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Louie Psihoyos, Director of The Cove talks to EIA on Dolphins

www.thecovemovie.com

LOUIE Psihoyos is one of the world’s top photographers and co-founder of The Oceanic Preservation Society. His first film The Cove exposes the brutal slaughter of dolphins in a remote cove in Taiji, Japan, and won the 2009 Best Documentary Oscar.


What was the motivation for The Cove?

I started the Oceanic Preservation Society in 2005 with the help of my friend and diving buddy Jim Clark. He started Silicon Graphics, Netscape and WebMD. We’ve seen the decline of the oceans drop dramatically since we’ve started diving and it was our idea to use film to create awareness about the ocean’s decline.

I had been travelling to marine mammal conferences around the country to understand the issues and Ric O’Barry was supposed to be a speaker at one of these events talking to about 2000 of the top marine mammal scientists. At the last minute, he was pulled by the event’s sponsor, Hubbs Research Institute, the non-profit arm of Sea World. I called up Ric and asked him why he wasn’t allowed to talk and he told me it was because he was going to talk about the captive dolphin industry and how it relates to the largest slaughter of cetaceans on the planet. I had never heard about either industry before and was quite shocked. I asked who was working on the issue and he said very few people. Clare Perry of EIA was the first I heard of; we met later at an IWC meeting and she was researching the science about the toxicity of dolphins and porpoises. But Ric was the only one actively protesting.

I had never made a film before so I took a three-day crash course on how to make a film and went to Taiji, Japan to meet up with Ric Driving into Taiji was like driving into a horror movie. Everything about the town made it seem like they loved dolphins and whales. There was even at sign at a dolphin park where they trained dolphins that said in English “We love Dolphins!” Of course, all of the dolphins from that pod were captured right down the street in a National Park which is a nature preserve. All the other members of the pod were slaughtered, the few that survived were spared as long as they performed tricks for food.

The tragic irony of this movie is that the dolphin is the only wild animal throughout history known to save the lives of humans, from Aristotle and Pliny they have been legendary. The only way we can save them now is to prove that we have made their environment so toxic that we should not be eating them.


What was the immediate reaction to the film, especially in Japan?

The film was incredibly well received at the Tokyo Film Festival. At the Asia Society last month in New York, the show was sold out and received a standing ovation. Japanese and Asian audiences love the film. The negative reactions come mainly from nationalists who have not seen the film and react only as a knee jerk to what they think the film is about.


Will you be following up the effects The Cove has had in Taiji?

We hope to release the film for free in Japan – that would be the dubbed version of The Cove – in a few weeks over the internet. We are starting to get censored from screenings in universities and teachers are being threatened with expulsion if they show it. It seems the best idea is to try releasing it, in part at least, virally so the Japanese people can see the movie for themselves.


With the International Whaling Commission coming up in a few months, do you think The Cove will have made an impact there? Is the IWC likely to include small cetaceans within its remit?

We showed The Cove last year at the IWC and we may do it again. The best compliment the film ever received came from the IWC delegate from Monaco, Frederick Briand, who said that The Cove is worth a thousand speeches.

With Japan having bought so many votes at the IWC, I think it is unlikely to get a vote for small cetaceans any time soon. IWC delegates unfortunately vote with their wallets not with the science and their hearts.

Since the Japanese began ‘scientific whaling’ in 1987, one year after the moratorium, there has been perhaps one been one peer reviewed science article worthy of publication. Nearly all the results they achieve could be had from non-invasive, non-killing methods. The really good science that could be published for Japanese consumers would be the extensive toxicity reports, like EIA has done of cetaceans in Japan. Clearly, consumers would abandon those products in droves if the information was widely distributed. All dolphin meat is toxic by Japanese standards so if they enforced their health food laws none would be able to find its way on to supermarket shelves and freezers.


With the real possibility that commercial whaling could be legalised again, is the IWC an effective body for dealing with these issues?

The 1986 moratorium on whaling was one of the great ecological achievements of the last century. Only a few times in the past have countries come together for the common good to save a natural resource. Erasing the moratorium would erase 25 years of some of the best environmental work accomplished by humanity.

I have been in talks with most the major NGOs and they agree that we must fight this effort like never before – the whales are not yet saved, there are dark forces out there trying desperately to get them back on the menu.

What we know about whalers is they lie. What we know about whaling countries is that they do not care that whalers lie. The Soviet Union had two sets of books for whaling in the Southern Ocean and they killed 100,000 more whales than they reported. Even after the moratorium, Japan was whaling aggressively on her own coasts. In violation of CITES and the IWC, Japan continues to export whale meat to other countries or not follow up prosecuting those that do. I think if the IWC declares open season on whales again we will see blood baths like The Cove all over the world with the great whales.

Korea has a whaling program almost as large as Japan’s and it exists only from whales caught in nets. Of course, many of the whales are harpooned and cut up at sea where the method of death cannot be analysed. There are now 29 whale meat shops in Korea along a one-mile stretch of seafront selling “intentional by-catch.” We can expect to see a lot more springing up all over the world if we loosen enforcement.

Scott Baker, a scientific advisor to the US and perhaps one of the top DNA surveillance experts in the world, is proposing that Japan offer up some real science and turn over their DNA registry so we know if whale kills or ‘takes’ are authorized. We are now seeing Japanese whale meat turn up in America. My organization, OPS, worked with federal officials to bust a high-end sushi restaurant in America that was selling whale meat from Japan. It is now closed down but there are many more doing the same thing around the US and the world, and we must work diligently to keep the demand shut down.

What do you think it will take to alter the mentality of a country that seems set on a path of total marine destruction?

Mitsubishi is stockpiling bluefin tuna for the day they are commercially extinct and they will own the only surviving market. The only thing the Japanese Fisheries worry about is money.

I’d like to tell you a funny story. We had the material for The Cove two years ago and it takes a long time to edit a good film. I did not want to have this material and not at least try to use it to shut down the cove while we waited to edit the film. At the time, toxic dolphin meat was being sold to the school systems around Wakamaya, where Taiji is located, and the mayor had hatched a plan to distribute toxic dolphin meat to school children all over Japan. EIA, Ric’s organisation, CCC in Chile, Blue Voice and my organisation, OPS, wanted to stop this. We made a PSA (Public Service Announcement) in Japanese, with the intent of trying to get the Japanese delegation to watch the film and understand the content – it wasn’t only about animal rights, it’s about human rights to safe food.

On the flight down to Chile, it was a completely full flight except for one seat right next to me. Before the door closed, onto the plane came Akira Nakamae, deputy minister of Japanese Overseas Fisheries, and sat down next to me. It was a 10-hour flight from Dallas, Texas, to Chile. I thought, if there is a god, it has a good sense of humour. I waited ’til the flight took off so it would be more uncomfortable for him to change seats with anyone and I asked him: “Do you know who I am?” He shook his head no. I told him that I knew who he was and I wanted to show him some films. I showed him a preview of The Cove, I showed him the PSA and I said: “You’re the guy in charge of 5,000 tons of toxic dolphin meat being spread to consumers every year. It’s being fed to school kids, even though it has many times more mercury than allowed by health laws – how do you reconcile selling poison to children?” He told me: “I’m in charge of food security, not food safety.”

About the same time, the Australian government, by investigating sales receipts of tuna sold around Japan, had caught the Japanese fisheries killing 50 per cent more bluefin tuna than was allowed for the last 20 years! I asked Akira: “How do you justify killing more fish than you are allowed?” He told me Japan is an island nation about the size of California and only 17 per cent of the land is flat enough to build or grow crops. They have to look to the sea for food. It used to be that a Japanese tuna boat could go out and be full in eight days, now it takes 30 and they are competing further and further from home with the Koreans, the Chinese and the Indonesians for the same fish. He said the people to watch out for now are the Chinese and they are now consuming more fish than the Japanese.

He said he was concerned about feeding his people now, worrying about future stocks would be somebody else’s concern.

Were there occasions where you or the team faced real danger?

We had 5 hotel rooms – the police had five hotel rooms. We were always facing arrest. There are arrest warrants out for the OPS team in Japan. I get death threats by email. We were run out of town twice by the police. Still, we went back seven times to Taiji.


The activities taking place in Taiji are partly fuelled by a demand for ‘Flipper’ type shows globally, so shutting down places like SeaWorld would help stop the demand; how do you feel about this and are there any efforts being made to at least highlight the plight of captive cetaceans to the wider public?

I think there are tens of millions of people who have seen The Cove now that will never go to a dolphin park. Jacques Cousteau once said: “The educational benefit of watching a dolphin in captivity would be like learning about humanity by only observing a prisoner in solitary confinement.”

I think when you take a sentient intelligent creature out of the wild and force them to do tricks for our amusement – it says more about our intelligence than theirs. There has never been a documented case of a wild Orca killing a human being but one SeaWorld dolphin has killed three people in one lifetime. Two SeaWorld orcas killed two people within two months. SeaWorld should be called the killers, not the killer whales.

What impact do you think receiving the Oscar for best documentary will have?

The Oscars are the most widely watched show on Japanese television, people there know about it now. The Cove has won some 60 awards now – I gave most of them away to our crews and our supporters like Ric O’Barry. The awards are the collateral in trying to get the real reward, shutting down the demand for dolphin meat and eliminating dolphin parks. To this end, EIA has been the boots on the ground in this effort way before we came to the fight. Meeting likeminded individuals, like those in EIA, has given us the science and the support to move forward on this issue and advance the fight into the mainstream.

The director John Ford said that making a movie is like painting a picture with an army. I had a really good army, starting with support of organisations like EIA. The really great aspect of making a movie is that it is a collaboration; no one person can take credit for the success of a film but we can all share in its success. The fact that the film is getting traction now is empowering. I believe film is the most powerful weapon in the world, a weapon of mass construction. It’s the one hope we have to save the environment before it’s too late.

Your interviews from Japan’s major cities suggested most people were unaware of what went on in Taiji. How much exposure has The Cove had in Japan?


At the Tokyo film festival we had more press coverage than Avatar. In fact, I see The Cove’s plot as kind of prequel to Avatar: Ric O’Barry, ex-military guy, goes into an alien world to subjugate the natives, who are nine feet long and blue, finds out they are more intelligent and sentient than anyone realises and helps create an army to vanquish his own species.

Do you have plans to expose/highlight the plight of other marine creatures?

The next film will be in 3-D and will actively try to inspire millions more people to save our cetacean cousins. We’re working on it now.

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