HISTORY
A Fresh View of a Classic Story
Great stories have more than one meaning, and some meanings grow clearer with time.
Notes by Michael Parfit, co-director
New technology made this film possible, but the power of its story gave it life.
It has been many years since a baby orca nicknamed Luna got lost in Vancouver island’s Nootka Sound and started to make friends with people.
Recently my wife, Suzanne Chisholm, and I were invited to take the story of Luna to the giant screen, starting at the IMAX® Victoria theatre in British Columbia. “Lost Orca: The Legend of Luna” is the result. It’s a fresh look at a story we first told with a film called “Saving Luna,” in 2007-08 and then in 2011 with “The Whale,” narrated by Ryan Reynolds. These are the films that have won the festival awards and review praise you’re seeing here. (See below.)
As we edited the new film, we worked to distill the meanings that resound most deeply now for people who knew Luna. We put memories together with a lot of new giant-screen-quality footage that we could not have filmed back then. Historic footage, some not seen before, was dramatically improved by new technical magic that doesn’t fake images; it clarifies them. So “Lost Orca” is not just a directors’ cut. It’s fresh.
This film shows us Luna’s place and life with grander pictures than we ever thought possible. But we hope it also brings a new clarity to Luna’s story, showing why he matters so much to all of us, and why he always will.
2007 – BEGINNINGS
We made “Saving Luna” at home, a hand-crafted film if there ever was one. I narrated.
Some distributors said it would only appeal to people near our British Columbia home. But we found out quickly that the farther we got from the orca coast the more excited people were to see it.
“Saving Luna” won awards at film festivals around the world. But we are particularly proud of winning the audience award at the Middle East Film Festival in Abu Dhabi.
2011 – CELEBRITY
We were told that we needed a celebrity to get United States audiences. We had amazing luck. Ryan Reynolds was just starting to hit the big time. He loved the film.
He became an executive producer and even narrated it. A terrific human being.
When the film was released in theatres in the U.S., both the New York Times and the Washington Post made it critics’ picks. The film played in the U.S. for about six months, but then it ended, and we thought it was all over. We were wrong.
From a little daydream
To the grandest of screens:
The triumph of the unexpected
All this started over 20 years ago because Suzanne and I, on a magazine assignment to write about a little lost whale, had small video cameras. So when things started happening that nobody expected, we filmed it. 350 hours of it. Then we did a lot more things we hadn’t planned. We made a feature film on our computer. Then we took it to a festival.
1. DAYDREAM
In October, 2007, when we got to the theatre at the wildlife film festival at Jackson Hole, Wyoming where our little film, called “Saving Luna” was going to premiere, it wasn’t a theatre at all. It was just a conference room with folding chairs. And it was almost empty. We thought that our daydream had come here to die.
We had been working on our film about the lost baby orca nicknamed Luna for several years, partly supported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CBC wanted a 42-minute TV video, but we had, probably foolishly, daydreamed about making a full-length film.
We somehow did it, and we had been overjoyed when the film was accepted at the festival, one of the biggest in the world. But now there were just six people in the room. Oh no!
I sat in the back as the film played. It was an hour and a half of agony. A few more people straggled in, dark shapes who clanked into tin chairs as they sat down.
We had taken the film to the big world, and the big world didn’t care.
The lights came up. The room was quiet. There were probably 12 people there now.
Oh, there was somebody I knew from my work as a journalist: an executive with the PBS Nature series, sitting down front. Surprise! She was there with her boss, who ran the series.
She looked around. She saw me in the back. But she didn’t just wave.
She raised her right thumb so high it might hit the ceiling.
The big world did care. And everything changed.
2. CALIFORNIA RAIN
It was early 2008. The little film we had made was getting some recognition. It had won a major award at Jackson Hole, and now we had managed to get it into the famous Santa Barbara Film Festival.
But then, of all things, rain came to California. Each night the film was on, it poured. Would anybody come to see it?
But they did, splooshing through puddles. We talked to them afterward, and they said they loved it. This was great.
We were delighted that so many people came. There were so many big films and big stars: Cate Blanchett, Tommy Lee Jones, Ryan Gosling, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Reynolds. So there was no reason to wait around for the awards ceremony. We went home to Canada.
About a week later Suzanne was reading the news on her computer. She realized that the Santa Barbara festival had probably ended by then. So she looked it up.
She called out from upstairs. “Listen to this!” She began to read the Hollywood Reporter for that day. The lead sentence:
“Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit’s documentary “Saving Luna” won the audience award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival tonight . . . “
3. OCCUPY THE WHALE
September, 2011. At last we were opening in New York. It was like stepping to the plate in the major leagues. We had made the second film, “The Whale” and the New York Times had done a beautiful review and called it a Critic’s Pick. So here we were, at a little cinema on 12th street in Manhattan.
In the theatre I heard shouting from the street. Protests by people in the newly forming Occupy Wall Street movement had turned down 12th street. The critical moment of prominence for the whole movement was about to happen, 30 meters from the theatre’s front door.
I went out with my iPhone and filmed.
For the rest of the story, play the video.
4. And now, the most unexpected thing: Luna has reached the giant screen.
I counted. There are 682 individual clips in “Lost Orca.” All of them have been replaced or modified for this giant screen film since the original film was made in 2007. I had expected the work to be time-consuming and tedious. It did consume time, but it was never tedious. The chance to re-live the experience we had on Nootka Sound with Luna never stopped being wonderful.