In 2009, director Louie Psihoyos created a new kind of documentary: the covert-ops eco-thriller. , a dolphin-slaughter expos茅, won every award around, including the Oscar for best documentary. Now the 57-year-old former National Geographic photographer is back with Racing Extinction,聽a look at the way that humans are fueling the mass extinction of species, starting with plankton and moving up the food chain. The film premieres at Sundance in late January.
OUTSIDE:聽In your last film, there was a single bad guy to blame for the horrifying problem you were investigating. In this case the bad guy is all of us. How do you capture that in a visceral way?
PSIHOYOS: First of all, this is a different movie. People are going to be comparing this movie to the last one. But you never want to chew your spinach twice. I think this film is a bigger call to action than The Cove. You know, The Cove is a film that鈥檚 very near to my heart. But very few people actually saw it.
It won the Oscar!
So what? I鈥檝e got a little gold man. For people that managed to see The Cove, it affects them. But very few people see it because it has the stigma of being the dolphin slaughter movie. I don鈥檛 care about another shelf full of awards. I want to make a movie that people actually want to see. This movie is much more entertaining than聽The Cove. I designed the movie to be one that I鈥檇 want to see on date night.
Mass extinction is a huge topic. So why focus on something as small as plankton?
You start to realize there鈥檚 this other world around you. In this case it鈥檚 the world of animals. It turns out what鈥檚 really important in the biosphere is not the big things. The world will do fine without humans. In fact it will do much better. What you really need are things like plankton, which generate more than half the air you breathe. Some scientists say we鈥檝e lost about 30 percent since the industrial era.
I鈥檓 with you. But there鈥檚 a challenge here鈥攈ow do you create outrage over plankton?
Starting out I don鈥檛 think that anyone鈥檚 going to care about plankton. That was the trick with dolphins as well. People thought of dolphins as something you saw at SeaWorld. How do you get people to care about a dolphin? You tell that story through your subject. You start to understand these animals as sentient and intelligent. Hopefully we鈥檙e doing the same thing with other species.
The last big film that you couldn鈥檛 unsee about carbon was An Inconvenient Truth, which has suffered huge backlash. Did you take that into account聽while making your film?
I鈥檓 one of the few people who鈥檒l still admit they liked An Inconvenient Truth. It opened my eyes to a lot of these issues. I mean, the world is absolutely insane. The course that we鈥檙e on right now is destructive not just for humanity but for all of nature.
Is the Covert Ops team back?
Yes. We do a lot of undercover work.
What kind?
Busting rings selling endangered species. But I don鈥檛 want to go too much into that.
Tech was a big part of the last film鈥攄oes this one feature any interesting toys?
We鈥檝e adapted a FLIR (forward looking infrared) camera. It鈥檚 the same camera that we used in聽The Cove but we鈥檝e adapted it so you can see greenhouse gases鈥攃arbon dioxide and methane. So we travel around the world with two cameras: one that鈥檚 seeing what your eye sees and another that sees this invisible world of hidden gases. Right now, with me talking to you, it would look like I鈥檓 smoking.
Then we took a perfectly good Tesla, stripped it out, put in a 15,000 lumen projector, and installed a FLIR camera that pops up out of the hood. We can project in real time this world of carbon dioxide. It鈥檚 the first car in the world to have an electroluminescent paint job. We can change the color of it with the flick of a button.
Sounds like an environmental Knight Rider.
It鈥檚 better. I鈥檝e seen the Bond cars before鈥擧ollywood magic. Well, ours is real, and it鈥檚 much more important. There鈥檚 the thrill of seeing a small group of people bust bad guys doing horrible things to animals. There鈥檚 the thrill of seeing a hidden world that鈥檚 destroying the planet. It鈥檚 like a Bond film. But it鈥檚 real.
This interview has been edited and condensed.