In the beginning, there was an idea. Like most ideas it arrived half-formed and seemed crazy to even think about, but it wouldn’t let go. The year was 2012. Veteran BBC natural history producer Mike Gunton and Sir David Attenborough — the two had worked together on Planet Earth II — were standing on the edge of a lava rift overlooking the green plains of Africa, in that part of the continent palaeontologists had dubbed “The Cradle of Humankind,” a stone’s throw from where the late naturalist Peter Matthiessen penned his natural-history classic The Tree Where Man Was Born. Gunton and Attenborough were filming the introduction for their new BBC collaboration Africa, Gunton recalled in a teleconference call earlier this week, and Attenborough remarked, in an almost offhand way, that nowhere on Earth does wildlife put on a greater show.
“I sat there thinking, I wonder if that's always been true,” Gunton said. “I wonder if there was a time when that was not the case. When would the most extraordinary time have been? The time of the dinosaurs, I reckoned, when they were walking across that mountain — that would have been the most extraordinary time, when wildlife put on its greatest show. I thought, could you get everybody standing on that mountainside, including Sir David, the crew, all the directors, all the experts, all the camera kit, stick it in a time machine, go back to the time of the dinosaurs, and make a wildlife film that showed them doing that.”
No, no, that’s crazy, don’t even think about that.
A funny thing happened on the way to Prehistoric Planet, though. Computer-generated special effects have been transformed in just the past 10 years. Attenborough and the BBC’s Natural History Unit have set a standard in natural-history filmmaking that may not be surpassed in our lifetime. And the idea wouldn’t go away — crazy as it sounded. Attenborough wouldn’t let it go. For Gunton, who produced BBC’s Dynasties in the interim, it became all-consuming. Four years ago, the pair made a silent pact. Attenborough was 92. He wasn’t getting any younger. Earlier this month, he turned 96. The prehistoric world was about to get the Planet Earth treatment after all.
Apple TV+ jumped on board, with both ambition and funding, and the idea was about to become a reality.
Gunton didn’t need a divining rod or a premonition from above to know that Prehistoric Planet would present imposing challenges. It was easy enough to imagine that technological advances in computer-generated effects had advanced to the stage where anything seems possible when creating — and recreating — faraway worlds, but the BBC Natural History Unit had set a high bar for storytelling. Programs like Planet Earth and The Blue Planet are much more than the sum of their flashy, eye-catching parts. Every scene, every moment on the screen has to tell a story within a story, a story with depth and soul and emotion, a story that resonates with the viewer. One bad effect, one wrong choice, one unintended distraction could break the spell in an heartbeat. The most they could hope for was that a five-night Apple TV+ nature series set in the Cretaceous Period would convince even the most jaded, doubtful viewer into believing this actually happened, 66 million years ago, and that it looked pretty much like … this.
All images ©Apple TV+ / BBC Natural History Unit
“Some of the interpretation of the fossil record has changed dramatically over the past 30 years,” Planet writer-producer Tim Walker said. “And that's what we've tried to bring to the series. It'll be a big surprise not just for us as filmmakers but for the viewers. They'll see dinosaurs depicted in a new way unlike we've ever seen before, either on the big or the small screen, doing behaviours that we've never seen before.”
The Cretaceous was the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era. It lasted longer than any geological period on planet Earth, some 79 million years in all, and was home to countless archosaurian reptiles, including tyrannosaurs, velociraptors and triceratops, as well as the earliest mammals and birds. The Cretaceous featured a relatively warm climate with high sea levels and numerous shallow inland seas, a virtual haven for early life on Earth and home to astounding biodiversity. The world was largely ice-free, and forests extended to the poles.
“The important point is, why now?” Walker said. “That’s because the scientific world itself is going through a big change. Rather than just looking at fossils of these animals, poring over their bones and viewing them as dead things, they are starting to think about them as living, breathing creatures who behave as animals do. As wildlife filmmakers, that’s what we’re after. That’s what we do. We film animal behaviour, the challenges they face, the struggles they face. We wanted to introduce that sense of being into this program. And we needed the veracity too, we needed the science to back that up. Scientists are starting to think about animal behaviour, dinosaur behaviour. That allowed us to do this.That was the final alignment of the stars, that allowed us to proceed with a sense of accuracy and authenticity.”
The Mesozoic Era ended with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction that bore witness to the demise of non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and large marine reptiles. Scientists now accept life on Earth as it was then died out as the result of the impact of a massive meteorite or ice comet.
Prehistoric Planet’s five episodes focus on a single ecosphere each, starting with Coasts and continuing with Deserts, Freshwater, Ice Worlds and Forests. The first hour-long episode premieres on May 23. A new episode will stream each night until May 27, after which the entire series will be available for streaming on Apple TV+.
Once the idea became a reality, Gunton, Walker, science consultant and vertebrate palaeontologist Darren Naish and feature filmmaker Jon Favreau embraced it head-on. it was imperative that Prehistoric Planet look and feel as real as possible. The computer-generated effects were supervised by feature filmmaker Jon Favreau, whose past directing works include The Lion King and The Jungle Book, as well as several Avengers films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Iron Man.
“Remember we're coming from two different worlds,” Favreau said. “This team, other than me, have worked on all these Planet Earth documentaries, all these really rich, scientific, entertaining, long-from cinematic, new style of documentaries that were such an inspiration for the teams that I've been working with. We're more of the CGI tech team. When we were working on Lion King and Jungle Book, we were looking at these Planet Earth documentaries and trying to emulate what they were doing. I probably learned the most because I had no background in any of this. We're living in a golden age for dinosaurs where there are new discoveries being made on a monthly basis. And each one of those discoveries cascades down throughout our understanding of what the ancient world was like, and how life developed on this planet. So, for me, I was grateful for the rich education I was able to get from the leaders of these fields.”
©Apple TV+ / BBC Natural History Unit
Gunton acknowledged that Prehistoric Planet needed to do more than mimic his past programs.
“Part of that is the grammar,” he said. “The grammar of how you shoot a wildlife documentary is very specific. We usually only have one camera when we're on location. And you can only put that camera in certain positions. So, we reflect or replicated those constraints ourselves. Obviously, in a CGI world, you can put a camera anywhere. But, in the real world, you can't. So, if you're going to be authentic about it, as if you’re actually filming these animals for real, you have to replicate the single-camera look. There are shots which are impossible which you can't do in the real world. So we didn't do them. When you see that, when you see the images in the show, I wanted them to look and feel as if they were filmed by real people in real-world environments.”
Walker, who wrote all five of Prehistoric Planet’s episodes, concurred.
“We're wildlife filmmakers,” he said. “We've spent 30 years doing that. So, we know those are the rules.”
Without meaning to belabour the obvious, Favreau admitted that, in the end, Prehistoric Planet wouldn’t have been the same without Attenborough.
“He's invested in this community, and he wants to present the message of science to the next generation,” Favreau said. “Certainly, he's a man who has a big enough body of work, and has done enough, that we were very grateful that he was able to contribute to this. Because, just honestly, hearing his voice over it helps this fit within the pantheon of other scientific content that's out there, that speaks to a certain level of authenticity. And so when he agreed to become a part of this after seeing what we were up to, it made me feel like we were really on the right track.”
Gunton found the right note to end on.
“Sir David was 96 last week,” Gunton said. “Last weekend. I told him, ages ago, we were finally going to do this project. He said, ‘My God, this sounds amazing. I can't wait to see it. This is going to be incredible.’
“And then we were finally able to show him the program, a short while ago. He was sitting in the dubbing theatre, during the recording.
“At the end of it, he takes his headphones off, his glasses are all square from peering at the footage, and he says, ‘Mike, it was as if I was there looking at them through a pair of binoculars. It was absolutely incredible. When can I see the next one?’ I think for David to say that, this man who has seen everything — he's the most travelled, the most experienced, altruistic filmmaker, the most knowledgeable person that I know — for him to say that, I thought to myself, ’I think we're doing okay.’”
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Prehistoric Planet premieres Monday, May 23 on Apple TV+. A new episode will stream each night until May 27, after which the entire series will be available for streaming on Apple TV+’s On-Demand service.
©Apple TV+ / BBC Natural History Unit