NICK: This film is really the culmination of about ten years
of working in the Northern Territory making wildlife films.
As a filmmaker, you don't often get presented with
a chance to do something as ambitious,
a 3D Giant Screen film
in some of the most beautiful locations on Earth.
So really this is possibly the highlight
of my filmmaking career.
We've had 100 days of camping in the bush, filming,
a small crew with some incredible people,
and all of this in Aboriginal communities,
which is just such a privilege.
After spending so much time in those communities
with those people and learning from them where, how,
when to go and find the creatures
and what they'd be doing,
I really came to appreciate their understanding
of the natural world.
And I guess it's at that point that this film was born
because it's that understanding that led to this film.
It's really a wildlife film from an Aboriginal perspective.
From a technical point of view,
we had to overcome some really big obstacles.
We had to find a way for a small crew of three people
to get large, high-resolution cameras
into extremely remote areas.
It was really great to be part of such an ambitious project.
Shooting for IMAX and Giant Screen in 3D
is really quite tricky.
It's not your usual camera.
It's not your usual storytelling.
So, being out in the bush, in fires, on swamps,
it can really mess things up.
Our 2D RED setup had to be lightweight and ready to go,
but the 3D rig pretty much came straight off a Hollywood set.
It's big and it's got two cameras, one horizontal
and one vertical, bouncing off a 45-degree mirror on the front.
And now imagine having that in the bush.
It's like carrying around a pane of glass, 24/7.
The nest mustn't be too far now
because we've got a bit of a croc slide in the grass there,
which should be a place where she rests.
Let's see in here.
There we go, you see those eggs?
They look like they're getting very close to being ready.
CASPAR: She's got a slide over here,
but that's her main entrance over there.
NICK: Keep your eye on that.
Look out, look out, look out!
CASPAR: Oh, she's got another slide over here,
keep your eyes open.
There's a little one hiding.
He's obviously hatched before the others.
I'm going to pick him up.
I'm going to try not to get bitten,
they're a bit like their mums, they're kind of agro,
these little critters.
Got it!
How about that, eh?
Isn't he gorgeous?
These guys were hunted to near extinction.
Right about the time when I was being born,
these guys were nearly at their end
and they've been protected up here.
And so now you suddenly got this incredible population of crocs.
He's going the wrong way,
he's heading off in the wrong direction
so I might give him a little bit of a head start
and put him down where his mum is.
Hopefully she won't see me.
In you go, big guy.
Cute.
Salties in Australia--if you get in the water with a salty,
it will attack you and kill you, every time.
It's not like a shark
where there are behaviors to be aware of
and times when it's okay, salties is every time.
So the big challenge was trying to film those underwater
and for that I got cinematographer Jon Shaw in.
JON: So we went off into Arnhem Land
and we're shooting crocodiles in the wetlands
and I was there doing pole cams
to try and get half halves of crocodiles in the wild,
shots underwater, tracking shots.
We've had this one crocodile and he was eating a barramundi,
and we were able to kind of maneuver super close here.
It's like this fantastic shot
and all of a sudden the crocodile just goes "smash"
and just bit the camera.
And it took the camera clean off the pole
and then starts swimming off down the billabong
with it in its mouth,
at which point we all were like,
"Oh my God, we've got to grab this camera back!"
So we basically chased the crocodile down,
whacked its tail, it let go of the camera
and then luckily we were able to sneak around--
Nick grabbed the camera out of the water.
I mean, the camera is insured, right, so that's one thing.
But really, the most valuable thing was the shot.
You know, it was an extremely cool shot,
and it made it into the final cut.
NICK: After trying for weeks to get good underwater shots
in the wild, we eventually realized it was too hard.
The only shots we were able to get
were crocodiles attacking the camera.
So we decided to film a large pet crocodile,
underwater in a pond with a cage to protect Jon.
And the first thing that actually struck me
about the animal was the noise that it made.
It literally growled like a dinosaur,
or what I would imagine a dinosaur would growl like.
And then, I'm talking to Nick, the director,
I'm kinda looking down and this crocodile had stuck his nose
and mouth probably, maybe a foot and a half through the cage
and my arm would have only been probably,
maybe 10-15 centimeters away from his mouth.
And I'm talking to Nick very, very casually
because I kind of didn't really worry about it.
But then I looked down and I saw this crocodile,
how close it got to me
and I realized that this crocodile
was just waiting for me to make one mistake,
and it was just going to grab hold of me and
I was going to go through that tiny hole in the chicken wire.
And it might look like it's subdued
and it might look like it's doesn't care,
but it is always on
and it is always ready to take advantage of a situation.
NICK: Australia used to be made up of about
500 Aboriginal clan groups,
and the area we're working in with this film,
the top end of Australia,
is still largely owned by those Aboriginal people.
So we had to get their permission to go in
to their land and film these sites.
People like Jeff Lee allowed us into Twin Falls
and Jim Jim Falls.
This is an important sacred site to his people.
It's a real privilege to have been allowed in there
to capture it in full flow.
Another indigenous elder, Charlie Mangulda, took us out
to some of the most incredible art sites I've ever seen.
Charlie's probably in his '80s.
He comes from a wetland area in Arnhem Land
and everywhere you look, every rock formation,
every cave has ancient art on the walls
that's so spectacularly beautiful.
And we went into one of those caves with him
and he happened to mention that he lived in this one as a child.
And it's really in that moment that the story sunk in,
they're not just art sites or archaeological curiosities,
they're really homes.
It wasn't that long ago.
This world has changed so much for these people.
[Aboriginal singing]
This film really came about as a result of a friendship
with a man called Balang Lewis.
Balang was a traditional elder in Arnhem Land,
he's also a well-known actor in Australia.
And he really opened the doors for me to northern Australia.
We spent a lot of time with him out in the bush
and just hanging out really
and that's where the seeds for this film were planted.
BALANG LEWIS: What about like this?
No, fire. Fire…
NICK: The commentary in this film
is all derived from conversations I had with him.
It's his take on northern Australia,
it's his vision of wilderness that's described in the film.
He was the inspiration behind the story
and the reason we chose the crocodile.
The crocodile is one of Balang's totems.
BALANG LEWIS: But luckily for Caspar,
the Northern Barrier Reef nestles against
some of the most pristine coastal rivers on the planet.
NICK: That's really nice, let's do that again, in that…
Tragically, he died just before we finished the film.
We had recorded everything, we had done everything,
it was the final stages of postproduction
when Balang passed away.
And so he unfortunately never got to see it on a big screen,
but the film is now dedicated to him
and I'm really, really glad we got to make it.
It was just in time, just in time for him to tell his story.