David Attenborough 1995 Interview

British television broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough has completed his latest series, The Private Life of Plants. The series attracted over 8 million viewers when it first aired on the BBC in January. Since then, millions more have tuned in to watch plants devouring mice, seducing bees and invading territories with the determination of an army. It will air in the United States on October 9th on TBS. And I am pleased to have Sir David Attenborough here with us this evening. Welcome. Thank you. Is your family... Do you know of any other family in England that has two brothers who are... have been knighted? Come to mind? Anybody? Sir Richard and Sir David? Yes. I don't know. Nothing comes to mind. That's the sort of thing that keeps coming to my mind. Tell me about this series and what you have discovered about the world of plants. And I'm sure that somebody at the BBC must have said, uh, wildlife is one thing. Plants is something else. That's quite right. I mean, when I went and said I've got this terrific idea, how about an hour-long program at Peacock's about leaves? They said, oh, he's out of his mind. And what would you like to do for the encore? Paint drying? Well, no, I mean, being serious, I've been making natural history films for 40 years, and we're extraordinarily egocentric, and as animals we're extraordinarily animal-centric. We always look at everything from the animal's point of view. And the plain fact is that plants are, in many ways, much more successful organisms than animals. I mean, they grow bigger than the bigger plants. They live longer than animals. They can transcend time. They can travel through time just by this extraordinary device of a seed, which will last for a hundred years. And above all, they are the basis of life. I mean, without plants, no animal can exist because there's nothing to eat. And I thought, now, when you kind of think of it, of course, plants use animals. I mean, we are the servants of plants in many ways. I mean, when you or I pick a blackberry, we tend to think how bountiful nature is to provide us with blackberries to eat. But of course, the blackberry is a device, a rather cheap device at that, by which the blackberry plant manages to get its seeds transported for two or three or four miles, because we eat it and we swallow it and the seed comes up a long way away. And it was devised, I mean, it was evolved for that purpose. One mustn't say that evolution has a purpose in mind, because we know it doesn't. But the strategy was there. Anyway, I suddenly thought, why don't we do a series of programs from the plant's point of view, in which plants are not the victims, but the heroes? And of course, nobody else has done it before. Why has nobody else done it before? Not because plants do anything, as you said. But of course, that is because plants live on a different timescale than we do. And if you can change the timescale, if we can move on to the plant's timescale, then suddenly you'll see these things are murderous and territorially aggressive and shy and collaborative and all these extraordinary things. And of course, we can change time optically these days by time-lapse, time-lapse photography. And the reaction of the BBC was, because it was you, go at it, let's go to it? Well, I suppose, you know, track record accounts for something. Of course it does. And so they, I mean, I gave them that kind of spiel I've just given you. Was it more difficult to do than the others? Oh, yes. And what was difficult about it, other than the fact that... Well, because you do have to have some kind of action. You do have to have some kind of drama, after all. Right, right. And so how did you create that? Well, you've got to be careful not to overdo the time-lapse. You know, if everything was in time-lapse, it would be... So what it... It's like all things, isn't it? I mean, it is... All good television programs have a plot. They have... In which there are characters with problems to be solved, and they, in the end, manage to solve it by extraordinary ways. And so what's the most extraordinary thing you've discovered in this exploration? I didn't really discover... For you? It was just seeing things. The marvellous thing was that you put your time-lapse cameras in front of a situation of a plant which is doing things. It's simply growing or developing or that. And you film it in time-lapse over maybe one week, two weeks, three weeks. When you take it to the viewing theatre, you have no idea what you're going to see. Because no human being has ever seen that before. Ever. Now, if I had been filming lions catching wildebeest, I know whether the lion caught it or not. Right, right. I take it to the theatre. Is it in focus? Yeah. That's what I would say. But with plants, you just don't know. Set this up for me. The private life of plants, the germinating seeds of the dodder. What are we going to see? Well, all right. There's an example. Now, a dodder is a parasitic plant. It's quite common in this country, in the wild, and in my country, in northern Europe. And because it's parasitic, it doesn't even bother, as it were, to develop leaves. It simply is a tendril, which is going to try and find sap and nutriment from other plants. It's a parasite. Humans have parasites. And this is a sequence in which the seeds of the dodder are germinating near a bed of nettles. It's quite amazing. I hadn't seen that before. It's done over, you said to me as we were watching, over a period of ten days. Just explain the process a little bit. You just sat there? No, we don't sit there. As you know, film is normally taken 25 frames a second and shown at 25 frames a second. If you only take one frame a second and show it at 25 frames a second, it speeds up 25 times. So effectively, that's what time-lapse is, and people have been doing that since the beginning of cinema photography. But the ingenious bit, and it's not my ingenuity, it's that of the cameraman, a chap called Tim Shepard, is that I said to him, look, I want to have as much freedom to pan and zoom and track and move in and out in time-lapse as you can in normal time. And that means that if you're going to go up with the dodder as it goes up there, you've got to know how fast the dodder goes. And you've got to put a beam with a little carriage on it, with a camera, which is going to move up at the same speed as the dodder does. And each one, each frame is accompanied by a flash, so that while you maintain a night and dark, for the dodder has to have, like any other plant, the oscillation of night and day, throughout, by putting a flash on both day and night, you make it even so that the growth is continuous and the picture is continuous. Someone said to me, I wonder if he appreciated that, and you tell me whether this ringed the bell at all, how manipulative and deceitful and violent plants were. Oh yeah, I mean, that's in fact what the program is about. I mean, deceitful, yeah, deceitful, plants are enormously deceitful. I mean, one of the most engaging deceits of plants, there's a little, Britain has orchids, everybody thinks orchids grow in tropical rainforests, but of course, you know, they're little things like that. Well, there's an orchid which mimics a female bee. Its flower is an exact replica, well not an exact, but a close replica of a female bee. The hair's all right, little head. Even more extraordinary, the flower's perfume is exactly, chemically, the same as the perfume emitted by a female bee when she's looking for a mate. And the orchid produces this, and the male wasp comes along and says, wow! And you can see he lands on the orchid, and he tries to mate. And the vigour with which he makes releases a spring in the top part of the orchid's flower. So there's a little hammer with a yellow blob of pollen that goes, boing, and hits him on the back of the neck with pollen. And you can see the bee going, whew! Hadn't quite expected that. And off he flies, and tries to find another one. So he'd do it all over again, which indeed he tries again. And this time, of course, he's got the pollen on his head, and this time he rubs it off onto another part of the flower, so the orchid has fair flowers. It's interesting, because on this program, last week, Bill Sapphire was here, talking about James Jesus Angleton, you know, who loved orchids. And in fact, there was a book with him called An Orchid for Mother, which was his name. Do you have a particular fascination with any particular plant yourself? Yes, I am fascinated by a group, a family of plants, called the aroids. The arum lily is one which we all know. It isn't a lily at all, it belongs to this plant, the arum. And the arums attract insects, and take them prisoner. I mean, the arum has a sort of shroud, a spade, it's called, like the arum, that white part of the arum lily. And from the top, as you know in an arum lily, there comes that yellow spadex. And that produces a smell which attracts flies. It's not a particularly nice smell. In some members of the family, it's a smell of rotting flesh. And the flies go in to try and seek this, and they go through downward-pointing hairs. And at the bottom, inside this tube, there are a lot of small male flowers and a lot of small female flowers. And the female flowers are ripe. And the flies go in with luck, they've got some pollen from another one. But they can't get back because of these hairs. So they rummage around, trying to get out. In the process, spread the pollen on the female stigmas. And then, cleverly, the second night, the male flowers suddenly come out and burst pollen, which scatters all over these flies. And then, thirdly, the downward-pointing hairs shrivel. And the flies say, at last we can get out. And away they go, loaded with pollen. Now I know why, after being a big-deal executive at the BBC, you decided to leave all that to go back to doing this. Yes, that's a lot of fun. Because, why? Why is it fun? Well, no, why is it fun? But, I mean, why did you leave? And with all that sort of power and influence you had at the BBC, as head of programs and all that role. I'm not so barmy about power. Yeah, didn't... No, I don't think power is particularly attractive. Well, the power to create programs, the power to influence and develop programs. That's true. The power to, you know, see things through. But most people who wield big power, they don't do that sort of thing. They use power to manipulate other people. And that had no appeal to you at all? Not particularly, no. To be truthful. I mean, I started as a zoologist, as a biologist and naturalist. And the greatest pleasures of my life have come, apart from family pleasures and children and so on, but they come from the natural world. And you wanted to get back to that? Yeah, that's where I've been since I left. Yeah. I mean, but it just was... You've also said that you love film much more than writing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I find putting words down so that they aren't cliché written... I find writing a good sentence a very demoralising thing. Satisfying kind of thing. I don't know about satisfying. It's sort of a torturing business. But having written a good one is a satisfying... Yeah, I suppose that's true. ...result. That's true. But film, the moulding film, like moulding these films, it's just lovely. It's really lovely. You think, I want that shot a little longer or maybe a little shorter. But you've also said, I mean, what makes you interesting, you've also said you don't particularly like animals. Well, I... Is that what you said? Well, I said I didn't love animals. OK, that's right. You said you didn't love them. Someone said, are you an animal lover? I said, no. I don't love earthworms. No, I don't love slugs. But slugs... What about lions? Well, yeah. Magnificent creatures. They are fascinating. That's the point. They are fascinating solutions to the problem of being alive and of reproduction. In other words, you don't want to be their friend. You just want to say... I want to be involved. You want to say, look, look, look, my curiosity wants me to reflect their uniqueness, their character, their strength, their contribution. Some of the most rewarding experiences of my life have been in the wild. And we don't want to get too ethereal or pretentious about this, about communication with the wild. You know, Walden and all that. I know, I know. But go ahead. But that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. The most satisfying experiences have been there. Yeah, have been when you are suddenly aware that life on Earth isn't just human. Yeah. That life on Earth is infinitely complex, infinitely marvelous, infinitely varied, and a source of deep delight. How do you compare this work with the other pieces, the other series you have done? I'm almost sorry you've asked me that, because it's something one shouldn't really say. But I think probably this is the best thing which I've done. Largely because, one, nobody else has done it before, nobody's tried this kind of thing, and because a lot of people didn't think you could do it. And because most people don't know this the way they know. I guess. I mean, everybody's seen Lion Hunter. There's a lot of other naturalist films of that type. In books, yes, but on film? No, not, no, no. What's next? Birds of Paradise. Yes. Have you already started? Yeah. What will it be? Well, that will be, that's a real, you said before it was the BBC Alfamir Award, this is a present, this is a little gift from the BBC, really. Because Birds of Paradise are extraordinary. There are over 40 different species, utterly different from one another. Some of them are only as small as robins and some as big as pheasants. They only live in New Guinea and there are islands nearby. They have the most extraordinary, fantastic, unimaginably wonderful feather plumage, which they exhibit to one another in dances of the greatest sensual ecstasy. LAUGHTER And only four or five have ever been filmed. So there are 30-odd there. Why? I'm afraid the answer to that is only too clear. They live in horribly difficult country. I mean, it's very thick rainforest, it pours with rain all the time, it's very mountainous, you're clambering up mud and stuff, and they only do it in very, very dark circumstances. Many of them only do it just before dawn. So the light is not good. Yeah, we haven't had camera, we haven't had film that could deal with that. Fast enough to do it. Now we've got electronic cameras which can work in those light levels and I want to be the first to get those things in those lights. I've filmed others of the more useful ones. Had you seen them before you went to film them? Yes, because I've been going to New Guinea over the past 40 years. I've been, what, a half dozen times or something. So I've seen these wonderful things. Much success for this. The Private Life of Plants premieres in two parts, Monday and Tuesday, October 9th and 10th at 8.05 on TBS. There's also a companion book by Sergei at Borrow the Private Life of Plants. Thank you very much. Perfect. We'll be right back. Stay with us.