Hollywood has its fair share of chilling love stories, but who knew an ode to thawing ice could be so captivating? "We were spending time trying to figure out who we wanted to sing the end-credits song," says Chasing Ice director Jeff Orlowski of "Before My Time," Scarlett Johansson’s soulful contribution to his documentary about the world’s dissipating glaciers. "Our composer showed her some of the footage, and she was totally hooked!"
Instead of tackling the vast topic of global warming all at once, the film's protagonist, photographer, and Extreme Ice Survey founder, James Balog, took a more focused approach, installing dozens of cameras along treacherous frozen terrain to capture moments that include the largest calving incident (the term for when an iceberg splits off from a glacier) ever recorded on film and a shingle shard of ice being backlit by an entire universe of glittering constellations.
Produced by Oscar-winning documentary The Cove's Paula DuPré Pesmen, Chasing Ice has captured the attention of both The Carrie Diaries' Anna Sophia Robb, who urged her Twitter followers to check it out, and Robert Redford, who called the time-lapse doc "indisputable" proof of the dramatic effects of soaring global temperatures.
On the eve of the film’s release (November 16), we caught up with the filmmakers to discuss the romantic side of the globe’s endangered terrain:
What brought you to this project?
Jeff Orlowski: I got connected to James through a mutual friend and I just knew that I needed to be involved. I volunteered to join James to go on a trip to Iceland. I had no real cold-weather experience and I froze my butt off. We weren't really planning on making a film, but we just kept shooting everything. About a year into the project, the time-lapses started to reveal themselves, and we start to see what's actually happening to the ice. [James] was a little resistant at first so I edited the trailer together. That's when Paula came onboard. I recognized that if I was going to do this at a professional level, we needed a lot more talent than I could do myself and we just built the team up.
Why do you think it is so emotional to watch the glaciers disappearing in the film?
Paula DuPré Pesmen: We always hear about ice caps melting, but I never really felt connected to it. I didn't realize how close it really was to my daily life. We can see the death of these glaciers with the time-lapse photography, which is really powerful. When you actually see it happening, you realize the damage that we are doing to the planet.
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