INTERVIEW

What is your greatest extravagance?
LP: Taking time to make a photograph.  Photography is my first love, but I drifted away when I began making films.  They say that films are just photography at 24 frames a second, but that’s only part of the picture; you also have dialogue, a score, sound effects, and a story that hopefully will transport the viewer to a new interior landscape of their soul that will be transformational.  The director John Ford said that making a movie is like painting a picture, but with an army.  An army that is cranky getting up at 4 a.m. to capture the director’s obsession to capture magic hour, that ever so brief time of day when the sublime spectrums of reds and blues dance together, gods willing, for a brief few seconds and make the landscapes come alive.  But the army needs to be fed, caffeinated, and paid overtime when magic hour rolls around again at sunset.  Photography, however, is pretty simple; alone, I can marvel in bliss at the ever-evolving light show on this rock spinning around the sun, without the earthly concerns of a platoon of humanity in tow.  However, a well-organized film crew is the most powerful weapon in the world to create social change. Therein is my conundrum, the conceit of potentially changing the world with film, or the personal satisfaction of documenting the gods playing with light at landscape scale.


When and where were you happiest?
LP: In the early 80’s until 1992, I was a pioneer, living in one of the first all-artist buildings in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.  This was a dangerous time, before the High Line and the West Side Parks were built. “You can witness a crime an hour from the window” was no longer a selling point when I had two young children who weren’t being exposed to nature like I had been as a child.  My oldest son learned to ride a bike in our loft.  I was on vacation visiting friends who lived in Antigua in the West Indies.  My kids were entertaining themselves in nature running around the yard, the happiest I’ve ever seen them without curated fun.  I told my Antigua friend that I wished I could live in a place like this; he responded, ”They sell tickets to everybody.”  Three weeks later I was living in Antigua with my family, in a rustic beach house, writing a book that I had been meaning to write.  Pre-internet, no newspaper or magazines to distract, only writing, being with family, hanging out with friends, eating delicious meals cooked from scratch. Life was simple but meaningful; my mission was to let my children be children and get to know nature on its own terms, and to give myself the time to pry words out of my brain to create that book I wanted to write.  Twenty years later my son still lives in Antigua.


What is your most treasured possession?
LP: My photographic and film work are contained in 26 filing cabinets, representing a half-century of my work.  I wasn’t living in a flood plain, but I lost much of my home to a flood in 2000 that struck my neighborhood in Boulder.  I spent three days and nights around the clock manning commercial-grade pumps to keep water from rising and destroying my photographic and film archive.  The archive survived intact, and I whisked my collection to the safety of a storage facility on high ground a few miles away.  A few years later, a firestorm incinerated over a thousand homes around the neighborhood encircling the storage unit. My archive dodged another disaster. I spent my life making art, and it would be an emotional disaster to lose my collection, but when it came time to flee the floods and fires, there was always one box in the car with me: our family photos with a little gold man on top, our team’s Oscar for The Cove.


Who is your fiction hero?
LP: What young boy didn’t want to be a secret agent? Rolling Stone said The Cove was a cross between The Bourne Identity and Flipper.  For our second film, Racing Extinction, we made a Bond car out of a Tesla, the first car in the world with an electroluminescent paint job where we could change the color of the car with the flick of a button, kind of a reverse camouflage.  We installed a FLIR camera that rose out of the “frunk” so we could see the invisible world of greenhouse gases.  A 20,000-lumen IMAX projector could emerge from the hatch on a robotic arm and project those images on skyscrapers, mountainsides, and government buildings.  


What is your motto?
LP: Nothing is impossible, it’s only difficult.

Through the tremendous work that you do, both through your films and the various global initiatives that you spearhead, what is your ultimate mission?
LP: To change the world sounds like a conceit, but that is exactly what we do.  I learned this from my friend Jim Clark, who financed our first film.  Jim was the first person to start three industries from scratch and make them all worth over a billion dollars.  I met him when he was starting his fourth company, Shutterfly, a company that makes prints from digital photos.  He asked me if I would teach him how to be a good photographer and I told him I would make him a great photographer if he made me a billionaire.  He set me up in a non-profit called The Oceanic Preservation Society, which is our film and photography production company.  Jim’s secret to success was to surround himself with the best people possible, and that’s what we do with our film projects.  The Cove, a film about dolphin hunting in Japan, not only became one of the most winning documentaries in film history, it also helped reduce the slaughter of dolphins and porpoises in Japan some 93%.  Our novel projections of animals from our second film Racing Extinction on the Empire State Building, the United Nations and the Vatican were seen over 5.4 billion times and inspired laws that now protect some of the world’s most endangered species.  In the first 30 days that our film The Game Changers, a film about plant-based super athletes, was on Netflix, searches for plant-based diets went up 350% world-wide.  Mission Joy, a film featuring two of our generation’s great spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is about how to find joy in a world full of sorrow. It’s been seen by tens of millions of people and is now shown as part of the programming in prison systems.  I’m not a billionaire, but I have found that true joy can only be found by helping others, and that makes our team feel like we may be some of the wealthiest people in the world.

https://www.opsociety.org