Daniella Ortega - Carbon co-writer/director's exclusive interview

DANIELLA ORTEGA: I became a documentary filmmaker, because of my curiosity about the world and how it works and my place in it. I think it's all driven by curiosity. And when you have that curiosity, it inevitably leads you to learn about science and history because those are the fields that tell us about how the world works. That's the kind of underlying motivation, always wanting to find out something, learn something that I didn't know. In terms of how I got involved with this particular story, and of course, it's the greatest story: climate and the way our world is changing and carbon’s role in the way our world has changed and is changing. I feel it's the biggest story that you could possibly learn about. It is THE story, in many ways. I thought that I knew about this, and I wanted to find a way to tell my kids because I have two small kids, and they were coming to an age when I started making this film where I was really trying to find a story and a narrative to explain to my son. At that point, he was about six or seven, and I was really trying to explain what it is that everyone's talking about: climate change, carbon credits, I needed to explain carbon to him and so I would tell him little bits and pieces. But I think what we need is a story that joins the dots… What is carbon? Where does it come from? How does it have this power to disrupt our world? And so I really was motivated by wanting to deliver. To deliver a narrative to young people about this issue that we're dealing with. And then whilst I was doing it, I realised that I needed to do it for me, as well, because I thought I knew the story, but actually, there was so much that I didn't know and I learned a lot too. I think it is the story that we all really need to understand, and to understand what climate is and to understand climate change, and our destiny of life, we really need to understand carbon.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: You're right, I mean, there's a lot of noise about carbon, and at the time I started making this film, I really was getting frustrated with the chatter and noise about carbon. And I wanted to find a way to provide some sort of clarity through all that noise. An understanding of carbon. So then the other part of it is that not only did I want to do that, which is sort of a cerebral kind of task, I actually wanted to find a way to connect the head and the heart by understanding how we can have a more meaningful relationship with carbon. How can we understand carbon better? That's one thing, but can we feel something about carbon? Can we have a different kind of relationship with carbon? How can we have more respect? These are the sorts of ideas that lead me to think that we connect to things that we can relate to, and carbon is really hard to relate to. It's an element, and you can't see it. How do you make this relatable? And then I really cottoned on to this idea, what if we make carbon a character? What if we make carbon a person that would have a voice? That's never been done before, well at least I hadn't seen that before. What would that do? Maybe that would give me a way to connect with carbon and change the narrative around carbon and get through the noise. If we actually give carbon a character, that will then open up a whole world of possibilities. The biographical approach, there's a whole genre you can draw upon, and it was so exciting. And so much fun, really, to invent the biography of carbon. The challenge then, though, is that I might have this idea and I might think it's great, but I really needed a whole lot of people to embrace it as well. And I was lucky enough that people did. Starting with my team and the executive producer who said, 'Yeah, that's a good idea. It's kind of crazy, but it's a good idea.' And then everyone else afterwards, especially the contributors, very serious scientists who are in the film, who also said ' yes, we'll go along with that idea, we'll imagine carbon as a character.' And they had a lot of fun doing that. That’s very different from what you normally do in a science film, having this sort of subjective view where you can imagine that carbon is a person that has a personality and has different personalities and dimensions. So I was just really thrilled that other people joined in on this idea and lifted it up to take flight, which was great.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: That sequence that you're talking about, how the film begins with an unborn child, that's a very personal sequence to me, because when I finally sat down to write that and had all these ideas, it was when I was pregnant with my second baby. So I had a baby in my belly, and when you're pregnant, your belly bumps up against the desk. So I had a big belly bumping up against the desk, thinking about this film and thinking about where to begin. And it was such a clear thing for me. I had to begin with that baby because she was right there in my belly, kicking away, and I was thinking about my baby and my baby's future. And what kind of future they may have. And it really brought it all together for me. I had to begin in the womb. It had to begin with babies, my baby, thinking about those first words of the film, those are my words, 'I wonder… who will this child become? What will be the story of their life?'' They were the questions. It's wonderful, and then the connection, of course, is sort of surprising but a very real connection I felt to carbon and this is in line with that sequence. This child, a perfectly-formed child, is partly made of pollution, of waste, because it's true, that this perfectly-formed child is made from the air that we breathe, and that comes from plants and everything around us. But also from carbon dioxide, which is emitted from what we call pollution. And so it was really trying to begin in a way, which draws you in, in a way which is surprising, and which sort of poses this mystery. '‘How can this be? Where did this happen? How did this happen? ' And that gives me a launching point to start to unravel the story of carbon. And there is one other piece to this in that I was not only inspired by my children and everything around me but there was a story written by a chemist called Primo Levi. In his book, ‘The Periodic Table’, there is a very short story about carbon, which didn't personify carbon, but it travelled. It was the journey of a carbon atom. And it was so beautiful. I highly recommend it for people to read. It's only a few pages long, but it was really the other kind of creative spark when I read that story, and it brought the whole journey of a carbon atom to life where I thought 'I can build on this, I can extend this, and I can make this a journey which begins in the stars and goes into the future.' So I built on that. And as part of that thinking, when you start to learn this journey, the story of carbon, we start to imagine carbon as well. The element that builds up planets, builds life, builds our skills, our children, and builds our civilization. You start to really feel like carbon was an enabler, a creator, a mother. These are the sorts of ideas that make it hard to imagine carbon not being female.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: So, for the voice, I thought, who is going to be able to tell this story? It’s a universal voice, almost like a timeless voice that can't be someone too old or someone too young, it can't be someone with an accent, it has to be neutral, but an emotional, inner voice. And so who was going to be able to pull that off? It's a very difficult brief for a performer, and for a long time I was just doing the voice, and when we were editing the film I was thinking of how Sarah Snook was up there at the top of the list. But you list people and have these dreams of getting a list of actors that are going to do your voice, and mostly they're just dreams because they're out of reach, or they're unavailable, or they're just too expensive. Luckily, Sarah was on the top of this list and when we approached her management, she just happened to be on a break from filming Succession. She was in Australia, and she loved the film at that point, so she just said yes. And again, it was one of those really precious, special moments where it's like, really? She said yes, and that was thrilling. And then I got to direct her over Zoom because everything was new. She was in a studio in Melbourne, and I was at a kitchen table in Sydney, and we spent several sessions, recording her voice. She was super generous and delightful, and it just felt right.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: I always knew that we'd have to have some form of animation because we're trying to make the invisible visible, you know, how are you going to do carbon without animation? You have to have some sort of visualization of the atom and the journeys of this element. Now, this is when the co-production really became an important part of this whole journey, as this is a co-production between Canada and Australia. When you have a co-production, you need to divide the creative process between the countries and so the animation fell onto Niobe Thompsons’s half of the production, although we were very much connected to it. But in terms of who was going to be, it had to be Canadian, and the extraordinary luck of having found Bruce Alcock as the animation director and the team he has with a company called Global Mechanic. He is an artist. I mean, Bruce is a genius, I feel he's just such an extraordinary artist, who again embraced this whole concept 150%. And so I’d suggest that carbon should be this sort of seething ball of energy that's really alive and has this sort of beautiful presence, and it was his job to translate that into what that means and looks like. And so he invented the glowing magenta ball. He invented all the artwork he did every painting, beautiful ‘painterly’ work, which I find such a wonderful way to go with this, and the term that he used is ‘meaningful abstraction’. Meaningful abstraction is abstract enough for us to sort of fill in as a viewer with our own kind of emotional response to these beautiful paintings, just like great works of art. When you see a great work of art, it invites you to have a response. Every single animation has a scientific basis, so it's not completely abstract, it can't be, it's still a science film, embedded in fact, every single word, every single picture. But, abstract enough to invite us in like a great work of art. So I am forever indebted to his genius and his commitment to the film. He transcended all my expectations of what the animations were going to be. Stunning.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: Just as important as the animation is to help us with this sort of emotional response to the film, the music is actually super critical. It's music that carries your emotions, it's music that can transport you in ways that are so magical. I just love the whole process of working with composers because to me, it's a mystery. It's a real magical mystery that they can do that. And I love the impact that the music has. The film was composed by another amazing Canadian called Jonathan Kawchuk. His background is in electronic music and so, he's not a classical music composer. But his response to this film was really fulfilling the brief of being epic and transformational and transporting but in a unique way, not a conventional score. It was a very innovative and interesting response and I really think that it's the combination of the visuals, the words, Sarah’s performance, the animation, and the music. These are the tools that we bring together and that have to come together to create the end result, which is what you see, and I think the music is just so important.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: And it was a huge task, but the music production in itself is like another level of production. Not only because he was tasked with making music that I had included in our edit, you know, music that was jazz, but that was also classical that was Latino dance party that was like a teenage rave - there were so many different types of music that he had to get his head around and find ways to tie together. And then when he got to producing the music after he’d composed it, there was a full orchestra and a choir and a Latin dance troupe. It is an extraordinary production in itself. You can't underestimate the power of music and the endless process that you need to undertake to get there.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: Yes, well, working in a pandemic, trying to make an international film, about carbon, a sort of epic film that we were making during a pandemic. It was not really ideal. But the thing about having a co-production was that we were able to then divide the production, and that was actually very helpful. So what that means is that my co-production partner, Niobe Thompson from Handful of Films took care of the filming sequences in the Northern Hemisphere, and I did the Southern Hemisphere. And we had to do much of it remotely. As a filmmaker, I would have liked to have gone to Mongolia and filmed sequences. I would have liked to have traveled to Tasmania, and I couldn't even film the sequences in Tasmania. He would have liked to have gone to Alaska. We had to engage with teams all over the world and direct remotely, which was a challenge, but we did it and the results were good. Anyone seeing the film would not realize that there was a mountain of pain and a challenge behind each sequence. For the interviews, we employed a style where we could do them through Zoom, although I was lucky enough to be able to do some directly in Sydney such as with Tamara Davis who is a wonderful Australian astrophysicist, and with Will Steffen, I did Melbourne and David Christian, I was lucky enough to do mine in person, but many of the others were through Zoom. But actually, because of the style that we employed, which is looking directly at the camera, it worked out really well because I was able to engage with all the interviews that Niobe was organising in the Northern Hemisphere through Zoom, and he was able to do the same here. And so we were able to contribute to each other's interviews in ways we couldn't if we weren’t doing them through Zoom, so there were some advantages and some disadvantages, but all in all, just after the filming was complete, I sat back in the edit suite and thought, 'Wow, I can't believe we actually pulled it off like that. It was pretty amazing, that we managed to do all of that in the middle of a global pandemic.' And it was a credit to the production teams on both sides and all the other partners that we had in France, Mongolia in New York, Alaska, and all over the place who engaged with us on this process. That was fantastic.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: I've worked with Sonya for several years at Genepool on various projects. So we have a long-standing working relationship and also a personal relationship. I feel there are not many people in the world like Sonya Pemberton, she's really one of a kind. She's up there in terms of superb science communicators of the highest order, she is world-class. And so it's a huge privilege to be working with her on this project. As I said, she was the first person that said, 'Yes, that is an idea worth pursuing. Go think about that. Go write about that.' You know, giving me that opening, that is amazing. It’s from that, from her being the first person that said yes to that idea, everything else followed. So, I have an unbelievable amount of respect for Sonya, for her bravery and courage, and her commitment to telling fun stories and to telling difficult science stories as well in innovative ways. Lucy, unbelievably, was able to take on the challenge of actually being the hands-on physical producer of this epic film, during a pandemic. She rose to that challenge and embraced it with so much grace. So, it’s a really amazing team. Every member of the team. It's just a really precious thing to have a wonderful team to work through this because it was really hard. It's a complex material. And it's a big creative challenge, in the middle of a pandemic.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: It wasn't difficult, it was a process. I've been making science documentaries for a while, and, you know, I have my knowledge of who are strong communicators within their fields. And so we start off with a wish list of who we’d like. For example, when you think about astrophysicists, top of the list if anyone wanted to engage an astrophysicist for a scientific, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And in Australia, because I am a huge fan of Tamara, I've seen her in many different productions and I think she's wonderful. And so you have these people these wish-lists, and then it's a process of, are they actually going to engage with this idea and who's going to be able to do this to personify carbon and so basically, it's a process of approaching people. And then and some people were not enthused, so, they're not the right people. It was just a matter of, who wanted to do this and who loved it. Tamara loved doing it. The people we selected, just went yeah, I really want to do this, so that's super fun. And then working with them in preparation for their interview discussing what points of science I thought were important, that were in the script as key points to get across, but then they had a license to basically go for it in whichever way they wished on the day. I did not script their words, they brought their own words. Even if I had key points that I needed them to convey, it was a real process and it was. I still can't believe that.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: There were some challenging sequences, where we wanted to convey complicated science in an interesting way. So for example, the sequence around photosynthesis which was with the wonderful Canadian biologist Carin Bondar, that was a very complex sequence. It not only had a wonderful current describing the process, but you need to have very tricky animation to interweave. It needed to hit the right note of being accurate and informative, but not too detailed. And there are several of these sequences in the film where we're communicating scientific information and scientific concepts and scientific discovery, but in a way that is accessible and dare I say enjoyable to absorb. So with that one, for example, I always had in my mind and I wrote it very early on, that I wanted the photosynthesis sequence to be like a theme park ride, going on this ride of photosynthesis with carbon to the right of photosynthesis. And so the music, the animation, Carin’s style, the words we choose, all of that had to come together, and making that work was complex.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: I have so many favourite moments, I don't really have one favourite moment. I mean, I love Tamara Davis's contribution at the beginning of the film. She does a wonderful job of helping us understand where carbon is born, and it was wonderful filming with her at the telescope. I think there's something very special about that. Then there are other sequences that I also love for different reasons, for example, the sequence in the forests of Canada where Suzanne Simard is contributing. She's called a forest ecologist, and it's about the way that carbon is sequestered or captured in these old-growth forests of Canada. It's poignant and sad and beautiful, all at the same time. And so I love that emotional and tragic part about old-growth forests, I find that incredibly moving. Oh man, I love it all. I mean, I love that opening sequence because it was my baby and the ending sequence because it's the baby being born. There's so much that I really love.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: I made the film with the intent to make it sensory and sensual. She's a sort of complex character carbon, you know, with lots of dimensions.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: One of the treasured memories I have is about directing Sarah Snook and helping guide her. There's a sequence in the film quite early on, where we have scientists talking about carbon bonds, a prolific bonding element with many other elements. And that's an important point to understand in the film. And so carbon is bonding and dancing with other elements, and joining and linking up in elements and letting go and linking up with other elements, hooking up with an essence of herself, and that it's a really fun, sort of dance sequence. Anyway, directing Sarah Snook was really great. Because she just, I don't know how she did it. It's just that magic thing that a world-class performer can do. She just embraced it, and she brought that atom to life. It was so authentic, her response to making carbon fun and joyous and, able to do that in a way that was really authentic and which felt real. She made carbon human, and it was a really wonderful experience, to be a part of that.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: Overwhelmingly, it's been a really positive response. And I've had many people contact me to tell me that they watched it with their children and with their teenagers and that everyone was hooked. And that's really great for me because that's coming back to the whole intention and motivation for making the film is to be able to share it. So it's a film that's sophisticated enough for anyone to watch, but also accessible enough for younger people to engage in as well. So that's been really great. I love hearing how this inspired conversations with their nine-year-olds, with their teenagers. It's interesting how there is a sense that some people have communicated to me that they feel much more connected to the world and that is also a really strong motivation to show the connectedness of us all, and our environment, and our climate, and our future. That was a very strong theme. And so that has really worked for some people, which is really great. I hope that it has. It's only had a small life so far in Australia. Around the world, it has won awards already, but here in Australia, it's only just been released and has only just become accessible here. So I hope that many more people will engage with the film.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: Personally, it has enriched my understanding. Like I said earlier, I thought I knew a lot about carbon. And then I realized as I was making the film that there was so much more that I didn't understand. So on a personal level, it's that cliché of how everything is connected. Well, when you learn about the story of carbon, it's actually true, chemically. And I really had a much deeper appreciation for how connected we all are to everything and everyone in a profound way. So that's a pretty big thing. Professionally. It's been my greatest challenge so far to make this film. So I learned many lessons. I think overall, what I really feel about it is that it was the first time I really was able to express my voice when I made a science film. I've done many types of different science films, but mostly they're quite straight, whereas this film, because of its kind of unconventional, unorthodox approach, I was able to express my voice, which is a really confident voice for the first time really and truly. So that was a satisfying one. And I feel like it's opened the door for more. More opportunities to express my voice, authentically and scientifically.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: Well, I am. The film is only coming out now in Australia, but it actually was completed at the end of last year, so I have since actually taken on a different kind of role. I am currently a screen executive at Screen Australia, which is the federal funding agency for film and television in Australia. So it's a bit of a transition from filmmaking, and it's a wonderful privilege and an honour, really, to be part of the team that decides on which documentaries get funded here by Screen Australia. So that's really fun and inspiring. And I'm doing that for a while, but there will be more films. Yes, there will be more films, but at the moment this is what I'm doing, and it is informative and enriching for me as a documentary practitioner.

DANIELLA ORTEGA: I know I will. It takes a lot to make a film like this. It took many years and a lot of people, but it's the kind of production, the kind of work that I want to make and that I enjoy making. It's incredibly challenging, but also very rewarding. So I want to keep on making these kinds of projects.