Enhance ReadabilityTomorrow Is Too Late for the Planet
The following is the second installment in a three-part excerpt from “One Person Acted and Everything Changed,” a book that chronicles ten accounts of extraordinary people who risked everything to change the world.
ouie Psihoyos’ growing appreciation for the urgency of this crisis and his decision to launch the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) came from a convergence of events. At one point, he shot a photo essay for Fortune Magazine featuring Jim Clark, a computer genius and entrepreneur who became a billionaire by founding several Silicon Valley technology firms. The two became friends and then diving buddies, eventually teaming up to do underwater photography at dive locations around the world. Over the years they began to notice that each time they returned to a diving location, they would see far fewer fish. One of those locations was the Galapagos Islands, where they also observed fishermen poaching sharks in a marine sanctuary.
One day, Clark was visibly upset about the situation, and told Psihoyos, “Someone should do something about this.”
Psihoyos agreed. He looked at Jim seriously, and asked, “What about you and me? We can use your money and my eye, and we can make films to expose the destruction going on in our oceans.” In that moment, a partnership was born.
For Psihoyos, it was a huge and risky departure, both personally and financially, moving from a life as a still photographer to a life as an activist producer of documentaries. Exposing illegal activities can be dangerous, especially when big money is involved, and it’s often as dangerous to expose legal ones. Yet, in his view, the stakes of not doing so were far beyond reason. He felt he had a moral imperative to let the world know what was happening and a responsibility to motivate as many people as possible to change it.
Their partnership took form in 2005 when Clark bankrolled the startup of the nonprofit OPS and the making of its first film, “The Cove.” The film would expose the widespread slaughter of dolphins in Tajai, Japan, the sale of the most attractive dolphins to theme parks, and the serious health threat to the Japanese population who were ingesting incredibly high levels of mercury in dolphin meat.
Psihoyos knew he would need to collaborate with a team to fulfill his mission. As he puts it, “I had a bunch of my buddies with me. We weren’t filmmakers, either. I took a three-day course on how to make a film before I went to Tajai, Japan to shoot ‘The Cove.’”
Fully aware of what he didn’t know, he called upon close friends in the movie business like Paula DuPre’ Pesmen, an associate producer on the first three Harry Potter movies. Pesmen knew the mechanics of how to make a film. He also brought on Fisher Stevens, an actor, director, writer, and movie producer.
Making that film was far riskier than Psihoyos first anticipated, and he received death threats for doing so. From the moment he and his team arrived in Tajai to start shooting, they discovered they were being followed, but had no idea by whom. As he says in the film, “We didn’t know if it was whalers, Japanese mafia … we had no idea.” The chase continued throughout the entire filming in Japan, forcing Psihoyos and his crew to shoot the footage at night and from hidden locations in daytime hours.
The film crew, with Psihoyos directing, employed a host of undercover tactics and gadgets to secretly film everything from the bloody mass slaughter of thousands of dolphins in a secret cove to the donation of mercury-laden dolphin meat to local school children.
“The Cove” was an overwhelming success, one that would earn a slew of awards around the world, including an Academy Award for Best Documentary for co-producers Psihoyos and Stevens. Most importantly, the film achieved its purpose of educating the world about the needless destruction of marine life that was leading to its very demise.
