[Trailer clip “Our Planet II”]
Huw Cordey (interview): “You know, he just brings so much you know, he’s got obviously he’s got massive integrity and he’s the voice of nature, but, you know, just the way his emotion and his delivery just adds so much to every program. And I’ve been very, very lucky to work with him on natural history films for 25 years. But I think what’s almost frightening is that at the age of 96, he doesn’t seem to have got any worse at it. I mean, you know, the level of skill and delivery is as good as it ever was.”
[Trailer clip “Our Planet II”]
Huw Cordey (interview): “Absolutely massive. We barely go on a shoot these days without a drone. And it’s one of the big changes between the two ‘Our Planet’s. Drones did exist on ‘Our Planet’ one, but they were quite large. They couldn’t stay in the air for very long. So their use for filming behavior was fairly limited. You could use them for getting establishing shots or scenics or things like that. But the technology that’s around now, these tiny little DJI Mavic drones, they’re only like, you know, this big, you know, they can stay in the air for 45 minutes. They don’t – they make a noise, for certain, but not very much noise. And they’re very small, so they’re unobtrusive. So we’re getting behavior that just simply not possible with the ‘Our Planet’ one.”
[Trailer clip “Our Planet II”]
Huw Cordey (interview): “That was extremely difficult. You would have thought that a swarm that had 200 billion animals in it would be easy to find and film, but it’s not. Plus the fact that it happened in lockdown. So we had to find remote crews in order to film it. But they were also flying across very, very remote parts of Kenya. And so, you know, even a large swarm like that, you know, if you’re five miles away, you don’t see it. So we’re having to rely on local information, or W.H.O., U.N. authorities who were actually trying to get one step ahead of the locusts to spray them with pesticides because the huge damage they do to crops. And so we had a sort of twofold battle, you know, finding them, but finding them before the sprayers. And, you know, didn’t always work. But, you know, we got one step ahead just enough of the time to film that remarkable sequence.”
[Trailer clip “Our Planet II”]
Huw Cordey (interview): “Ok so we filmed that on two consecutive years. The first year we didn’t see a single crab. Can you imagine it? There were billions in the second in the second season, the second year, but the first, yet not one returned. So we had a whole crew there and not one appeared. And so we thought, OK, what do we do? Do we call it a day or do we give it another go? And so we gave it another go. And it was an all-female camera team and they were on Christmas Island on Christmas Day when that event happened. I mean, how much serendipity can you get?”
[Trailer clip “Our Planet II”]
Huw Cordey (interview): “An uninhabited island, like the one that Laysan albatross chicks hatch on, you know, it’s thousands of miles from the nearest habitated Island, and yet it’s covered in humanity, plastics. And although the plastic on the island isn’t being fed to the chicks, the adults who are combing these oceans, looking for food for their chicks are picking up things that they mistake as pieces of fish or squid or whatever, just scooping them up and feeding this smorgasbord of, you know, electric lighters and fish parts to their chicks, unknowingly. And of course, you know, if you’ve got that much plastic in your stomach, you know, the end result is that A lot of them die and as was depicted in the sequence. And yeah, so yeah, it’s very, very sad and sobering.”
[Trailer clip “Our Planet II”]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.