Interview: Rupert Murray (The End of the Line)

[Editor’s note: To coincide with The End of the Line‘s release today at the Cinema Village in New York and Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, we’ve re-published the following interview which took place during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.]

Rupert Murray

Eric Lavallee: How did this documentary subject “land on your plate”? And more importantly, how did this become a story you wanted to explore?
Rupert Murray: I’d been reading horror articles in the newspapers about the oceans sporadically for about 5 years, but I always thought – how do I put these together into a film? I always had had a passion for marine life and then I read Charles Clover’s book The End of The Line and I realized my search was over. He had spent 15 years researching and amassing stories and data that laid the whole thing out and to me, he revealed two things, one; it’s ten times worse than I ever imagined, and two; it’s so easy (relatively to other global problems) to solve. So I decided to contact him and make the film and so two years and a few quid later here we are.

EL: If we look back at your debut doc film and look ahead at your next project, is it a fair assessment to say that you have a preference of exploring larger themes through the POV of the individual?
RM: We looked at telling this story through the eyes on an individual and we felt that no one person’s journey or experiences could do the magnitude of the issue justice. That is a bold claim to make but instead I found a group of like minded forward thinking heroes from all around the world, who were all battling the same issues in the same way. Hopefully as their stories are told, it becomes one voice. The similarities between this film and Unknown White Male, my last feature doc, is really the science and the abstract nature of the problem the film describes. I’m really hooked on science, I love the opportunity documentaries give me, and therefore the audience, to sit with the number one expert in a given field and try to understand not only what they know but why they are searching for that knowledge. For me in both films I experienced a kind of epiphany, when the knowledge of the subject matter reached a tipping point and I went ‘oh, now I really get it’. Then I started to look at so many other things, outside marine issues or science with a totally new eye. That is the great ability that docs have, if you want to invest in the subject matter there can be great rewards.

EL: With the advantage of working from the book – did you think of a narrative strategy prior to shooting?
RM: I did draw out a fairly rough structure but it didn’t follow the books chapter by chapter design but had the same overall arch. Because we had to travel to quite a few distant places it was in our interest to stay there to find characters for our story. That extra time meant we shot over two hundred hours of material. It took a huge amount of time and effort to condense it into our story. Hopefully the film brings the book and some new elements, to life. The story because it is so far reaching was very difficult to tell, but I hope we have succeeded.

EL: I imagine you might have gone in places where you were not welcomed. What proved to be the most difficult footage to obtain?
RM: Actually we were welcome most places apart from on trawlers. We tried very hard to gain access to a trawler but no one would give us permission for a variety of reasons ranging from length of time between ports to insurance but I think maybe they were frightened that people might recoil at what they brought up on deck and what they threw back over the side. We went on many purse seiners though. But our film is not an investigation in detail about any one type of fishing but tries to tell the whole story. And that story is of a global industry with a fast declining resource. The goals put forward in our film will hopefully help fishermen to secure a long term future.

EL: I was wondering if you and Charles considered a counter balance to scientist forecasts and if there was any thought to including the arguments of fish as sentient beings, veganism or perhaps, moral issues like humans dominance over other species?
RM: I got trapped in a fishing net and thought I was going to die, so whether fish feel pain or not is irrelevant to me, fear of death is just as bad, and they certainly feel that, because we were both trying to get out. Our film is not about an animal rights issue, or a conservation issue, it’s fundamentally about global resources. In the oceans we have this amazing ‘free’ food source and we are destroying it’s ability to replenish itself. Hundreds of millions of people depend on fish to live, and with our growing population we may seriously need that resource into the future and turn around and find out that it’s gone.

EL: What are you hoping that future audiences will take away from this doc?
RM: I hope they enjoy it. I hope people find the story enthralling and make the same connection with the ‘issue’ as we did. I hope they begin to care about fish. The entire Fish Team hopes they ask questions about where their fish comes from and only to buy it from a sustainable source, we want people to tell politicians to respect the science when taking decisions about how much fishermen can catch and to reduce the overall fishing effort. We also want people to join our campaign for Marine Protected Areas, zoned areas where less or no fishing takes place, to rebuild the fish populations that we have lost. If these things become commonplace the seas will return to their former glory. It’s that simple.

Rupert Murray‘s The End of the Line received its world premiere at the 25th edition of the Sundance Film Festival.