Melanie Finn Talks The Crimson Wing

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.

In some ways it hampered us because people had all these questions and we were like 'we don't know'. As a filmmaker that's a difficult conundrum but on the other hand we don't know and that is an amazing thing.

- I read that you spent thirteen months filming, that's a long time to dedicate to a single project.

Well actually in terms of a wildlife film that's an incredibly brief period considering there were only the three of us it's a miracle that we managed to get it done, most wildlife films can take at least two to three years, so the fact that we got all of this done with a tiny crew, I still have no idea how we did it.

Actually Matt and I stayed on after the filming for another year and a half so we were probably there for a total of three years.

- How did you find the shoot and what sort of difficulties did you face there?

Physically it was very gruelling, not only because we had these huge time constraints, but the lake itself is incredibly alkaline and if you are walking in it and you have a shaving cut on your leg it's like acid. So any sort of wading that we had to do your legs would become so irritated from the water.

Because we couldn’t drive anywhere because of this rain we had to lug all of this camera equipment in these packs so we would go two miles across mud flaps, up the volcano or up these incredible waterfalls and through the marshes.

I didn't go out on the salt flats but Matt and Leander did and it's forty five degrees out there so physically it was a very very demanding job where you had to be fit. We had to put up with a lot of hardship but having said that it was such a beautiful place and you felt that you were an explorer as well as a filmmaker so that was the pay off.

- How did the script and the story change as you were faced with the realities of filming? Where there thing that you wanted to shoot that just became impossible?

Yes but I think that's true of any natural history film you start out with an idea of what you want to get and it's so practical and you know that you can get this and that. But then you have another list of what you would like to get, we wanted to get a fish eagle but that didn't happen but we got a fantastic hyena hunt instead.

Then of course, which we never expected to get, the Maribu predating the chicks it had never been documented like that, and it had certainly never been filmed, so it wasn't just a revelation to us but in terms of the scientific knowledge of what happens to these birds when they are nesting.

One of my favourite shots in the whole film is right at the beginning when the rainbow hits the water; I think many people think that it's a CGI shot. We had been having the most terrible trouble because it had rained for four months and Disney kept ringing to ask when we were going to start filming.

Then Matt and I climbed this hill and all of a sudden, after all of this rain, the sun came out and it illuminated the lake and this huge rainbow came out and the reflection on the lake with the birds walking though it is still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And we could never have thought that we could have got something that epic and that beautiful, and of course the volcano erupted which was totally unscripted.

- How important was Disneynature’s backing for the project?

It was something of a pilot project for them, they hadn't done anything since the 1950's, and I think that Jean-Francois was fantastically supportive, obviously there were days when the studio wanted more cute chicks, but certainly with Jean-Francois and out other executive producer Paul Webster they were so supportive of that original vision, which was to create something new and different and took some chances.

That did get diluted somewhat, but that's inevitable when you are trying to market a film, but I would say Jean-Francois was incredibly supportive and how can you not be happy when the Disney machine decides to get behind your film and embrace it the way that Jean-Francois did.

And they were pretty much hands off we didn't get a lot of phone calls telling us that we had to do this or had to do that but I think that they just decided to let us get on with it and see what happened.

- And when you see the chicks leave the nest for the first time it's one of the best moments in the film for me so do you have any favourites?

I love that scene when the adult birds has the chick nestling under her wing and then it peaks out and makes that little cheeping noise I think it's just a beautiful shot. I think it's a really touching shot and you really understand it, even though they seem to be dumb birds, there is a connection between a mother and a chick.

Just some of the happier moments when we filmed the whole water sequence with the waterfall, I know that there's nothing very emotional about that but it's such a beautiful place to film.

We spent days up this canyon and it was just like this lost world were there is nobody just these huge vines and this beautiful waterfall, I look at that and personally I have really happy memories of that particular section of filming.

- You kicked off your career in journalism so what drew you to our lovely profession?

I have been a writer all my live I was a journalist, then I was a scriptwriter in Hollywood for a while, then I wrote a novel and then I met Matt and we made a few small documentaries together for television and then we started working on The Crimson Wing. So everything seems to have happened by default rather than by choice, which is not what I'm supposed to say (laughs).

But I think it's a natural extension for me because I really like nature and spend a lot of time outdoors. Matt and I are very creatively compatible, I love nature and I'm a writer so all those things kind of came together.

- While you were making the movie you founded the East lake Natron Health project so can you tell me a little bit about that?

Basically the remoteness of the area there is absolutely no health care whatsoever, you had to walk eight hours across to the other side of the lake where there is a small clinic and sometime there is a doctor there but most of the time there isn't.

So if you have a sick child or you are sick there is just nothing and people were dying of ridiculous infections like TB.

So when people learnt that I had a first aid box and some reasonably good first aid knowledge they just started coming up the hill to be treated; I ended up stitching up a guys face and evacuating a you woman who had pre-eclampsia, if we hadn't she would have died.

When we left I felt very strongly that we shouldn't just abandon them to the fate that they had faced before and so with Matt's mother, who is a GP in the UK and done a lot of rural work with communities in Nepal, we came up with this project which was to support local medical services within in the area so that they could extend their services to these remote communities.

So at least these people have options, it's not great but at least once a month they have the flying doctors coming in and they can get vaccinations and medications. We have just had a donation of $20,000 from a Dutch donor to buy ultrasounds for a couple of remote clinics and also some high frequency radios for a couple of the villages so they can have better communication with the flying medical service.

It's not the perfect solution but it's something where they had nothing.

- Finally what's next for you?

I have twin babies at the moment and I don't really think much beyond the next feeding (laughs), potentially there will be another film or another book, but at the minute it's nappies and bottles.

The Crimson Wing is out on DVD now.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

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.

In some ways it hampered us because people had all these questions and we were like 'we don't know'. As a filmmaker that's a difficult conundrum but on the other hand we don't know and that is an amazing thing.

- I read that you spent thirteen months filming, that's a long time to dedicate to a single project.

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