Filming Africa’s Top Predators : Beyond ‘Savage Kingdom’ (Part 2) | Nat Geo Live

(Pulsing music) - Since 2012, we have been based in Savute. I just want to walk you through the reason why we ended up there and how that kind of led into the making of Savage Kingdom. Botswana is a landlocked country right in the heart of Southern Africa. Chobe National Park is in the northeastern corner, and it's a particularly dry and fairly arid environment. It's almost semi-desert, and what that really means is that water is always at a premium, especially in the dry season.

But Savute was a particularly interesting place in that the river that flowed into that area is an ephemeral river, and it only flows for 20 years in every hundred. Its name translates as unpredictable, because—and it's apt—because nobody really knows when it will arrive or when it will disappear again. Now, that unpredictability is due to a number of events. The catchment area where the rain falls that flows down into that area is about a thousand kilometers away. On its long journey getting there, it has to break through several fault lines, and these fault lines sometimes block the flow and sometimes release it.

Then Savute, being so dry and arid, relies quite heavily on also the microclimates around the area. If there’s good rainfall around Savute and in the dry riverbed leading up to Savute, all of those factors come together, and only then does the river actually flow into this area. When it does reach Savute and when it flows into that area, it empties out into the bed of an old ancient lake and really just brings that back to life. It forms this incredible oasis in the middle of the desert.

When it's at its full, Savute is probably one of the most incredible wildlife habitats, habitat that would rival any of the wildlife habitats, great wildlife habitats we have in Africa. When I was a child, I saw the drying up of the channel; it disappeared completely, and that was 35 years ago. But it did return, and in 2008, the river flowed back into Savute. In 2012, once the area had responded somewhat, we decided to move our entire filming operation into Savute for obvious reasons.

After several years of being there, we did two films on lions, a film on a leopard family. In 2014, we started to see that the area was starting to dry out. All those factors that enabled it to flow slowly sort of went out of sync, and a big drying up process was beginning. We started noticing that a lot of the herds, the big herds that are gathered there just started to naturally move off literally to greener pastures, and that presented a problem for the predators.

Now, the predators were stuck in that habitat. They were bound by their territorial boundaries; they couldn't leave. They were sort of thrust into the situation. And I very soon started to recognize that this incredible storm was brewing. We had a number of predator families that were being forced into an untenable situation. They were being pushed and forced in on top of each other, and that really was the premise and the seed that pushed forward the whole concept for the Savage Kingdom itself. What was going to happen when Africa's top predators were thrust into a confined area and most of their resources were gonna be taken away?

Let's have a peek. (Thunder rumbles) - [Narrator] One kingdom, five heroes. Each with a unique power. Fighting, not just to survive. (Growling) But to reign supreme over the savage kingdom. (Dramatic music) - Tonight I'm gonna walk you through sort of round one, the first season of Savute's own real life Game of Thrones. A season of diminishing habitat and a number of predator families that were literally fighting to survive and exist in that particular area.

From the onset, we knew that this was not gonna be an easy ride. These groups of predators were being forced into this really untenable situation, and it wasn't going to be a story about Bambis and rainbows. Knowing the circumstance and wanting to be true to that whole dynamic, we were really determined to capture life as it unfolded in front of us, no matter how harsh and brutal and difficult it became. I have a bugbear about natural history films that sanitize predators and what they do.

I think that people overlook they are predators and they're doing what is so natural. It's not for us to pull away from it, and I think that the more that you pull away from the reality of what they do, the less you care for them, the less you bind to their lives and emotionally invest in them. We were determined to show a sort of honest account of the way these predators really live, unaffected by people. No human pressure was involved. Just a purely natural circumstance that was playing out and how hard each one of these predators had to fight just in order to survive.

Before we go into more about the Savage Kingdom and the dynamic, I'd like to introduce the team that helped me film this. Obviously, we had several family groups to follow. We had two prides of lion, a wild dog, a leopard mother, and a clan of hyenas. And so, we needed multiple crews if we were going to embed in the area and have a crew per animal family.

This is Rich; he is my right-hand man who Geoff was talking about. He's a childhood friend, and he's our longest-serving cameraman. And then there's a crazy kid, a crazy American kid. He's from LA. He gave up his life in the city and decided to move out into the wild with us. Very passionate, very driven, and a lovely, lovely guy. Then there's Lawrence; he's my cousin, that's not me. He is a Botswana bred bush wreck, kind of like I am.

The adjusting for him, adjusting to living out in the wild and the bush skill is quite, came very easy to him. He's a great asset to the team. And then there was long, tall, thin Cam, who is a bit of a wary Australian guy. I knew him for about 20 years, and I knew at home in Oz he didn't really bathe every day anyway. So, him joining us, you know, would have been such an easy transition for him. (Audience laughing)

I wanna start by saying that being a cameraman for the NHFU for us is very much modeled on what I learned to do and how I grew up. And it's quite a difficult job. If it is always your life, it comes naturally, but for guys who are not used to it, it's quite a task. You have to be bushman, tracker, you have to be cook, you have to be pretty much everything. And then you've got, on top of that you've got to spend month on end living out in the wild just following endlessly following animals. Month on just keep going.

And it takes a very specific type of character to do that. And I think fundamentally, you have to be an animal lover. If your enthusiasm is about animals and following your story and loving their behavior, the camera work kind of comes secondary. As long as you can do that, you can spend the amount of time that you need to get what you want. It wasn't all just lying around. You know, it was long hours. Lions used to—they sleep for most of their lives.

80% of their time they're asleep. You will spend days watching them sleep just to capture a 15-minute piece of interaction on the fourth day, and it's quite exhausting. And you have to be fairly comfortable in your life, and clearly Cam, because he wasn't showering. Anyway, but there's a point in which everybody starts to go a little bit crazy, and you start having your own little docudrama in the car. You sort of fight wars, and you do all sorts of things, and everybody at some point just gets a little bit manic and a little bit crazy.

And start doing some particularly stupid things, particularly Cam. Everybody seems to lose the plot at some point, but very quickly we regain it, and you know, kick them in the line, and they start focusing on the job again. One of the things that is so important to getting a behavior and working with these animals is you've got to get these animals to really trust you.

Now, we had been there for three years before the Savage Kingdom started, and a lot of these animals really started to become acclimated to us. And as you can see, they would use our car as shade so often. That's how comfortable they became with us, and it's an important thing to do with animals that they can play out their normal lives without you feeling like you're influencing them. Only then can we really immerse ourselves into their lives and let them just get on with it, unencumbered.

Now, some of you would have noticed that our cars we paint with zebra stripes. I know it's the Botswana national animal, but we really do that because it's cool, we're young, we're hip. (Audience laughing) We wanna be different, and we wanna be noticed, you know? Most of that's not true. The only thing that is true about that is that we do wanna be noticed. Most animals and predators only see in black and white, and there are a lot of other vehicles that would come through that area, tourists would be traveling through, and what we wanted to do is make ourselves instantaneously recognizable to the characters that we're working with.

That they could at a glance know that we were there, and they trusted us, and they were completely comfortable with us having around. And they knew that we weren't going to impede on their lives while they hunted and what they did. And it so often happened where we would be working with a leopard; she would go and she would lie down in the tree. It's getting a bit hot, she'd given up hunting for the day, and she would get up, and we'd be 80, 90 meters away from her.

She'd get up, and she'd literally walk straight to the car, crawl underneath our car, and go to sleep or lie right next to us. They would choose to come to us. They sort of trusted us enough, and it was just an indication of how well that plan worked and how accustomed they were to us and us being around.

From a childhood fascination with predators to an adult familiarity with predators. Andy and I were talking recently, and in the past 20 years or so, I've spent more time with predators than I have with people. I am fascinated by their level of intelligence. I am completely passionate about spending time with these animals. Each one of them develops, each species develops a unique skillset that they use in very different ways to each other.

And even beyond that, specific individuals will actually develop a skill set that is specific to that particular animal. That is just an indication of the level of intelligence that these animals have, and it's what really drives me. The fact that I can be with predators out in the field; they adapt, they change, they anticipate, and there's nothing more exciting than knowing that at any point in the day, at any time, that animal may do something that nobody has ever witnessed before, nobody's ever seen before.

And that's really what drives me and what keeps me out there and keeps me wanting to be with these animals. Now for some slightly more serious side to this whole thing. The one thing that all these predators have in common is they have to kill in order to live. It's exhilarating, it's exciting; it's a very primal, almost gladiatorial kind of instinct that they have.

And I really—I'll go back to this point that I really feel that people are very quick to judge, and I don't shy away from it. I think that we have to get accustomed to the reality of their lives and embrace it, and know that it's completely natural. It's not gratuitous. It's not for any other reason than just pure survival, and it's very natural, and I think we should become more and more accepting to it.

I don't think that—I mean, hyenas, as you know, have got a really bad rap. And they're sometimes referred to as evil, and they're sometimes referred to as horrible or bad, but you know, it's not for us to lay that on them. That's a human construct. They're just doing what they are naturally designed to do, what they are born to do to survive. Game of Thrones, Geoff eluded to it and what the comparison with that was.

We were in a finite environment. We had a series of different clans that were fighting it out to take ownership or just to exist or to own that piece of land. And when we are trying to explain this concept to people, the minute we reference Game of Thrones, it became a shorthand. They understood exactly what it is about, and it became a shorthand for us to try and explain the whole concept and how we wanted to treat this project.

We were after predator conflict, and that is certainly what we got during our time with Savage Kingdom. In 15 months of filming, we saw 28 different war scenes where one clan conflicted with another. One or other combination of predators actually came together and literally fought it out for ownership or for a kill or for possession of a particular area. And the parallels between what is happening there and Game of Thrones, you can obviously start to see that link.

We thought it was a particular stroke of genius to ask Charles Dance to—he was one of the leaders of one of the clans in Game of Thrones, and we thought that bringing him in to narrate it for us would really help that concept and help that project. Charles was very intrigued by the way that we want to treat it. He really supported it and was very interested in the way and what we were trying to achieve with this project.

And during the narrating part of it, when in the studio, he also seemed to have quite a lot of fun, and let's take a look. - I am life. (Thunder rumbles) I am death. I give everything. But I take all. (Dramatic music) I am the Savage Kingdom. (Dramatic music) The old queen is dead. Now the greatest hunter takes the throne. She leads the most brutal army in the realm. Matsumi. How was that? Well, I'm not doing it again. (Dramatic music)

• Charles was great to work with. We felt that his voice had a lot of gravitas and had a lot of gravitas to it, and with his skill, he was able to add a lot of nuance into the way that we wanted to portray this film. And also give it very much a sort of feature feel to it, in the very much scripted drama type of delivery that we were after. Savage Kingdom really became a perspective piece for us.

We are following five different family groups, and each of the episodes we try to tell from that particular family's point of view. We buy into, we wanted the audience to associate with a heroine, with a character and a family and go on their journey. Know what they wanted to do, what their ambition was, their path, their life, their struggle. And at some point, they were gonna cross with these other predators.

And inadvertently they became the enemy, and then that all gets turned on its head when you now watch an episode that was from the so-called enemy's perspective, and the whole dynamic shifts. We are not comfortable with the whole anthropomorphism idea, and we try to deliberately avoid it in a lot of our films.

We feel that... Well, the problem is that we still wanted people to emotionally invest in your characters and invest in those people. Invest in those characters and invest in their story. What we did is we introduced a second person voice or a proxy voice that we used as a sort of emotional step just to kind of navigate you through the sort of what those animals wanted, their intent, their instincts, their drive without actually being anthropomorphic.

And we think it really, really worked, and Charles bought into that idea really, really well, and he executed it incredibly well. We couldn't have asked for a better delivery from him. An example of that is Saba, who I'll introduce you to shortly, one of our main characters. She had a set of cubs, and she used to leave them on leopard rock.

And it acted as a nursery for her cubs while she was out hunting. And just that drive with her wanting to return to her cubs, that second person voice just gave you that anxiety and that drive, and it just helped you contextualize their lives in human terms. Names, a lot of the names that we have adopted in the film were names that already existed for a lot of the characters out there. They are names that guides in the area and people had given them, and most of the time they were functional, they earned their names.

They were descriptive of their character or of an area that they lived in or some behavior trait, behavioral trait that they used to do. It definitely wasn't an idea to make them into little people, but it gave us the shorthand to be able to identify with individuals within this greater battle.