Curiosity and cinema: the story of 'The Eagle Huntress' | Otto Bell | TEDxWakeForestU

Have you ever wondered what it is like to produce a documentary film that highlights a culture and life unknown to most of the world? Otto Bell explains just how curious he was about the Kazakh culture and why he felt the need to document the Kazakh way of life.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Good afternoon, folks.

Thank you so much for having me today.

What a great pleasure. What an honour.

My name is Otto Bell.

I'm a British filmmaker
and creative director,

but I live in New York for about 11 years.

I'm an immigrant.

(Laughter)

And I made a film
about a Muslim girl, so ...

hopefully I'll be able to stay, who knows.

(Laughter)

It's really a great pleasure
to be here today.

I'm going to talk to you
about the intersection

between curiosity and cinema,

specifically how ...

the biggest act of following my curiosity

led me to make my first feature film,
'The Eagle Huntress'.

But for those of you
who haven't seen it, I thought -

well, if there are any of you
who haven't seen it -

(Laughter)

I thought it might be useful
just to start with a little primer.

Here's a trailer.

Oh, no. Garrett, could you
bring up the trailer, please, mate?

Here we go.

(Video starts)

(Kazakh) Man:
When it's warm we live in 'gers';

when cold in regular houses.

It's all we've ever known.

Nature is great here.

It is like our mother.

Voice on radio:
Good morning, dear radio listeners.

Near Ulgii it will be cloudy,
with no precipitation.

Only four weeks left
until the long-awaited eagles festival.

Eagle hunters are busy
preparing their eagles for the events.

Girl: Okay.

(Applause)

Otto Bell: Thank you very much. Thank you.

This film premiered at Sundance,
at the film festival in 2016,

and it was released in cinemas
on November 2, 2016,

here in the US.

It's had an incredible life
that's really genuinely surprised me.

It was executive produced
by this curious character,

Morgan Spurlock.

It was narrated by Daisy Ridley
from Star Wars.

Sia, the enigmatic Australian singer,
wrote an original song for us,

a beautiful song called
'Angel By The Wings'.

It was shortlisted for an Oscar,
it was nominated for a BAFTA.

By large, the critics really liked it -

we had, I think, 96 reviews
and 89 of them were really lovely -

and as the gentleman said,

we became the highest-grossing
documentary of the year.

(Applause)

Well, it's not every day.

The money really isn't everything;
it's more a factor.

What that meant was that we had
hundreds and thousands of children -

principally children - girls and boys,

turning out to hear
this remarkable true story

about a young girl who was determined

and who worked hard and achieved
what it was that she dreamed on.

These are actually
from my personal scrapbook.

You can see this little family
from the Mongolian steppes;

we got to go all over the world together,

and meet young kids
who had their own dreams

and who were looking for inspiration
from Girl Guides -

Girl Scouts, I should say -

all the way through, marvellous.

Some of the school screenings
that we did were just really ...

sort of life-affirming for me,

and I think the same
is true for the family.

But it didn't begin that way.

I made this film for just under
a hundred thousand dollars.

I used my entire life savings.

I got a high-interest loan
from the bank as well.

Use somebody else's money,
that's the first rule of filmmaking.

It doesn't matter how curious you are,

make sure you're using
somebody else's money.

(Laughter)

But I was curious,

and what sparked it for me

was this photo essay
that I saw on the BBC.

I was literally sitting
in my cube at work,

and I stumbled across this story,

and I was incredibly struck by it;
and I was curious about it.

So I contacted the photographer,

this big, scary bloke from Israel,
called Asher Svidensky.

He had been photographing in the army,
and he'd finished his national service.

He'd gone walkabout
and he's a curious chap as well.

He started photographing
the next generation of eagle hunters.

There's only thought to be
about 250 of them left in the world,

and their way of life is threatened
for a number of reasons,

most pointedly climate change.

It was him who found Aisholpan
training with her father's eagle,

and he just took this remarkable
series of photographs,

the ones that I would
eventually see on the BBC.

Here she is; you can see
this almost preternatural connection

she has with - this is her father's bird

that she's training with here.

He followed her all the way to school.

But it was this photograph
that really grabbed me by the lapels

and sparked my curiosity
such that I would go on

and make my first feature film.

For me this photograph
not only is beautiful -

I think it's almost like a painting,
in a lot of ways -

but if you start
to dissect it objectively,

I think you'll see that it has
a lot of the key ingredients

that really make for a great film.

In the background there,
you have the Altai mountains,

those blues and oranges and purples.

A fantastic setting.

It's the most remote part of the least
populated country in the world.

So, it's not the end of the world,

but you can see the end
of the world from there.

(Laughter)

And then here you have
these golden eagles.

This is the largest species
of golden eagle in the world,

have like a seven or eight foot wingspan.

I mean, they're like dinosaurs.

And then, of course, in the foreground,
you have this remarkable young woman,

who is both beautiful, I think,
and angelic, but also very strong.

For me, that photograph
held a lot of the ingredients

that go towards making a great film.

So I called up Asher; I found him
on Facebook, stalked him,

(Laughter)

had a Skype with him
and we got on the plane

and we went to Mongolia.

These are the little cigar tubes

that fly you up
to her region twice a week.

I once took so much film equipment

that the plane
couldn't physically take off

from Ulaanbaatar, the capital,
to her region in the Altai Mountains.

I was nervous. I thought,
'Has my curiosity led me to a dead end?'

I was worried about finding the family

and pitching them on the idea
of making a film.

But luckily, they were used to people

being curious about the way
they lived their lives,

about taking an interest
in how they do things.

I remember sitting in their yurt -
they call it a 'ger' -

having tea the first day I met them,

and I said, 'Would you maybe
be interested in making a film?'

That's where Aisholpan's father
stood up and said,

'We're going to steal an eagle
off the side of a mountain this afternoon,

for Aisholpan.

Would you like to film that?'

I said, 'Absolutely, I would.'

That was our first afternoon of filming.

It became the first act
of the documentary.

Some of the critics have said
all this is too good to be true,

but I'm going to tell you a little bit
about how we did this sequence.

This was performed in one single take
on the first afternoon of filming.

12 minutes.

We had the mother eagle circling above,

threatening to savage
Aisholpan in the nest,

so we weren't going to do it
for a second time.

I had a cameraman
here on the ground filming this plate.

He was actually scared of heights,
so he wouldn't go up the cliff.

I said, 'Alright, you stay at the bottom
and get a nice big wide shot.'

Then Asher and I actually hid
behind this crop here

to get a lateral shot of Aisholpan.

Her father, I don't know
if you can make it out there,

he is literally just
winching her down on a rope.

A rope is a big word for it;
it's more piece of string.

(Laughter)

We also put a GoPro
underneath her cardigan,

so that it would, sort of,
take you inside the nest.

We did lots of inventive things like that.

It was fairly ragtag.

This was our production.
This was our fancy wagon.

(Laughter)

There was no electricity,
no running water.

We sort of lived with the family
like ducks in a row at night,

and ran all of our batteries
off a petrol generator.

We did all the sound ourselves

on one of these little
handheld zoom recorders.

My cameraman Chris on the first visit.

We then went back multiple times,

doubling down on that curiosity
each and every time,

as things happened in Aisholpan's life
and the story kind of unfolded for us.

This is the annual Eagle Festival.

My camera assistant Ben
on top of the mountain

where they released the birds.

We wanted to do justice
to this incredible landscape,

but like I said,
we didn't have much money.

We had a crew of about three people.

Sweaty English blokes.

(Laughter)

But we did want

to give it a really big cinematic,
beautiful, polished look and feel,

so we threw the kitchen sink at it.

I don't think this film would have been
possible to make five years ago.

You know, we did it with three people.

We probably needed 30 people
back in the day.

But we leaned a lot on drones.

Here we had our sturdy,
Soviet-era Russian vans,

where we roped open the side door
and then we had a Steadicam inside,

and that allowed us
to get all of our tracking shots

as the family would gallop
through the snow.

I mean, talk about a shoestring budget.

My cameraman is amazing -
my main cameraman, Simon Niblett.

He built me this crane.

It's nine meters long,
he based it on a ship mast,

and it folds away into a snowboard bag.

It weighs 25 kilos.

That allows you to get these big swooping,
kind of cinematic shots

with just a couple of people.

I built a rig to get a GoPro
on the back of an eagle as well,

so we could get a proper bird's-eye view.

They loved that,
it didn't faze them at all.

But I just wanted to share with you
a couple of minutes, just a clip next,

which will show you a little bit of
what all of these techniques added up to

and where all of this curiosity led.

For those of you who are curious
how these nomadic folks live their lives,

this is a sort of my love letter
in the middle of the film

to how these people move
from season to season,

from grasslands to their winter homes.

Apologies in advance - we had a little bit
of a technical issue with the audio,

so you're not actually going to be able
to hear her father's voice

speaking over the top of it.

But you'll see the subtitles

and that'll explain the gist
of what he's actually saying.

Take a look at this clip
from the middle of The Eagle Huntress.

(Video starts)

[When it's warm we live in gers.]

[when cold in regular houses.]

[It's all we've ever known.]

[Nature is great here.]

[It is like our mother.]

OB: You get the idea.

Thank you.

(Applause)

To bring it back to the beginning,

Aisholpan was 13 when we filmed.

She's now 15, should be 16 on May 3.

For those of you wondering,
where are they now?

Aisholpan, off the back of the film,
got a free scholarship

to a really great school.

One of the top three schools in Mongolia,

actually, happens to be
in her neighbourhood,

and she's doing very well there.

She's learnt Turkish,
she's learning English.

Her English has really improved.

She can now write to me
and stuff, which is lovely.

When the film actually
took off at Sundance

and we started to get a sense
that it was going to be a big deal,

I made the family
profit participants in the film,

and we set up a fund
for Aisholpan's education -

she wants to be a doctor.

I'm pleased to say that that fund
is now at the point

where she'll be able to study medicine
wherever she wants to in the world,

which brings me to a pitch for you guys,

that maybe she could be a Demon Deacon,
I don't know, let's push your people.

(Laughter) (Applause)

But you could do a lot worse, trust me.
She's an incredible young woman.

Thank you all for listening
and enjoy the rest of the show. Thanks.

(Applause)