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October 12th, 2008

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Taking a look below the surface

Steve Loveček Lichtag gets personal with great whites, whales

By Kimberly Hiss
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 30th, 2008 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Lightag has made 24 documentaries, and is known for his "special kindness and love of wildlife." enlarge

COURTESY PHOTO

Lichtag and crew have often faced great risk while filming because they don't use cages to protect themselves from potential attacks. enlarge

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The Lichtag file

Born: March 4, 1954, Znojmo, Czechoslovakia
Profession: Documentary filmmaker
On-camera: Best known for his documentaries Carcharias: The Great White, Dance of the Blue Angels and Bizarre World
Off-camera: Founded the international film festival Water, Sea & the Oceans
Family: Married, with two sons

Director Steve L. Lichtag sat on the ocean floor 10 miles off the coast of South Africa, filming a great white passing along the surface.

He was admiring the animal’s silhouette in the sunlight, when the shark suddenly turned and dove straight for him. Lichtag braced himself for the oncoming 5-meter, 800-kilogram animal, and on impact, shoved his camera in its snout.

Dazed, the shark moved off long enough for Lichtag to kick his way back to the boat above.

The camera lens had broken, but not the waterproof housing, and the film inside survived to be part of the acclaimed 2000 documentary Carcharias: The Great White, which premiered on the U.S. television network NBC.

Three years later, Lichtag was 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of the Dominican Republic, swimming alongside a female humpback whale. Her willingness to let him follow, while using her fins to shield her calf, became one of the most intimate sequences in the 2004 award-winning documentary Dance of the Blue Angels.

“She was as close to me as you are now,” Lichtag says, gesturing across the coffee table between us in his Prague 6 production office.

The lounge is filled with shark replicas, underwater photographs and brass diving helmets. In a video suite next door, an assistant works on one of Lichtag’s current projects, a documentary about Indonesian whale hunters. A well-populated aquarium bubbles across the room.

“Those are the moments when you realize you’re not just dealing with some dumb fish,” he says of the whale’s protectiveness. “These are very intelligent animals.”

Lichtag, 54, has made 24 documentaries, but is perhaps best known for his nine underwater films, which have won a long list of national and international awards.

The son of amateur actors, a teenage Lichtag attended the Literary Drama Conservatory in Brno, south Moravia, and went on to act in various feature films and television series. In his early 20s, when he started being approached for shows with pro-communist messages, he decided to "relocate," escaping to Austria, Germany, then New York City and finally to Florida in 1979 where he had relatives.

When a friend asked him if he wanted to try diving one day, the son of a land-locked country found a second home.

“That’s where my new life started — in the ocean,” says Lichtag. “I’d never experienced anything as exciting as diving. It’s like exploring the cosmos.”

Lichtag spent the next few years going back and forth between Manhattan, where he co-founded The Ta Fantastika Black Light Theatre with a group of Czech expatriates, and Florida, where he taught mime at the Florida Academy of Dramatic Arts. But he was restless.

“Film, film, film was always on my mind,” he said of his motivation to head for Prague in 1990, where he had friends in the industry.

Lichtag soon took on the production of a television documentary about Cambodia (“I was the guy with all the headaches”), then produced another series on Siberia. Both aired on Czech networks, got international distribution, won awards — and gave Lichtag the technical confidence to develop and direct his next project himself.

Wanting to incorporate his passion for diving, Lichtag pitched the idea for his first underwater documentary to Czech Television. Acquisitions Editor Dušan Jurčík was involved in those early conversations, and remembers his impression of Lichtag as a “very sensitive author with feeling for the film story,” not to mention a “nice guy” and “great adventurer.”

Released in 1998, the series In Search of the Crystal World was a success, and Lichtag got constant calls from friends saying they’d just caught it again on TV.

“The television doors opened to me,” Lichtag says. “I felt like maybe this was bingo. Maybe this was what I was supposed to do.”

When to punch a shark

Lichtag rose to a whole new level of filmmaking with Carcharias — one of the first shark documentaries to be shot by cameramen swimming freely, without the protection of a cage.

But as Lichtag describes the challenges of setting up an underwater shoot, the close-up with the carnivore almost sounds like the easy part.

A day typically started at 5 a.m. with a check of the weather — the “major producer” by Lichtag’s definition. If conditions were right, the crew prepared the boat, diving gear and film equipment.

“You are working with saltwater, which is very aggressive. So everything has to be properly wrapped and ready for the worst,” he says. “Big waves or rain — once you’re out there on the ocean, sometimes there’s no way back, and you just have to stay there and protect your equipment.”

Once in the boat, the crew motored 10 to 15 miles out to the shooting location, anchored, and checked conditions such as water temperature, plankton levels, the angle of the sun, and — perhaps most importantly — underwater visibility.

“It would be a deadly combination,” Lichtag points out, “to have 3-meter visibility and a 6-meter shark.”

Once that checklist was completed, the crew began a three-step baiting routine by first lowering a shark liver into the water where its oils act as an attractant.

“You think everything is perfect,” says Lichtag of all the preparation. “Then you wait. You wait, you wait, you get seasick, you get burned, and you’re still just there waiting. Most of the days — 95 percent of the days — you don’t dive, and you don’t shoot.”

On a good day, however, a crew member would spot a dorsal fin, and bait No. 2 — a rubber seal — was used to lure the shark to the boat. If the shark followed, bait No. 3 — fish meat on a line — was dropped in front of its nose. The following series of casts and retrieves might prompt the frustrated animal to leave, or cause a shark to act so aggressively that the on-staff marine expert would advise letting it swim off.

But on the rare 5-percent occasion when the right shark stayed, two crew members suited up, prepped their cameras, and dove in with it.

Lichtag was often in the water (“I couldn’t find many people who wanted to do it”), with only a camera between him and a large, rubbery snout. If the shark got too curious, standard procedure was to, “bang his nose.” Lichtag’s crew, meanwhile, kept careful watch for other sharks approaching from the sides or below.

“It’s far too exciting to really feel the danger,” Lichtag says. “Actually, I realized that, for me, it’s better not to do it again, because whenever I felt like it was so great, those were the most dangerous moments. When I looked at the footage, I thought, he could really eat me right there.”

The whale whisperer

In the wake of Carcharias’ name-making success, Lichtag found that instead of looking for others to collaborate on future projects, he was the one being sought out.

“I always dreamed about shooting wildlife underwater,” says Czech cinematographer Matěj Cibulka, “and after hearing that it was a Czech guy who made The Great White film, I dreamed of meeting him.”

Cibulka would be on the crew of Lichtag’s next documentary, which was as much an ethical exploration as an underwater one.

Dance of the Blue Angels depicted the modern day whaling industry, and sought to establish sympathy for its victims by filming the story from their point of view — a perspective Lichtag came to appreciate by spending hours swimming with the mammals.

“You have to somehow build a trustful relationship,” he says. “The animal finally gives you a chance to come closer, and she stays, and she looks at you and you look at her.”

As for Cibulka, it didn’t take him long to get a sense of Lichtag’s energy on the water.

“He is like a child who gets a big toy,” he says. “He is very enthusiastic and it infects others easily.”

Blue Angels’ 2004 release was quickly followed by filming for Bizarre World, which dealt with the controversial practice of electro-shock fishing in Czech rivers. That film, out in 2006, was another example of Lichtag’s sensitivity as a story teller.

“There is a special kindness and love of wildlife which you can find in his films,” Cibulka says.

It was also proof of his growing skill as a filmmaker.

“He is now making bigger and stronger movies,” says Jurčík, who describes Lichtag’s current projects as “expensive, dangerous and complicated.”

Meanwhile, on dry land

Lichtag has become an author and lecturer on marine environmental issues, and president of the Water, Sea & the Oceans film festival, while raising two boys, Thomas, 21, and Michael, 14, with his wife Elen. But considering the travel demands of his next project, he’ll have to spend a considerable amount of time away from their Prague home in the coming months.

The documentary will explore the lives of subsistence whale hunters in the Indonesian village of Lamalera, where locals use primitive wooden boats and bamboo harpoons in the pursuit of sperm whales, which are the basis of the island’s economy.

Filming at the village — which takes five days to reach in a series of planes and boats — began last year and will resume this June.

Cibulka, for one, is well aware of what the film crew could witness.

“There might be a moment when we’ll be swimming with one badly hurt, bleeding sperm whale,” he says. “Anyone who’s ever been close to any big marine mammal can imagine what a big emotion this could be.”

According to Lichtag, that connection with the animals he films is something that doesn’t go away.

“It’s a never-ending relationship,” he says. “Especially with whales — once you meet your star, it never leaves you. It stays with you forever, whether you like it or not.”

Kimberly Hiss can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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