Behind the Camera

Lucia Ibarra had filmed weddings in Bilbao, cooking shows in Madrid and, once, a very long advertisement for a washing powder. She had never filmed a whale. So when a small production company in Wellington offered her six weeks' work as a camera operator on a nature documentary, she accepted before she had even finished reading the email.

The crew was tiny: a director called Hemi, who had grown up on the coast and had been planning the film for years, a sound engineer from Scotland called Fraser, and Lucia. They were based in Kaikoura, a small town on the east coast of the South Island, where the mountains seem to drop straight into the sea and deep underwater canyons bring whales unusually close to the shore.

On the first morning, before anyone was allowed on the boat, they were given a long safety talk by a woman from the local wildlife office. They were told that boats must keep their distance from whales, at least fifty meters in most cases, and that they must never drive towards an animal or cut across its path. If a whale came closer on its own, they had to slow down, put the engine in neutral and wait. "The ocean is their home," she said. "You are the visitors. Please behave like polite ones."

For the first two weeks, the whales behaved like polite hosts too, which meant that they were mostly somewhere else. Lucia filmed seals sleeping on rocks, dolphins racing the boat and a great many beautiful empty waves. Hemi remained calm. He explained that patience was the most important piece of equipment they had, and that the best scenes in nature films were rarely the ones that had been planned.

He was proved right on a gray Thursday morning. They had stopped well away from a young humpback whale that was feeding near the surface. Fraser had lowered an underwater microphone into the sea, and through his headphones he could hear long, strange songs. Then, without any warning, the whale turned and began swimming slowly towards them.

Hemi immediately told the skipper to switch the engine to neutral. Nobody moved. The whale came closer and closer until it was right beside the boat, so close that Lucia could see the barnacles on its skin and one enormous dark eye looking up at her. It stayed there for nearly four minutes, rolling gently onto its side as if it were studying them. Lucia kept filming, although she later admitted that she had no idea whether anything was in focus. Her hands were shaking and she was crying behind the camera.

That evening, Hemi watched the footage three times without saying a word. Then he asked Lucia whether she would mind if he shared one short clip with a friend who worked for a news agency. The friend shared it with an editor, the editor shared it with a television channel, and by the following morning the clip had been broadcast in more than thirty countries.

Not all of the reporting was accurate. One website claimed that the crew had been chasing the whale. Another said that the whale had tried to sink the boat, and a third described Lucia as a famous marine biologist. Hemi was furious about the first claim. He gave several interviews in which he explained that they had followed every rule, that the engine had been switched off and that it was the whale, not the crew, who had decided to come closer. The wildlife office supported him, saying that the crew had behaved exactly as they should have.

Lucia's mother phoned from Bilbao to say that the clip had been shown on the evening news in Spain and that the whole neighborhood had seen it. She wanted to know if it was true that her daughter was now a scientist. Lucia laughed and said that she had only been holding the camera.

The documentary was finished the following year. The whale appears in the last scene, with no music, only the sound of its breathing. When people ask Lucia how she got such a perfect shot, she always gives the same answer: she didn't. The whale came to her.