Louis Psichoyos, Oscar winer

By Bruce Young
© 2010 News Photographer magazine, http://nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2010/03/oscar.html
Award-winning photojournalist Louis Psihoyos has won an Oscar for his film “The Cove,” the first time a still photojournalist has made the leap to the highest movie award since 2004 when Zana Briski won for “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.” As a still photographer, Psihoyos won multiple categories in the College Photographer of the Year contest and later, honors in Pictures of the Year. NPPA caught up with Psihoyos the day after his Oscar win.
HOLLYWOOD, CA (March 8, 2010) – “What I set out to do was not so much make a movie as to create a movement,” Louis Psihoyos told The New York Times last July. He had already enjoyed working over 18 years as a National Geographic photographer, and was continuing a successful still photography career, but he had never made a movie before.

The film he directed, “The Cove,” about an annual dolphin hunt in a small town in Japan, his first film, won the Oscar for Best Documentary on Sunday.

“It helped to have thirty-five years of experience with photography,” he said by phone today from Los Angeles, where he’s still engaged in the Academy Award whirlwind. (In the next few days, he continues to New York, then back to Los Angeles; “I haven’t spent much time at home in the past year,” he said of the promotional schedule.) But he’s realistic about his role – even celebratory. “Making a movie is like painting a picture with an army,” he explained, quoting famous filmmaker John Ford. “It’s a very collaborative process.”

Psihoyos (pronounced, as he explains on his Web site, www.psihoyos.com, with a silent P, and said to rhyme with “sequoias”) still shoots stills, though he finds filmmaking a much more rewarding – and powerful – medium. “It’s a lot more visceral experience,” he says. Now he talks as if he sees stills as a secondary function because of that stronger reaction and reward. “People are not going to stand in front of my picture and weep or cheer or laugh.” He recommends moving pictures to every photographer, and “now that I’ve embraced it,” he said, “It’s as natural as picking up a still camera.”

The change, I asked, must have been wrenching, though. “I’m always driven by fear,” he said. Fear, he thinks, is often his prime motivator. At National Geographic, there were no excuses to come back without the picture, so fear of failure drove him forward even there … “especially when working for [legendary picture editor] Bob Gilka.” Psihoyos insists on moving forward into new territory. His signature line for eMail is a short phrase in Spanish, “Ni un paso atrás” – “Not one step backwards.”

Most of all, as he explained to the Times all those months before the Oscars (and all the other awards – “We were the first documentary to sweep the Guild awards,” he said, explaining that he gives the prizes to his crew), it’s about the cause. “It’s just a piece of metal, really,” he said of the statue, which he is keeping for himself. The real reward, he thinks, is solving the issue.

“The Cove” is a powerful film, half exposé and half spy adventure. It exposes the brutal capture of dolphins at the town of Taiji in Japan. Many are killed for meat – in some cases fraudulently sold as whale meat, and contaminated by mercury according to the film – while others are chosen to become aquarium display animals. Activist Ric O’Barry, a former dolphin trainer who turned on the profession when one of his charges tried to commit suicide, is a central character and guide.

Psihoyos then set out to get the other side. “I’m a journalist,” he said, explaining that he went to the University of Missouri’s journalism school, and worked at the Los Angeles Times before National Geographic. “I was trained as a journalist. But after they threatened us, I realized they didn’t want their story told.” A second layer appeared in the film’s story: that of the crew’s efforts to actually get the thing made.

He finally gave up on getting anything useful from the Japanese officials or townspeople (“Every time they talk it just sounds so ridiculous,” he explained. “It’s just an indefensible position.”) and began filming the slaughter by whatever means necessary. False rocks were made to hold underwater cameras that could be hidden on the cove’s floor. Cameras were attached to helicopter drones and small balloons. The filmmakers even crept in at night, setting up camouflaged positions and remote cameras. Once he realized he had to break some rules to get the story, he found it liberating. “It was really refreshing to step outside the journalistic box.”

However, for a guy Salvador Dali once proclaimed “too bizarre for me” (the artist was thrown by Psihoyos’ suggestions for appropriately Dali-esque settings for a portrait) the Oscar scene was “surreal.” He described a stream of Hollywood luminaries – Matt Damon, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, best director Kathryn Bigelow, and “Avatar” creator James Cameron – greeting him at the Vanity Fair party afterwards. “It was,” he admits, “a pretty fun experience.”

Naturally, one wonders what comes next. And considering his new love of cinema, it’s naturally another movie … and another cause. Acidification of the oceans, he explained, is destroying the coral reefs. “In ninety years,” he said, “They’ll all be gone,” a victim of fossil fuels. So while they still exist, he’s going out with his crew to film the last, pristine reefs.

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