Chasing Ice: Filming this “compelling story” was an amazing adventure

The scenes in Chasing Ice are breathtakingly beautiful. They capture enormous glaciers; desolate, stunning landscapes in icy greens and blues and whites; calving icebergs; adventure. But the message of the film, which premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, is somber, even depressing. The planet is changing. The glaciers are melting. (The trailer and show times are available on the movie’s website .)

As he relates in the film, National Geographic photographer James Balog used to be a skeptic of climate change: ‘I thought it was based on computer models. I thought maybe there was a lot of hyperbole that was turning this into an activist cause. But most importantly, I didn’t think humans were capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of this entire huge planet. It didn’t seem probable. It didn’t seem possible.’

Years later, he went to photograph the Solheim Glacier in Iceland. ‘I never imagined you could see features this big disappearing in such a short period of time. But when I did, when I saw that, I realized, my God, there is a powerful piece of history that’s unfolding.’ Balog set about deploying cameras to document the glaciers. His project, the Extreme Ice Survey, eventually placed some 25 cameras in 5 countries (and was able to further expand this number after the making of Chasing Ice). ‘I realized the public doesn’t want to hear about more statistical studies, more computer models, more projections. What they need is a believable understandable piece of evidence, something that grabs them in the gut,’ he says.

Every hour the cameras snapped a photo. Jeff Orlowski, then a senior anthropology major at Stanford University, jumped at the chance to help Balog document the project. While Orlowski had previously made short films, this raw material offered exciting possibilities for his first feature. ‘James was dedicated and passionate and obsessed about making it happen. I just had to follow him and keep up with him,’ says Orlowski.

Meanwhile, the Extreme Ice Survey continues, says Orlowski. ‘Eight minutes ago, 34 cameras around the world turned on, checked to see if there was enough light, and most of them took a picture. James wants these cameras to go forever, as long as the funding can possibly keep them alive, because they are a historic documentation of what we are doing to the planet right now, at the beginning of this century.’

Although Orlowski’s filming began as a documentation of Balog’s survey of the ice, Chasing Ice has so moved audiences that ‘we are being asked to become political activists in this process,’ says Orlowski. Not sure yet just how he and the Chasing Ice team can best fill that role, he says, ‘We want [the film] to be used as a tool to shift perceptions and increase awareness about the reality of what is happening. We are trying to showcase through undeniable, irrefutable, incontrovertible imagery of what has happened over the last five years to these landscapes. It’s a compelling story.’

Physics Today‘s Toni Feder spoke with director Orlowski in January.

PT: How did you become involved in Chasing Ice?

ORLOWSKI: I was in college. A mutual friend introduced me to James Balog, the subject of Chasing Ice. I was curious about learning more as a photographer. I volunteered my time and went with him to Iceland, just to get that opportunity to be with him. At the beginning, though, we weren’t planning on making a film. The original intent was to document what James was doing and to give him footage for YouTube videos and for promotion materials.

PT: What was the turning point that made you realize it was going to be bigger than promotional videos?

ORLOWSKI: It was seeing the audience response to James’s time lapses. He would do lectures and talk about the glaciers melting, and reveal the imagery. The response was jaw-droppingly powerful. As time went on, we knew that this was really significant stuff. People were learning about the issue [of climate change] in a new way, and it was giving them a new mindset. I thought, ‘Not only do we have these time lapses, but we have great video footage. We can tell a story.’

I started pitching to James on letting me make a movie. He was resistant for quite a while.

PT: Why was he resistant?

ORLOWSKI: Because he didn’t want to be the subject of the film. He is the guy who is behind the camera, not in front of the camera.

And I was 23 or 24 at the time, and didn’t have the skill set to do it. We didn’t have the funding to do it. I just kept pitching him on it: ‘We have to do this. This is how we are going to make the biggest impact, how we can get the imagery and the story out to the world.’ Finally, he saw that potential and gave me the green light.

PT: How did you fund the film?

ORLOWSKI: Funding for the project and the film was separate. James got the funding for the Extreme Ice Survey through grants and foundations and also from his own personal investment. For the film, we raised about $650 000, almost exclusively from friends and family. And we had incredible time and services donated. We estimate the budget was about $2 million.

PT: What were some of the most amazing experiences you had during the filming?

ORLOWSKI: We had probably half a dozen life-threatening circumstances in the course of working on the project. We had helicopter emergency landings. We had dog-sled crashes.

I once fell in ice water up to my neck. That was on my first trip to Alaska with James. I was filming him, and I stepped out onto a piece of ice that I thought was stable. It started to submerge under my foot. I slipped off, and fell into the water. I put the camera down on the ice—I was thrilled that I had saved the camera.

We kept filming for a few more hours. Later, when we got back to the hotel, and James saw me taking these layers of wet cotton t-shirts and jeans off, he was like, ‘What are you doing? How could you possibly be wearing that?’ And I very quickly bought a bunch of fleece.

Another time we were in a hut in Greenland. It was about –40 degrees, and the four of us were about to go to sleep. We could smell gas coming out of the little propane gas heater, and we decided it would really suck if we died in the middle of the night from asphyxiation. So we turned the heater off. I woke up in the middle of the night, because I was so cold that the sound of my own teeth chattering startled me awake.

PT: The film features glaciologists and other scientists. How did you go about bringing them in?

ORLOWSKI: We originally didn’t want it to be a film about climate change. We didn’t think we could make a film that was really powerful and seminal about climate change, so we were trying to avoid a lot of the science. But at a certain point we realized that our approach was wrong, and that we needed to embrace the reality of that. We restructured the film, and we started finding people who could comment, who could speak on behalf of how the planet is changing, what is happening to animals, with wildfires, and so on.

PT: What was the original plan for the film?

ORLOWSKI: We called the film The Photographer, and we thought that the edge we had was James Balog capturing this incredible, beautiful imagery that nobody gets to see. That was what we had that nobody else had. It was much more about his personal story.

I don’t think the phrase ‘climate change’ was used. At a certain point during test screenings, people were telling us that the story of James’s personal life, his past projects, the struggle of it all, was compelling, but they wanted to know more about the ice. They wanted to know more about what was happening to the glaciers.

PT: What impact have you seen so far?

ORLOWSKI: It wasn’t the intention to make a film that would have impact. But we have seen it have incredible impact. Now we are starting to question if we should try to proactively make more impact and try to influence political spheres.

Our message is not a matter of driving less, or sacrificing. It’s a matter that we need to do things smarter. The fossil fuel industry would lose about $20 trillion of known assets that they already have access to if they can sell and burn it—basically to put that garbage in the air. That’s a huge financial motivation to fight any sort of action or policy.

There is no environmental movement in the same way there was a civil rights movement, or a gay and lesbian rights movement, or a women’s suffrage movement. Those things were huge calls to action. They put a lot of pressure on the government. There are environmental groups that care, but it’s not on the same scale as those other movements.

We need to embrace sustainable energy. The grid is not designed for this, but we have solved bigger problems. We got a man on the Moon in less than a decade. We can solve this if we care about it. The technology exists—those are the easy things. The difficult part is that there is so much opposition from the fossil fuel industry and from vested interests to keep the status quo.

If we continue things at the status quo, within a generation or two, the planet is going to look incredibly different than it looks today. The future is going to look back on this decade and say, they had the science, they had the information, they had the knowledge, and they have the choice of what they are going to do. So the future will either say, did we go down the status quo route, or did we go down the sustainable route. And they are going to judge us as heroes or fools.