope that it’ll be a real family film. That’s what I would love to achieve more than anything.
Larry Fried: Well, there were some there at the premiere and there was a young child who even asked a question!
Mark Fletcher: And it was the best question. It was amazing. “How do these animals have emotions?” And the answer is “we don’t know.” They show us, they try and tell us, but we don’t understand half the time. There’s a lot of new science and it’s very helpful to have a very strong, scientific base for everything that you say. I feel as a scientist, as well as a filmmaker, that we have a responsibility to never make stuff up, to never speculate about stuff that we really have no evidence for at all, which is a real dilemma because on the one hand you can’t know. On the other hand, there’s a huge amount of evidence in various directions towards consciousness and towards emotion and towards language and all sorts of things.
Larry Fried: During the Q&A, there was mention that Patrick has gone back and that there was even more footage captured of the subjects in the film. Your producers, Walter Köhler and Wolfgang Knöpfler, vaguely mentioned that there may be additional footage brought onto the film because of some discoveries that have been made. Is there a possibility that the widely-released version of this film will feature additional footage?
Mark Fletcher: I think one of the things with wildlife is that we forget that they’re still out there. We have a window into a short part of their story, but the story goes on and people forget that. They think that, because we see so much drama, that the story is complete. It has the beginning and it has the end and then everybody takes off the mask and goes home. But with natural history, it’s not like that. They continue to face the same problems as they face in your film. The soap opera continues even when the cameras aren’t there. Their lives are carrying on, so there’s always the temptation to want to go back and continue the story. God, if we were given an opportunity to go back and do more, of course we’d want to know what has happened to them. Maybe Dolores will come back and there’ll be a reunion. Maybe Dolores will come back with a calf and say, “Here’s my baby, sorry you’re not the dad.” [laughs] But I think that’s the nature of documentary, particularly wildlife documentary. You are a little bit disconnected from your subject. You get a little window and then you walk away and that’s a hard thing. You always want to go back to the window.
Larry Fried: Do you foresee making more films about whales, maybe not even with Patrick, but with other collaborators? Is that a subject you wish to continue exploring?
Mark Fletcher: Yes, I absolutely love whales. I think what I find really emotional about them is that they are one of the animals that are really reaching out to us. You see that in the way they behave. They’ve gone through this history of like 300 years, 400 years of persecution and then they have the generosity to turn around and say, “If you kill me, you kill me, but I’m going to come and approach you. I’m going to reach out to you, even though I know that you’re incredibly dangerous.” For every whale-watching boat and every tourist that goes out, they have every right to kill you and they could do so really easily and they never ever do. That’s extraordinary, you know, that the most powerful predator on the planet…you can pet it [laughs], you can go after it, you can have a relationship, you can fall in love, and then forget that this is the biggest predator on the planet by far. That’s amazing.
Larry Fried: Last question, Mark. I assume you’ve seen a few films while you’ve been here at TIFF. Are there any films that you would recommend our readers pursue?
Mark Fletcher: There are so many films and everyone I’ve seen is different. When you look at the schedule, you see that [the festival team] really tried to balance things out. They could [only program] the most important campaign films, but they’ve put in much more of a mixture, which I think is wonderful. It seems to me that’s the way to draw in the maximum number of people. It’s to make it so that they’re not watching the same thing every night. You give them different things, different moods, keep them thinking in different ways each time. So, I would recommend they see as much as possible as often as possible [laughs] all the time.
After I come back from working all day, looking at screens, I sit down and watch TV. My wife’s like, “are you crazy?” And I say, “no.” I want everybody to think of it as a window. You see through that window and whatever the filmmakers present to you…you are there. I saw In Her Hands this morning, which is a lovely film, and I [felt like I] was there in a burqa with a clapped-out old sewing machine trying to survive under the Taliban. It’s just drawing people in. It’s making people suddenly feel that there’s something very different to what they really are. I never imagined that I would think of myself as a woman with a sewing machine in Kabul, but this morning I really was. I felt that and really felt that emotion. That’s what film does. It’s so powerful and people should just sleep and watch movies. That’s all we should do.
Larry Fried: There’s no better final comment than that. Thank you very much, Mark, for your time.
Mark Fletcher: Thank you. It’s been brilliant.
_
Patrick and The Whale had its World Premiere in the TIFF Docs section of Toronto International Film Festival 2022.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.