Melanie Finn Talks The Crimson Wing

15 March 2010

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Melanie Finn has been a journalist and an author and has now penned the script for the latest documentary The Crimson Wing.

Working alongside her husband, director Matthew Aeberhard, and Leander Ward, also serving as director, the trio spent thirteen months at Lake Natron following the flamingos in this largely undocumented part of the world.

I caught up with Melanie to talk about how the project came around, her experiences filming and what lies ahead for her.

- Your new movie The Crimson Wing is out here in the UK this week so can you tell me a little bit about it?

It's filmed in Lake Natron, which is one of the remotest places in the world; there has never been a documentary film made there. It's about the beauty of the place and the beauty of the birds, the flamingos; well I hope (laughs).

We wanted to make something that was special and different as opposed to something that was just normal with a natural history sort of approach that you might see on television.

So we took a few chances with the way that we filmed it and the way that we structured it and wrote it, and I think that the place itself is this very magical and dynamic place that asks us to do something different.

- You penned the script for the film so where did your interest in this subject come from?

Well I'm married to Matt, who is one of the directors, and with Leander we had been looking at nature since about 2001 together and coming up with this idea that we wanted to make a film there.

So over the years the three of us worked together to come up with a theme for the story and how we wanted to structure it and what sort of film we wanted it to be. So my involvement was about conceptualising the whole thing as well as just penning the script, in fact Natron was one of the first places that Matt and I went on a date so we've had a long association with the place.

- You say that you have worked on this story for a long time so what story did you want to tell and how did that change as the concept developed?

I think we started out in a much weirder place we had ideas about comparing nature to other planets, Natron really looks like another planet, as well as asking the question why are we studying the heavens and going into space when we have amazing places like this that no one knows anything about?

So that was one of the places where we started, and I don't think that there is much of that left in the film. We did really wanted to tell the story of nature's regenerative powers and how through death everything starts over again, that was at the very beginning and it's something that we kept.

Jean-Francois Camilleri at Disney was very supportive of that he really wanted a poetic, different type of film; although Disney wanted a few more happy chicks Jean-Francois really wanted that heavier more serious theme.

- So what was the research process like?

Well actually the research process was very brief because so little is known about Natron; a few papers have been written about it when you consider that it's less than a hundred miles from the Serengeti which is one of most researched places on earth. There's quite literally a slim stack on paper, Lesley Brown wrote something on flamingos and there have been a couple of things about the algae and that's it.

Even the Lesser Flamingos themselves, there has been a lot written about the Greater Flamingos in the South of France, there is almost nothing written about them. So that was part of the mystery of the flamingos nobody knows anything about them why do they come? Why do they go? Why do they choose this lake? Nobody has a clue.

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