INTERVIEW: Wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory is still looking for animals, despite the pandemic
Photo: Bertie Gregory has been sidelined because of COVID-19, but he’s ready to get back out there. Photo courtesy of Chadden Hunter/BBC America/BBC Studios / Provided by press rep with permission.
The photographic and cinematographic work of Bertie Gregory should be well known to wildlife enthusiasts. The British filmmaker has traveled around the world since graduating college six years ago and provided his expertise both in front of and behind the camera for several prominent TV series. He’s a frequent presence with the BBC and National Geographic, and he’s typically on the road for 11 months of the year.
This year, the dreaded 2020, Gregory has been grounded in the United Kingdom without the chance to document the animal species he has come to know and love. Only recently has he ventured out of the country for an assignment, and the feeling was exhilarating.
“I was in Kenya,” Gregory said in a recent phone interview. “That was nice. That was my first overseas shoot since lockdown started. It’s nice to get back on the horse and remember where the record button is on the camera.”
Gregory was actually filming elephants in Kenya. He had been to the country several times before, but not to this particular section, and he had never worked on a film with elephants as the main target. So this was a learning opportunity for him.
“It was really cool getting to know them better and learning from lots of interesting people,” he said. “They’ve got an extraordinary social life and intelligence that is hard to even wrap your head around from a human perspective, just because their way of doing things is so different than us.”
Gregory’s road travels are so extensive (during a somewhat normal year) that he calls his home back in the UK his really expensive filing cabinet. He’s hardly there, except in between shooting assignments. Instead, there’s a better chance of finding him on the savannah in East Africa, along the coast of Alaska or climbing some mountain looking for an elusive animal.
“It does make maintaining your friends and all that stuff pretty challenging, but it’s part of the job, part of the sacrifice,” Gregory said. “I haven’t filmed overseas since February, which is the longest I’ve been in the UK since I went full-time professional, which was just after I graduated from college, which was six years ago. So I’ve just been go, go, go for six years. It’s been an interesting culture shock to still be in one place. It’s been difficult, but there’s been a couple silver linings. One has been it has forced me to get to know my local British wildlife, which is why I’m interested in wildlife in the first place because that’s what I grew up with, and I sort of have lost touch with it because I’m always filming overseas just because that’s how my career has developed, I guess. It’s been nice to be forced to reunite with it, and it’s been really amazing. I think most people think of the UK as having rubbish wildlife, but that’s wrong. We’ve got some incredible stuff. I’ve been filming blue sharks and basking sharks. Basking sharks are the second biggest fish on the planet, and the best place in the world to film it is in Scotland. So that’s where I was.”
Gregory grew up in Reading, England, which is situated just west of London. He lived on the edge of a town and had access to many farmers’ fields. This was not the most pristine natural environment to learn his trade, but he still delighted in finding badgers, foxes and deer. That may not be as exciting as grizzly bears and bald eagles, but a young Gregory had fun.
“I love them all the same,” he said. “All the skills that I was learning as a teenager, crawling on my belly in the mud, sneaking up on these animals, little did I know it was skills that I use on a day-to-day basis as a professional now. It was a good training ground for sure.”
For those who were wondering, Gregory has been a longtime supporter of Reading Football Club, and when they are not in the Premier League, he has rooted for Chelsea. But, truth be told, it’s hard to see Gregory having anytime nowadays for football fandom. If he’s not on assignment for the BBC, he’s working with Nat Geo or another network on a new project. One of his most cherished projects was being in front of the camera for wild_life, the first-ever digital series for Nat Geo.
“With BBC, I shoot on their landmark series, which is series like Frozen Planet, Planet Earth, Seven Worlds, those kinds of programs,” the filmmaker said. “Typically they have big teams, and I am hired as a cameraperson. So they’ll ring me up and say, ‘Right, we’ve got this shoot to film polar bears for six weeks. These are the dates. Do you want to do that?’ That’s how it works. I’m hired on a shoot-by-shoot basis, and it tends to be that they have their story. That said, I do occasionally pitch stories to them, but usually they have their story. And I’m hired as a cameraperson to help them with that story.”
He added: “With my projects with National Geographic, it’s different. They tend to be projects that I’m much more involved in editorially, so I research, pitch, go through the commissioning process and then work with a production company to make those projects happen and act as a field director while I’m there. Whereas with the BBC stuff, typically I have a director there. It’s kind of a nice balance because the National Geographic projects I’m involved in from start to finish. They really feel like my baby. I have a lot of control over the environmental messaging and what we do with the film. I really love that creative process. That said, it’s a lot more work, a lot more pressure, so it’s nice to balance that with my BBC shoots where my job is cameraperson. And at the end of the shoot, I hand over the harddrives, and I walk away.”
Onward to the next country.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on Bertie Gregory.
