The makers of the award-winning documentary The Cove are back, with a guerilla-filmed documentary Racing Extinction.
“Most documentaries feel like you’re going to a medical lecture, where you’re just getting a lot of facts but there’s no story. The goal is to be a fly on the wall,” he tells me at a Santa Monica hotel, after a late night spent at the Port of Los Angeles projecting blue whale images from the Tesla. (Between 1988 and 2012, there were 100 reported cases of large whales struck by ships along the California coast.) “But if you can wrap that around a tale of adventure, of thrill and redemption, and tell a really goddamned good story, people will listen to almost anything. When people see our films, I want them to feel like they landed in a different world, like, this is not my beautiful life. We’re trying to wake people up to what is actually going on.”
More here.
The film has been well-received, scoring 79% on film review site Rotten Tomatoes to date. The New York Times called the imagery ‘shocking but necessary’. Variety, however, didn’t feel that Racing Extinction was as good as its predecessor The Cove, suggesting that it was too dense.