THE ACADEMY CONVERSATIONS
Writer/Director
Gabriela Cowperthwaite speaks about
BLACKFISH
The Samuel Goldwyn Theatre
July, 2013
GC: "I am a mother who took her kids to
SeaWorld. When I heard about the
Dawn Brancheau incident in the media I read as much as I could about it. I found it very confusing. I kind of thought to myself---this doesn’t square with anything that I know about killer whales and their intelligence and I just sort of thought they didn’t do that to us, especially in
that park. I sort of thought that they are our friends here on this planet just as dolphins are. We have these images of these animals and it just didn’t make sense."
"I thought it was a one-off. I thought it was an aberration. I just wanted to investigate what it is about us that desires to have a relationship with our predator counterparts. So I had this bigger philosophical film in mind. I read some. I would read a little bit and the more I read the more confounding it got. First I read that she tripped and fell. Then there was this ponytail theory and then it sounded like it was a playful event."
"Then I read the autopsy report and it’s just a terrible thing to read and to imagine. And it became just this---I guess I didn’t want it to be deliberate. I didn’t want it to be this sort of attack. And so from that moment…and then another kind of revelatory moment was when I found out that he had killed twice before. Suddenly I realized I couldn’t make the film that I was going to be making. I felt in a strange way that I was being kind of compelled to tell the truth here. It wasn't sort of, you know, my original directive or what I had in mind. And I think that a lot of documenters will tell you that. You feel compelled. You can’t not tell the story."
"The former
SeaWorld trainers have all seen it. Some of them knew each other. Some of them overlapped in their tenure at
SeaWorld. Some didn’t. Some came much much later. In fact, we have one guy in the film who left
SeaWorld not even a year ago. So he came on very late because he had just quit and he was still nervous and backed out of one interview after we had flown out there to go interview him. He said, “I can’t. I can’t do this.” Two months later, three months later---we revisited that."
"There’s a quality that all of these people have---its almost a confessional quality. Maybe it comes through the film. I hope it does. They’re my ‘Apostles’ and I sort of refer to them as that. They have the message from the other side. There is a lot of guilt. There is a confessional aspect to this in that they sort of needed to talk about this and let it go before they can kind of move on. They all have new careers now. They were never able to let go of what happened and felt that they abandoned the animals and the animals are very likely doing worse and---my gosh---their colleagues---one of them died. So they just sort of feel like they can’t shut that door without kind of talking some of this stuff through."
"To the extent that all captivity is bad or is probably very likely a bad thing, I always thought that killer whales at
SeaWorld are probably treated better than like a primate in a defunct zoo.
So in my mind I was not going into this film to talk about the state of the whales or mistreatment of whales or anything like that. I completely backed into it. You peel back the onion and it’s shocking. And in fact what shocks people a lot is that this seems so incendiary. The film seems so incendiary. But it is so tip of the iceberg. I wanted the self-restraint to stick with a single story. I wanted to tell audiences the story of
Tilikum. Start 40 years back and just march him through as a protagonist because I didn’t want to shoehorn all these activist facts to overwhelm people because I don’t learn that way and I don’t think everybody learns that way. I was sort of like---you trust your audience--- you know."
"I think at this point I just have such hope. Yes, I do feel that you come out of these films with hopefully a little bit of shock and anger. Some questions. Some more questions and then ultimately---
hope."
