00:00Come si è iniziato il tuo partner con Werner Herzog?
00:05È stato un amico in Beverly Hills.
00:11I was there.
00:15I do speaking, so I was there, you know,
00:19and he just said,
00:21you must meet Werner Herzog.
00:23And I met Werner and we talked about the meaning of life
00:27and where thoughts come from and the human, you know,
00:30it was just the most fascinating beginning of a relationship.
00:34And we continued that relationship.
00:38And I started talking about the ghost elephants.
00:40I started talking about, and he was just,
00:42I've had pneumonia and I can't,
00:45I can't go on this extraordinary journey with you.
00:48And he was like, I'll advise you.
00:49I'll do any other support.
00:50And then I thought, why is it?
00:53You must come to Angola.
00:54I had come to Namibia.
00:55There's no malaria there.
00:56There's no, you know.
00:57And I phoned him and he said, I'll come.
01:03And that was, you know, within three weeks, I'll be there.
01:06And it was within the first two days, this, this,
01:10like it was, he settled in.
01:12We went straight to Kui's house, the master tracker,
01:15and Kui wasn't there.
01:16He was like, ah, no.
01:17And then as we, that's just milling about,
01:20then Kui walks in and he's bringing back the meat of a kudu,
01:23which you see that represented in the film.
01:25And Vanner just goes straight in.
01:26And from that point forward was this fiery intensity of just like,
01:30and I could see now, ooh, now it's happening.
01:33And there was no budging Vanner from his vision.
01:38Before that, I had sent him books and poems and writings of some of the things I'd been
01:44experiencing before, but I've never experienced someone with such intensity in interviews.
01:52It's like a conductor.
01:54And that really filtered into my team who started to explore themselves very differently from what
02:00they would usually would.
02:02And you see that in the film, but no, it was a friendship.
02:05So that's how it started.
02:07The movie is, I thought, is very different from a classic documentary about nature or animals.
02:15Your journey, it's a midway between a scientific expedition and a visionary tale of mystery and
02:24tradition.
02:24So how did you approach this apparent contradiction?
02:27I mean, I'm a scientist that acknowledges science needs narrative, character, explanation, story.
02:37So for 15 years, I've been focused on developing storytelling capacity.
02:43The cinematographer and the camera producers were all Africans that have worked with me for years,
02:49that joined Vanner and his team.
02:52It's the activity of what we do, localizing voices, exploring magic and mysticism.
03:02I've been exposed to that for decades, where I've seen people do things that aren't humanly possible.
03:10Travel a distance overnight, that would take you three days to drive, communicate remotely.
03:15The trance dance, I've done those many, many times, and it's extraordinary to experience that.
03:22And what about the obsession with ghost elephants?
03:26How did it, how it started for you?
03:29Angola was locked away.
03:31It was considered impossible for us to work there.
03:34We were the first conservation research team to get in there.
03:38We snuck in as tourists.
03:40We met the governor of the province and we started getting his support.
03:44And the president wrote us a letter and then it took six months in armored vehicles
03:48through minefields to gain access, first access to this area, to the north of it,
03:53the source lakes of the Okavango.
03:56We were following the no roads or tracks.
03:58We were following cut marks and trees through the minefields,
04:00showing the people that camped their hunters.
04:06And it's the remotest place in Africa that you could imagine.
04:14And finding, as we go along, it was a month into that first expedition.
04:19It was four months on the river that I found the first signs of elephant.
04:22I was on a walk looking for people because we hadn't met any people yet.
04:26It was this lonely landscape, empty, and I've never experienced that.
04:30And I was stressing, I wanted to meet local people, attract people's footprints.
04:33And then I found this clearing with an elephant dung in it.
04:36And then I could see it was, to me, I call them elephant gardens,
04:39where an old bull elephant had been there, big bull, big footprint.
04:43And he'd been clearing it out, chopping the trees so that they grow from the bottom,
04:48so that young elephants can feed.
04:50Because what he wants, because he doesn't migrate, is when the breeding herds come through,
04:53the moms and the babies, they stop there, because it's a nice place.
04:56And they interact with him.
04:57So it was a feeling of a lonely old bull elephant.
05:00And then I started talking to the king and to the traditional leaders and to the hunters.
05:04And they talked of these elephants.
05:06And we searched on mountain bikes and motorbikes on foot.
05:11We explored all of the rivers.
05:13And you'd only, on the mountain bikes once, three weeks from the roads,
05:17out there for a long time, we were, I could sense them.
05:21I could smell them, but you cannot hear or see anything.
05:24And it's just, there was an experience of ghosts.
05:26And the local people call them ghosts.
05:28They said, if you want, we can find dung in one day.
05:32We'll go and find it somewhere there.
05:33But if you want to see them, you must live down there.
05:37And they may reveal themselves to you.
05:39It's an extraordinary experience, having an entire forest brought to life by elephants
05:45that you will never see, that are so, so deeply entrenched in the culture of the people
05:52and the traditional beliefs of the people.
05:55And the strength of the movie, to me, is the way Erzog transformed this scientific expedition,
06:05your scientific skills into an existential journey.
06:10I was wondering, what are your thoughts about this aspect of the movie?
06:16Well, it's, I spent most of my year on expedition in very remote landscapes.
06:23and it's always like that.
06:26You are going back in time.
06:28When you go to the source of a river, anywhere in the world, you will find,
06:34and especially in Africa, for my experience, it's where I am,
06:37you find people living off the grid, close to nature, close to language, culture and tradition.
06:44The sources are sacred to them.
06:46The forests are sacred to them.
06:48They protect them by their practice of life.
06:53So it's, it's always like that for us.
06:57You feel magic and mysticism in everything.
07:00There are mukisi, lukisikisi, mafuaku.
07:04You've got these creatures that you'll never see that are mythical, that are spirits.
07:09So when Vanna comes and starts to tell that story and starts to,
07:13to, I mean, it's, it's a recognition of what is always there.
07:17And I think it's in all of us.
07:19I mean, we watch movies, we dream, we make believe, not just as children, but as adults.
07:26But that's, you know, so easily represented in traditional culture,
07:30in indigenous culture, where it's right on the surface to be seen.
07:34And, you know, existentially, I mean, yes, I believe, you know,
07:39if, if we were to lose those elephants, and you searched and searched and searched and searched,
07:44and I'll spend the rest of my life continuing to follow the ghosts, which I'll never see,
07:51is, if we lose them, then there's no place for us.
07:55There were once 10 million elephants in Africa in 1900, 120 years ago,
08:00and now there's less than 400,000.
08:03We've lost 80% of our wildlife across the world in the last 50 years.
08:06That's walruses and elephants and lions and everything gone.
08:11So, yes, we have to reflect upon that.
08:15But I must say that underlying all of my scientific research of the health of the rivers and ecosystems
08:21and wildlife populations and everything all of my teams do is underlying it is always resilience,
08:28the opportunity and ability for recovery, and it will come, it will come.
08:33Life, as Werner says in the film, life will go on, but without us.
08:39But I wake up every morning living under the assumption that everything is going to be okay.
08:46So now I'm going to read the book.
08:49We'll read it.
08:49So, let's go.
08:50So now we're going to read this part.
08:50Let's read it.
08:50Your article on the book.
08:50Let's read it.
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