The dolphin’s smile, says Richard O’Barry, is “nature’s greatest deception.” He should know. During the 1960s, O’Barry captured and trained dolphins, including the five that played Flipper in the TV series of the same name—which did more than anything to popularize the notion that marine mammals are happy to perform tricks in captivity. O’Barry became the world’s most famous dolphin trainer, earning enough from Flipper to buy a new Porsche each season. But his growing sense that the show’s dolphins were severely stressed was confirmed one day when Kathy, the dolphin that played Flipper most of the time, died in his arms. As O’Barry explained in a Maclean’s interview, dolphins are not automatic breathers, and Kathy “committed suicide by not taking her next breath.”
In death, she was still smiling. The next day, O’Barry was jailed for releasing dolphins from Miami’s Seaquarium. And he has dedicated the rest of his life to campaigning against the multi-billion-dollar dolphin captivity industry. “I spent 10 years trying to build that industry up,” he says, “and 38 years trying to tear it down.”
Finally, O’Barry is about to get the world’s attention. His efforts have inspired an astonishing documentary called The Cove, which blows the lid off the dirty little secret behind dolphin showbiz. This devastating exposé takes us to Taiji, a seaside town in Japan, where dolphins are captured for export to aquariums around the world. Thousands of others are slaughtered for their flesh, a mercury-laden meat that was fed to Japanese schoolchildren as part of a free but compulsory lunch program; kids were forced to clean their plates.
Since its premiere at Sundance in January, The Cove has been gathering momentum, stacking up prizes at one festival after another, including audience awards for most popular film at both Sundance and Toronto’s Hot Docs. The movie, which opens in Canada on Aug. 7, seems on track to be an Oscar sensation—An Inconvenient Truth for marine mammals. And the filmmakers are hoping that the scandal it provokes will embarrass the Japanese government into revising its hardline support of whaling and dolphin fishing, a policy that’s enforced by a media blackout forbidding criticism of the industry.
The Cove also represents a potent new prototype in the evolution of the eco-documentary as a mix of agit-prop journalism and pop entertainment. It’s being marketed as a thriller, an Oceans 11-style caper movie about a hand-picked squad on a special ops mission to penetrate a secret hideout of environmental horror. Activists have been protesting the Taija dolphin slaughter for years, playing a cat-and-mouse game with fishermen who try to stop them photographing the bay where the dolphins are trapped after boats drive them from their migration routes. But until now, no one had been able to document the cove around the corner where the slaughter takes place—a natural fortress surrounded by steep cliffs on three sides, and protected by high gates with barbed wire and razor ribbons.
With a US$5-million budget financed by Jim Clark, the creator of Netscape, director Louie Psihoyos assembled a Mission Impossible team that drew on talents ranging from Hollywood to the military. Canadian air force veteran Simon Hutchins devised sophisticated unmanned drones, including a miniature model helicopter, to shoot aerial footage of the slaughter. Charles Hambleton, an adrenalin junkie and divemaster who worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, was in charge of “clandestine operations.” He obtained military-grade thermal cameras to monitor the movement of the guards in the dark. Model makers at George Lucas’s special effects studio, Industrial Light and Magic, created fake rocks designed to hide HD cameras in the cliffs. And two freedivers, including world-record holder Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, smuggled underwater cameras and hydrophones into the depths of the cove to shoot the slaughter from below.
As this small army descends on Taiji, they engage in a cloak-and-dagger dance with the police. Every time the crew members make a move, they are followed. “We had five hotel rooms, the police had five hotel rooms,” says Psihoyos. “Often we had several cars following us at the same time. We would switch cars, and use distraction techniques to draw guards out of the cove. We would go out in a decoy van to shoot temples and tuna farms with cops on our tail.” Although the crew repeatedly broke the law, for months they eluded authorities. But now, says the director, “there are warrants out for our arrrest for conspiracy to disrupt commerce.”
What’s ingenious about the film is that the slick intrigue of the covert operation ends up serving as a central narrative. It wasn’t planned that way. The military thermal cameras, for instance, were meant strictly for surveillance, until Hambleton suggested using them to gather material for a “making-of” documentary. Once the editors saw the spooky night-vision footage, they convinced the director to make it part of the film. “I resisted for a while,” he says, “but I realized we could make a kind of Oceans 11 film with all these amazing characters.”
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