by Anthony Frajman
In 2017, Australian director Jennifer Peedom and music supervisor Joseph Nizeti, in association with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, released their first collaboration, Mountain, a look at mankind’s obsession with the highest peaks.
That film, which featured a score by the ACO’s Artistic Director, Richard Tognetti AO, and narration by Willem Dafoe, became the highest grossing documentary in Australian cinemas ever.
Peedom and co-director Nizeti headed back to the wilderness for their follow-up documentary, River, examining the fundamental relationship between humans and rivers throughout history.
Reuniting with the creative team behind the hit 2017 film, River features footage from over 39 countries, and narration by Dafoe, a score by Tognetti and the ACO, as well as music by Jonny Greenwood and Radiohead.
We caught up with Peedom and Nizeti to talk about their latest work.
River has been described as an ode to the bodies of water of the planet. Can you expand on this?
Joseph Nizeti: Robert Macfarlane, our writer, recently said this in a Q&A, rivers and lakes only account for 1% of the world’s surface, but they are so vitally crucial to not just the survival of our species, but all ecosystems. And we have really come to take them for granted.
There’s a sense that rivers are hidden in plain sight in our daily lives, especially in major cities like Sydney, until something goes really wrong, and we really do remember that power. So, definitely, it’s a love letter to rivers, but it’s also a reminder of how we need to be aware of the hubris that we have as a species towards the planet. From time to time, we need to be able to think long term about the kinds of decisions we make, and the kind of trouble it might land us in, to not respect nature and to only put ourselves first and to only put short term greed before long term need.
You’ve said that River is not a traditional documentary, but a hybrid film and a live orchestral experience. How important was this in your approach to making the film?
Jen Peedom: River was originally a commission from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, so was always needing to exist as ‘River Live’. And we didn’t want to have two totally different films. That was also the ambition, which is an audacious ambition.
There were moments with Mountain and River that I didn’t know that we would be able to pull it off. There is always a way somehow, but what that dictates very formally is that there’s never gonna be talking heads and dialogue and people chatting about stuff. It dictates this kind of more global look and visual style. The narration is there just to thread the needle through the story and help link the ideas, and partly to help express what it is that we had to say about this particular story that we couldn’t say visually alone or musically alone.
It’s real footage of real people, I guess that makes it documentary. It’s certainly not drama but it does sit in between those two things.
The film brings together footage of 39 countries. How much of a challenge was this and how did you pull this off during Covid?
Jen Peedom: The first day of pre-production on River was the first day of lockdowns in Sydney and many other places around the world. So, suddenly, we found ourselves unable to leave the country. We had drawn on libraries and international cinematographers on Mountain, and we hadn’t been to every location on Mountain either. So, we already had a template for how that could work. We could never go to all those countries and never achieve that ambition of what we wanted to do by doing it all ourselves. It would cost millions and millions of dollars and take probably 10 years. But we had intended to travel and shoot more than we actually did.
It was an unexpected, delightful consequence (of the pandemic), that Joseph did so much of this work beyond the immediate contacts that I already had and libraries and guys that I was already working with. Joseph really spread the net wider to a community of filmmakers all around the world who also all found themselves in lockdown and jobs cancelled, because that was the way it was at the beginning of the first lockdowns all over the world. But they were still able to go out into their own backyards and shoot stuff for us, or had existing footage, that we were able to go, ‘Wow, you’ve got a really amazing skill at that, would you be interested in licensing us this footage?’ And then they’re like, ‘Oh yeah. I’ve seen Mountain’.
And in many cases they’re like, ‘We’ve got this and this and this and this as well’. So, it was kind of like working with a community of really like-minded people that cared about the same thing and believed in the story that we are telling and the message that the film had.
It really helped that we had this work that came before it as a proof of concept. That was a really lovely part of the experience. It was a huge amount of digging and researching and contacting people that Joseph was mainly responsible for and made some extraordinary discoveries. He kept popping up with them. The incredible drone shot, for example, was one of Joseph’s discoveries.
With Joseph having a musical background, did this inform the process on a film that is so musically driven?
Jen Peedom: It was a real advantage having Joseph there, as somebody that had a really intimate working relationship with Richard Tognetti specifically. They worked together very closely on Mountain. In fact, Joseph even composed some of the cues in Mountain. So, his musical knowledge in terms of music editing and score, just understanding the repertoire that we were drawing from for some of the classical works and all of those things, it just streamlined a lot of processes and sped things up.
Joseph Nizeti: From the outset, we always knew it would exist in cinemas, and as this live touring, orchestral performance, with the film playing back. So, from the get-go, we knew that there were certain parameters about ‘River Live’ that we had to accommodate, even when we were making the theatrical version of the film. It was interesting to have constraints for a live performance that were actually coming back and impacting decisions we were making about the film, but as always, constraints lead to coming up with a different way to navigate things and finding new, interesting, and surprising ways to satisfy the needs of both the ACO and the filmmakers in terms of getting the story across, but also making sure that the performances of ‘River Live’ will be really engaging and fulfilling for both the orchestra and audiences.
You worked with the ACO’s Richard Tognetti on River and Mountain. What was that process like a second time?
Jen Peedom: Richard is musical director of the film and in some ways that role is a much bigger role in a movie than it would normally be in the normal, director-composer relationship, and necessarily so, because this is designed as a concert movie. The reason that we have the orchestra tuning up at the start of the cinema version, which we don’t do in the live version, obviously, is so audiences understand that they are going to a concert. Richard brought very strong ideas to the project, some of which is challenging to make work, because when you’re trying to pair Bach with a piece of cinema, and the Bach doesn’t do what the edit wants it to do and isn’t the right length, then there’s all of these challenges. But Richard then found a way of arranging it for the entire orchestra, this piece of Bach, and somehow arranged it to fit to that particular sequence. He’s very skilled and is his own kind of visionary.
Music plays a big part in this film. How important was music to the film in production?
Joseph Nizeti: Music is deeply important in this film, it’s very much just a core aspect of the creative makeup of the story. With Mountain also, but specifically River, we would talk about these ideas a lot when we were writing and editing it. The film is very much designed to give the viewer an encounter with nature. It’s very much our belief that encounters with nature, can really start to change hearts and minds around the value of protecting it. There’s a sense in which, as proud as we are of River, it actually doesn’t come close to a good bush walk. There is a sense that any encounter with nature is a valuable thing worth having, and for us music is that magical, special thing that really takes the imagery to the next level.
It invites this sort of intense experience of nature. And the palette of the music, that we were able to collaborate with Richard Tognetti, the didgeridoo performer and vocalist William Barton, and Piers Burbrook de Vere, the third composer on the film, really does take you across the full gamut of the story. It gives you these powerful encounters with nature. As we see the births of a river, it gives you the lower, darker beats of the film. And we begin to learn about what damages dams are behind when it comes to impacting on rivers. Likewise, during the industrialisation section, the palettes can move into more electronics and percussion to articulate those kinds of manufactured or human landscapes. So, music is incredibly important to not just taking you to all those different places, but to really just bringing the audience into this more heightened experience with the imagery.
What was it like to work with Willem Dafoe a second time and what did he contribute to the film?
Jen Peedom: Willem had worked on Mountain, and we were just totally delighted he’d said yes to that. I had thought really long and hard about who that narrator should be. And he was the first and last person that we approached. And we were just thrilled that he said yes. What he brought to that project was this gravitas, but this kind of earthiness as well. For me, it was super important that it not be a token celebrity narrator. I had to really believe that this person believed the words they were saying, but you could also imagine them in that environment. I think it was having seen The Hunter that made me think about Willem Dafoe in that environment, that rugged environment. And he does love nature. So that felt believable to me.
When it came time to doing River, it really wasn’t even something that we had to think very much about. He just generously said, ‘Hey, I’m here. If you need me, I’d love to do it’. And he’d been so great the first time around. We’d had a great time. He happened to be out in Australia for the world premiere at the Opera House with the Chamber Orchestra because he was shooting Aquaman. He came and did the press tour. So, we became friends and you’ve never met a lovely and more down to earth, less ego driven person, ever. He’s just a total delight. So, we were just really lucky. He’s part of the team. He just was always part of the team. He was one of instruments.
River is in cinemas now.
