Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

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I enjoyed reading this interview a lot. I appreciate the perspective and knowledge that Craig Foster offers into the ecosystem he is so familiar with.

But with the documentary, it was the opposite. The cinematography is gorgeous and many of the scenes that were captured were truly remarkable because he spent so much time in the water. The footage of the octopus and the sharks was just extraordinary. However, I really found the way Craig injected his own life story into documentary to be a real distraction and wished it had been more like a Sir David Attenborough documentary. (Actually, some of the footage made it into Blue Planet II, episode 5.)

If he had conducted the documentary more like this interview, I'm sure I would've enjoyed it even more.

> Octopuses don’t have tentacles as such.

Huh, TIL.

> The frustrating thing about a film is that you’ve only got 85 minutes. What you don’t see is that I have watched those pyjama sharks for years. [...] But what you don’t see is that I’m close to many different animals. All the different types of fish I got to know extremely well, otters, even some of the mollusks. Whales. There’re so many different animals. There’s no time to show all of that.

I wonder how much unedited footage he has? Seems like he could make an entire season about it all, especially now that he has a relationship with Netflix.

> I really found the way Craig injected himself into the story to be a distraction and wish this had been more like Sir David Attenborough documentary

Can you already see this 94 years old guy jumping into the water to build a personal relationship with an octopus? ;) I think the whole point of the movie was not capturing the life of the octopus, but showing the relationship between human and octopus. This would not be possible with the way Attenborough documents things (i.e. as a narrator).

Sure, but I didn't need to hear CF's life story. He could've presented the octopus and his interaction with it without all that. Almost everyone I've talked to found it to detract from the documentary.

I enjoyed his story, it provided background without which it would have been footage of an octopus like every other nature documentary.

I thought CF's story could have been a bigger hook into how he rediscovers the circle of life and his place in it. But the film never closses that loop successfully.

I appreciated the window into his struggles, not only because I continue to work towards better mental health, but because so many other people do, too.

Art is for the artist. That relationship gets more difficult when a production team gets involved, and will rarely (never?) please everybody.

Did not detract for me.

Yeah agree, loved the movie but his story did not land for me at all. The octopus gets her arm ripped off and he somehow internalized that as himself being torn apart... He was dying working a regular job and needed to make this moonshot octopus documentary... for his son.

It all comes off as this sort of quasi humble but very self-aggrandizing story told by a man with one facial expression. Sort of like a wealthy white lady talking about her ayahuasca retreat or something.

The movie is not a nature documentary, it is a love story. He starts out making a nature documentary, but this is merely the context of his relationship with the octopus.

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