Exploring the Art of Underwater Cinematography with Pete Zuccarini
by Darrell Nicholson
Did humans, in our evolutionary march from the sea, lose a crucial means of perceiving reality? Are we now sensory exiles of a planet that is nearly two-thirds water? Or do these “underwater eyes” still lie dormant somewhere in our hindbrain, waiting for the artist to re-awaken them? These are just some of the questions that acclaimed underwater cinematographer Pete Zuccarini touched on during this interview with Darrell Nicholson, co-editor of creative non-fiction for Saw Palm Volume 6.
Growing up on the barrier island of Key Biscayne, just a few miles from downtown Miami, cinematographer Pete Zuccarini was 11-years-old when he began shooting his first underwater photography of sharks, dolphins, and stingrays. Shortly after graduating from Brown University with a degree in semiotics, he launched into documentary films. Even Zuccarini’s earliest made-for-Disney documentaries, Sea of Sharks (2000) and Everglades: Home of the Living Dinosaur (2001), demonstrate his talent for transforming murky water, difficult lighting, and chaotic underwater scenes into unforgettable images.
Today, the 44-year-old filmmaker is regarded as Hollywood’s go-to guy for almost-impossible underwater shots. When a Hollywood
director requires a camera crew in a shark-filled lagoon (Into the Blue, 2007), the crashing surf beneath a sheer cliff (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, 2006) or a crocodile-infested section of the Amazon River (Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), Zuccarini is the man they call. His recent work includes the last four films in the Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003-2011), Into the Wild (2007), 127 Hours (2011), Piranha (2011), and Dolphin Tale (2011). In 2010, he teamed up with Dolphin activist Rick O’Barry for a daring exposé of dolphin trade for Animal Planet, and handled the underwater cinematography for Ang Lee in the film version of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi.
Zuccarini’s craftsmanship extends into the technical side of filming as well. He has been instrumental in designing innovative underwater housings for the bulky cameras used for 3D films and developing lenses to deal with the challenges of filming in the “boundary layer” where water and air meet. If there is a “signature” Zuccarini shot, it is one long take that gives the impression that the camera is in the arms of the sea itself; the horizon is undefined, the interaction of light and water is other-worldly, and the mind’s eye suddenly becomes weightless. Through these images, Zuccarini strives to capture the meaning and beauty of the world we left behind so many eons ago.
___________
Darrell Nicholson: You’ve done a lot of underwater natural history work all over the world, but much of your work has been done right here in Florida. Is there a particular Florida animal that you associate with?
Pete Zuccarini: I have a lot of complex relationships with Florida animals, but one that I stayed interested in was the eagle ray—what we used to call as kids the leopard ray, because it has these striking spots. As a boy, I was initially interested in the striking pattern and the fact that they were flying under water like birds . . . If you spend a whole day following around an eagle ray, you find they have these periods of the day when they are alone and feeding, and then they gather in these large social groups. As a boy, these were the kinds of things that fascinated me. There was this opening of these veils of secrecy . . . as the animals slowly began to reveal themselves.
DN: Given your success with Hollywood blockbusters, what draws you back to nature documentaries?
PZ: I believe there are still many lessons we can learn from the ways animals solve problems in a given environment. But to understand this, you almost have to rewire your brain from the way we are taught to learn. . . . Animals have their own ways of communicating knowledge or what we might call “intelligence” that is very different from our own. You have birds that fly halfway around the planet every year, you have sea turtles that circumnavigate, coming back to the same beach they were born on—all these things that are so amazing, and offer us a chance to learn about our world and ourselves. With all these things that we know, there are still these fundamental mysteries in the natural world. Unfortunately, most people today are so far removed from wild animals that is hard for them to recognize this. . . . In Florida, we are lucky in that respect.
DN: How does the underwater medium affect the way you tell a story?
PZ: As artists we are trying to communicate feelings, connections between things that we see, trying to make these radial associations with an image or a word. Photographers are working with light, and water catches light some unique ways that you don’t see on land. Particles in the water and the texture on the surface of the water directly affect colors, softness or hardness of light, visibility, clarity—all the things that can create mood. . . . For example, in a moving picture, swimming through murky water gives you a great opportunity for these “reveals.” There are these shafts of light moving through murky water and all of a sudden there’s this face of an alligator, white teeth in your face, literally glowing as the particles in the water catch the light that is reflected off the alligator’s teeth. That’s a very interesting thing about water—the fluidity of the lens or filter that it creates between the camera and your subject.
DN: You said in one interview that you try to film the way the water sees things. What do you mean by that?
PZ: In addition to the optical characteristics of water, things that live in water have a completely different relationship to gravity. In air, when you jump, you come down back to square, so your horizon is a very big part of the way you perceive things. . . . But there are creatures that live in the water that have no respect for the horizon. For me as a photographer, I try a little to break that tendency to orient to a horizon. Photographers do this on the land as well, but for me, in some respects it’s easier, because I’m not actually feeling the gravity. I’m generally neutrally buoyant; I tend to balance the cameras so I can spin them around. In this way, I can focus on communicating what’s in the photographic frame, rather that its relationship to up or down.
On a deeper level, I am trying to embrace all the things I know and feel while I’m in the water, and I try to use these to help me grow and learn. I ask myself, what other sort of vestigial terrestrial perspectives am I carrying with me into the water that are preventing me from really breaking through to the other side? I think there are a lot of really interesting artistic and intellectual pursuits to try and understand how humans are bound by the way we perceive things. Most of the “eyes” on the planet are probably in the ocean, so, wouldn’t most of the perceptions of “the way things are” probably exist in the ocean?
DN: How do you find new ways to look at the ocean?
PZ: One of the things I’ve gotten really interested in lately is including scenes that transition into the water from the air, or from the air into the water, shots that include the two different worlds in one movement. In this way we can really feel the differences. The photographic version of this would be called a split-level shot, but in a motion picture, you can really explore the dramatic changes as you move from the optical clarity of the air, where you are bound by gravity, to the water . . . where the character and the camera become weightless, and the water becomes a lens. There are a lot of technical challenges to this.
DN: How have you tried to deal with these kinds of technical challenges?
PZ: [Underwater camera housing pioneer] Steven Ogle and I have put a lot of development into the curvatures of the glass that goes inside the waterproof housing. If you look through a (diving) mask underwater, everything is magnified 25 percent. We experiment with that a lot when we do our water-level shots. Not only is it interesting to see the effect of different glass curvatures, it is also important to see how the water interacts with the surface of that glass. There is always that problem of not being able to control how the water sticks to glass, so we began experimenting with various coatings to control that. We have found that in some of these situations, a wet lens is preferable to a dry lens, so we’ve had to learn more about how you keep a lens wet for long periods of time.
DN: You’ve been in some animal activist films, and clearly care about the marine environment. Do you ever worry about over-dramatizing sharks as “man eaters” in films?
PZ: The interesting thing about monsters is that the thing that makes them so frightening is also the one of the things we admire . . . As an artist, I can show you how efficiently sharks move through the water, how beautiful their form is—and we all admire that—but if I leave out the part that bites, . . . then I’m not showing you the part that you are most afraid of and most fascinated by. An artist who cares about these animals is sort of stuck, because if you don’t represent the part that makes them dangerous, it’s not even accurate. This is where the suspense and drama lies, but this is also where it gets sticky, because drama leads to sensationalism . . . which can lead to misinformation.
DN: How do you handle the collaboration with different artists?
PZ: At a certain point in my development as a filmmaker, I realized that making films was not about how to make myself into this auteur, that there was something to embrace about all these talented people coming together . . . If you bring together a bunch of artists who are enthusiastic about a project, the communication that goes on between them is often the brightest part of the art form. The people I work with sometimes know more of what I want than I do myself, and vice versa . . . it verges on telepathy when it’s going well. I’m not a musician, but I would like to think that there are times when we get together . . . we solve a problem in a way that musicians might when they are jamming.
DN: Director Ang Lee is known for his stunning cinematography; can you describe some of the challenges you faced when you were filming Life of Pi?
PZ: The thing I’m trying to do more assertively is to try to craft scenes in which the camera moves in extremely dynamic ways, to really take advantage of how the water allows you to move around a subject and offer a range of perspectives—above, below, or around—so that shot can tell its own little story. In Life of Pi, we shot a scene, which in the movie is referred to as “The Storm of God.” . . . During the storm, the main character, a boy, gets knocked off a lifeboat. There’s a wave, and a giant wave thrusts him down under the water. The director [Lee] wanted the boy to go through a series of perceptions in one long breath hold. . . . We did another shot where the boy is running around some spiral stairs and then goes down into the water and back up again. The shots that go into and out of and back into the water are the most challenging, and I am very interested in exploring and perfecting those kinds of shots.
DN: Are there any feature film moments that you could connect with on a personal level?
PZ: We shot only a few sequences for Into the Wild [a film based on 24-year-old Chris McCandless’ death in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992], and for one of them we went rafting down the Grand Canyon, with the director, Sean Penn, and the rest of the crew. It was a very different environment than your typical Hollywood movie; we were sitting around the fire, telling stories, eating together, waking up together. . . . There was something about Chris McCandless’ story that I could really relate to. The story was as much about living his life in a free-spirited way than it was about being in the wilderness, and I felt like there was once a period in my life that I was doing the same sort of the stuff that he was doing, asking the same sort of idealistic questions he was asking. One of the scenes that we filmed was when the actor playing Chris McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) walks out into the surf on the Oregon coastline. The narration was really great. It was about how everyone should, at least once in their life, do something that was truly challenging—challenging for them, not for anyone else . . . It asked that big question: Have you ever lived if you’ve never truly lived?
DN: Is there some watery place in Florida that stands out as particularly beautiful or unique where a water-lover might “truly live,” so to speak?
PZ: The springs [in north central Florida] are an amazing natural phenomena. There are these giant tubes of absolutely clear water that has been stripped of almost all chemicals and particles, and [the water] flows out into this pond setting and brings all kinds of life—alligator, gar, turtles—animals that are usually found in murky water. So these springs allow you to see all these swamp creatures in a completely surreal, clear-as-air water. There is one place in particular that was always mesmerizing to me: Devil’s Ear, where the very tannic rust-colored water of the Santa Fe River runs next to this very powerful outflow of baby blue, perfectly clear water. You can be sitting 40 feet down at the bottom of this spring, looking at the trees and the sky above—it’s so clear that you can see the acorns on the tree—and then this mushroom-shaped cloud of tannic water swirls over the surface of this water and because your eyes have adjusted to the blues of the spring, the rust looks blood red. It’s a really striking experience.
This interview originally appeared in Volume 6.
Growing up on the barrier island of Key Biscayne, just a few miles from downtown Miami, cinematographer Pete Zuccarini was 11-years-old when he began shooting his first underwater photography of sharks, dolphins, and stingrays. Shortly after graduating from Brown University with a degree in semiotics, he launched into documentary films. Even Zuccarini’s earliest made-for-Disney documentaries, Sea of Sharks (2000) and Everglades: Home of the Living Dinosaur (2001), demonstrate his talent for transforming murky water, difficult lighting, and chaotic underwater scenes into unforgettable images.
Today, the 44-year-old filmmaker is regarded as Hollywood’s go-to guy for almost-impossible underwater shots. When a Hollywood
director requires a camera crew in a shark-filled lagoon (Into the Blue, 2007), the crashing surf beneath a sheer cliff (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, 2006) or a crocodile-infested section of the Amazon River (Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), Zuccarini is the man they call. His recent work includes the last four films in the Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003-2011), Into the Wild (2007), 127 Hours (2011), Piranha (2011), and Dolphin Tale (2011). In 2010, he teamed up with Dolphin activist Rick O’Barry for a daring exposé of dolphin trade for Animal Planet, and handled the underwater cinematography for Ang Lee in the film version of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi.
Zuccarini’s craftsmanship extends into the technical side of filming as well. He has been instrumental in designing innovative underwater housings for the bulky cameras used for 3D films and developing lenses to deal with the challenges of filming in the “boundary layer” where water and air meet. If there is a “signature” Zuccarini shot, it is one long take that gives the impression that the camera is in the arms of the sea itself; the horizon is undefined, the interaction of light and water is other-worldly, and the mind’s eye suddenly becomes weightless. Through these images, Zuccarini strives to capture the meaning and beauty of the world we left behind so many eons ago.
___________
Darrell Nicholson: You’ve done a lot of underwater natural history work all over the world, but much of your work has been done right here in Florida. Is there a particular Florida animal that you associate with?
Pete Zuccarini: I have a lot of complex relationships with Florida animals, but one that I stayed interested in was the eagle ray—what we used to call as kids the leopard ray, because it has these striking spots. As a boy, I was initially interested in the striking pattern and the fact that they were flying under water like birds . . . If you spend a whole day following around an eagle ray, you find they have these periods of the day when they are alone and feeding, and then they gather in these large social groups. As a boy, these were the kinds of things that fascinated me. There was this opening of these veils of secrecy . . . as the animals slowly began to reveal themselves.
DN: Given your success with Hollywood blockbusters, what draws you back to nature documentaries?
PZ: I believe there are still many lessons we can learn from the ways animals solve problems in a given environment. But to understand this, you almost have to rewire your brain from the way we are taught to learn. . . . Animals have their own ways of communicating knowledge or what we might call “intelligence” that is very different from our own. You have birds that fly halfway around the planet every year, you have sea turtles that circumnavigate, coming back to the same beach they were born on—all these things that are so amazing, and offer us a chance to learn about our world and ourselves. With all these things that we know, there are still these fundamental mysteries in the natural world. Unfortunately, most people today are so far removed from wild animals that is hard for them to recognize this. . . . In Florida, we are lucky in that respect.
DN: How does the underwater medium affect the way you tell a story?
PZ: As artists we are trying to communicate feelings, connections between things that we see, trying to make these radial associations with an image or a word. Photographers are working with light, and water catches light some unique ways that you don’t see on land. Particles in the water and the texture on the surface of the water directly affect colors, softness or hardness of light, visibility, clarity—all the things that can create mood. . . . For example, in a moving picture, swimming through murky water gives you a great opportunity for these “reveals.” There are these shafts of light moving through murky water and all of a sudden there’s this face of an alligator, white teeth in your face, literally glowing as the particles in the water catch the light that is reflected off the alligator’s teeth. That’s a very interesting thing about water—the fluidity of the lens or filter that it creates between the camera and your subject.
DN: You said in one interview that you try to film the way the water sees things. What do you mean by that?
PZ: In addition to the optical characteristics of water, things that live in water have a completely different relationship to gravity. In air, when you jump, you come down back to square, so your horizon is a very big part of the way you perceive things. . . . But there are creatures that live in the water that have no respect for the horizon. For me as a photographer, I try a little to break that tendency to orient to a horizon. Photographers do this on the land as well, but for me, in some respects it’s easier, because I’m not actually feeling the gravity. I’m generally neutrally buoyant; I tend to balance the cameras so I can spin them around. In this way, I can focus on communicating what’s in the photographic frame, rather that its relationship to up or down.
On a deeper level, I am trying to embrace all the things I know and feel while I’m in the water, and I try to use these to help me grow and learn. I ask myself, what other sort of vestigial terrestrial perspectives am I carrying with me into the water that are preventing me from really breaking through to the other side? I think there are a lot of really interesting artistic and intellectual pursuits to try and understand how humans are bound by the way we perceive things. Most of the “eyes” on the planet are probably in the ocean, so, wouldn’t most of the perceptions of “the way things are” probably exist in the ocean?
DN: How do you find new ways to look at the ocean?
PZ: One of the things I’ve gotten really interested in lately is including scenes that transition into the water from the air, or from the air into the water, shots that include the two different worlds in one movement. In this way we can really feel the differences. The photographic version of this would be called a split-level shot, but in a motion picture, you can really explore the dramatic changes as you move from the optical clarity of the air, where you are bound by gravity, to the water . . . where the character and the camera become weightless, and the water becomes a lens. There are a lot of technical challenges to this.
DN: How have you tried to deal with these kinds of technical challenges?
PZ: [Underwater camera housing pioneer] Steven Ogle and I have put a lot of development into the curvatures of the glass that goes inside the waterproof housing. If you look through a (diving) mask underwater, everything is magnified 25 percent. We experiment with that a lot when we do our water-level shots. Not only is it interesting to see the effect of different glass curvatures, it is also important to see how the water interacts with the surface of that glass. There is always that problem of not being able to control how the water sticks to glass, so we began experimenting with various coatings to control that. We have found that in some of these situations, a wet lens is preferable to a dry lens, so we’ve had to learn more about how you keep a lens wet for long periods of time.
DN: You’ve been in some animal activist films, and clearly care about the marine environment. Do you ever worry about over-dramatizing sharks as “man eaters” in films?
PZ: The interesting thing about monsters is that the thing that makes them so frightening is also the one of the things we admire . . . As an artist, I can show you how efficiently sharks move through the water, how beautiful their form is—and we all admire that—but if I leave out the part that bites, . . . then I’m not showing you the part that you are most afraid of and most fascinated by. An artist who cares about these animals is sort of stuck, because if you don’t represent the part that makes them dangerous, it’s not even accurate. This is where the suspense and drama lies, but this is also where it gets sticky, because drama leads to sensationalism . . . which can lead to misinformation.
DN: How do you handle the collaboration with different artists?
PZ: At a certain point in my development as a filmmaker, I realized that making films was not about how to make myself into this auteur, that there was something to embrace about all these talented people coming together . . . If you bring together a bunch of artists who are enthusiastic about a project, the communication that goes on between them is often the brightest part of the art form. The people I work with sometimes know more of what I want than I do myself, and vice versa . . . it verges on telepathy when it’s going well. I’m not a musician, but I would like to think that there are times when we get together . . . we solve a problem in a way that musicians might when they are jamming.
DN: Director Ang Lee is known for his stunning cinematography; can you describe some of the challenges you faced when you were filming Life of Pi?
PZ: The thing I’m trying to do more assertively is to try to craft scenes in which the camera moves in extremely dynamic ways, to really take advantage of how the water allows you to move around a subject and offer a range of perspectives—above, below, or around—so that shot can tell its own little story. In Life of Pi, we shot a scene, which in the movie is referred to as “The Storm of God.” . . . During the storm, the main character, a boy, gets knocked off a lifeboat. There’s a wave, and a giant wave thrusts him down under the water. The director [Lee] wanted the boy to go through a series of perceptions in one long breath hold. . . . We did another shot where the boy is running around some spiral stairs and then goes down into the water and back up again. The shots that go into and out of and back into the water are the most challenging, and I am very interested in exploring and perfecting those kinds of shots.
DN: Are there any feature film moments that you could connect with on a personal level?
PZ: We shot only a few sequences for Into the Wild [a film based on 24-year-old Chris McCandless’ death in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992], and for one of them we went rafting down the Grand Canyon, with the director, Sean Penn, and the rest of the crew. It was a very different environment than your typical Hollywood movie; we were sitting around the fire, telling stories, eating together, waking up together. . . . There was something about Chris McCandless’ story that I could really relate to. The story was as much about living his life in a free-spirited way than it was about being in the wilderness, and I felt like there was once a period in my life that I was doing the same sort of the stuff that he was doing, asking the same sort of idealistic questions he was asking. One of the scenes that we filmed was when the actor playing Chris McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) walks out into the surf on the Oregon coastline. The narration was really great. It was about how everyone should, at least once in their life, do something that was truly challenging—challenging for them, not for anyone else . . . It asked that big question: Have you ever lived if you’ve never truly lived?
DN: Is there some watery place in Florida that stands out as particularly beautiful or unique where a water-lover might “truly live,” so to speak?
PZ: The springs [in north central Florida] are an amazing natural phenomena. There are these giant tubes of absolutely clear water that has been stripped of almost all chemicals and particles, and [the water] flows out into this pond setting and brings all kinds of life—alligator, gar, turtles—animals that are usually found in murky water. So these springs allow you to see all these swamp creatures in a completely surreal, clear-as-air water. There is one place in particular that was always mesmerizing to me: Devil’s Ear, where the very tannic rust-colored water of the Santa Fe River runs next to this very powerful outflow of baby blue, perfectly clear water. You can be sitting 40 feet down at the bottom of this spring, looking at the trees and the sky above—it’s so clear that you can see the acorns on the tree—and then this mushroom-shaped cloud of tannic water swirls over the surface of this water and because your eyes have adjusted to the blues of the spring, the rust looks blood red. It’s a really striking experience.
This interview originally appeared in Volume 6.
