hen Ben Masters was a boy, he’d spend time on his great-grandfather’s ranch in the Panhandle, on the north fork of the Long Draw. Masters recalled, “The water table was so high that he went out there with his backhoe into this marshy area, and he dug this two-acre pond for all the kids to fish in.”
Everyone has their waterways. Since its very beginnings, human civilization and settlements have spread along rivers, and we retain a connection to their flow, letting it seep into our sense of identity. Masters himself passed his formative years on the banks of the Canadian and now spends much of his time on the Colorado in his adoptive home of Austin. He explained, “Rivers quite literally define the shape of Texas. They flow through all of our cities. They’re home to some of our greatest joys, and everyone has great memories of their river, whether it’s the Neches or the Nueces, the Sabine or the Rio Grande. Rivers are places that we love, and it just made sense to make a movie that celebrates the rivers that connect us and the wildlife that calls it home.”
The way that rivers have shaped Texas and, in turn, how Texans have shaped their rivers is the subject of his new documentary, Deep in the Heart 2: Texas Rivers, which opens in theatres on Sept. 25. It’s a sequel of sorts to his 2022 documentary, Deep in the Heart, which was an epic overview of the incredible diversity of Texas wildlife narrated by Matthew McConaughey. This time, it’s Austin native Ethan Hawke who guides the audience down the stream of Texas’ aquatic history.
However, that’s not the only name involved with the project that’s synonymous with the Lone Star State; H-E-B was also a key part of getting this film made.
The grocery chain has dedicated part of the proceeds of its Field & Future line of green products to conservation efforts. After the release of the first Deep in the Heart, Masters recalled, “They reached out to us and asked what initiatives and what stories we would love to see amplified and get funding for.” Since then, the company has donated over $1 million to causes featured in that earlier film, but the relationship doesn’t stop there. That initial conversation turned into five short films produced under Masters’ Fin & Fur Films shingle for the grocery company, “and then H-E-B decided to sponsor Deep in the Heart 2.”
Even though Masters was at work on another feature, 2025’s The American Southwest, he was eager to capitalize on the success of the first Deep in the Heart. “It did a lot of good things for conservation in Texas, and we decided to make another one because Texas has so many amazing wildlife stories.”
Those wildlife stories are plentiful in Deep in the Heart 2, from mountain lions stalking prey on the limestone canyons carved by the waters of the Pecos, to the flirtatious courtship dances of turkeys along the Canadian, the native Texas fatmucket filtering the Llano River, and the film’s mascot, Ozzie the otter, patrolling his expansive territory in East Texas in search of catfish.
Being able to get so close to these animals is Masters’ life work, but he didn’t actually ever plan to become a documentarian. The Amarillo native had actually studied wildlife management at Texas A&M and sort of backed into filmmaking in 2012 when he launched a Kickstarter to help pay for a film he was hoping to produce. Directed by Phillip Baribeau, the documentary followed Masters and three friends as they traveled the 3,000 miles of the Continental Divide from Mexico to Canada on wild mustangs. That story, Unbranded, was the first feature released by Fin & Fur, and since then they have produced five features, Deep in the Heart 2, and many nature short films, as well.
“We make wildlife movies with our friends,” Masters explained with signature humility. But the truth is that, in only a decade, the Fin & Fur team have created one of the most important filmographies and resources about the flora and fauna of the Lone Star State, raising awareness about its beauty and its plights. Additionally, in that time, “we’ve grown as filmmakers,” Masters said. “We’ve gotten better at knowing what we want before we start to roll cameras. So, Deep in the Heart I we were still figuring out how to do this. Deep in the Heart 2, we had the experience of Deep in the Heart I, so the shooting was more strategic, the production was more strategic, the writing was more strategic, and overall it was an easier process.”
But not a quick process. The film captures the same rivers, streams, springs, and fishing holes and aquifers across many seasons and even years. As for the lead actors – well, wild animals don’t respond to call sheets and don’t take direction well. Masters said, “You don’t just roll up on set and ask a mountain lion to go kill a family of feral hogs. You’ve got to work for those shots.”
Coming into Deep in the Heart 2, Masters was very clear that this second film would focus on water management in Texas and, more pressingly, “our society’s developing relationship with waters.” However, just like the process of waiting for hundreds of hours in hot or soaked or remote conditions for that awe-inspiring moment, like when the bivalve fatmucket lures a fish in to help spread its offspring, the length of production was important to get a firmer grasp of the story they were telling. Over the three years of production, Masters explained, “I’ve grown a deep appreciation for how amazing rivers are, and how healthy some of our rivers are. I also came to realize how drastically altered and changed our rivers are.”
The river system in Texas does not flow as nature intended, and the greatest impact comes from two developments of the 20th century: one above ground, and one below. At surface level, dams have brought waterflows to a trickle, blocking the transportation of silt that provides essential nutrients downstream. Beneath the soil, unregulated overpumping has left aquifers dry and dropped the water table to levels so low that springs no longer flow. While global climate change has had an undeniable impact, with longer, hotter drought seasons, these two feats of engineering have left the land less capable of surviving these changes.
Masters has seen the impact of both, personally. In his 2025 documentary The American Southwest he showed the fate of the other Colorado. Not the one in Austin. The one that used to run to the Gulf of California but now dries out inland due to excessive water removal and the impact of dams. But also, back on his great-grandfather’s property, that lake of his childhood memories is gone. “The water table has been lowered because of unsustainable groundwater pumping, and the creek no longer flows, and the catfish pond of my youth is now dry. So, in my short 38 years I’ve seen how unsustainable groundwater pumping has decreased the amount of water on the surface.”
That’s a story that’s been repeated across the state, from the Rio Grande and the Colorado running dry along big stretches for much of the year to beloved swimming hole Jacob’s Well being closed since 2022. Masters doesn’t blame earlier generations for creating the systems that led to overpumping or for the damage caused by dams, because they were acting on what they thought was the smart thing to do. “There are benefits with dams,” he said, “but they also come with severe consequences.” Similarly, back when the rules about extraction were written, he said, “They had no idea there would be over a million wells, pumping water out of the ground and sucking aquifers dry.” Now, the understanding is different. “We have to work with the nature of rivers, and not against it.”
Dams haven’t just reshaped the waterways, they’ve reshaped the language. The only reason that Austinites rarely refer to the Colorado running through Austin is that a series of seven dams, starting with Buchanan in the west and leading to Longhorn east of Downtown, have reshaped it into the Highland Lakes. Constructed between 1938 and 1960, they created the system modern Austinites know but that would have been alien to prior residents.
Those dams and the lakes they create are impermanent. Many of the over 7,000 dams across the state, including those of the Highland Lakes, have already exceeded their original planned lifetime. Masters said, “Many of them are not being maintained to a level to meet safety requirements, many of them don’t serve a meaningful purpose. Many of them are losing huge volumes due to evaporation, and they’re all causing significant problems downstream.”
The worst-case scenario is a dam collapse, and the rate of failure has been increasing over the past decade. “The consequences of a dam failing are terrifying,” Masters said. “Look what just happened in Nepal. That was a glacier that melted and got temporarily dammed behind a mudslide, and then it just exploded downstream. That was a natural event, but imagine something like that compounded by a reservoir failing.”
If this all sounds like a call to action, that’s because it is. Masters has seen how his films can have a real-world impact. The release of Unbranded led to the adoption of hundreds of mustangs and helped change the conversation about their management, “and it made me realize that films have a tremendous power to inspire people at an individual level and influence policy.”
He explained, “I’m not going to hide the fact that I am a passionate river lover and conservationist who genuinely wants this movie to influence decisionmaking so that we have a more sustainable future ahead of us in Texas.” Just because the rules in place are the way it’s been done for the last hundred years is not a reason to stay the course, he said. “I do not think that those excuses are good enough to continue degrading our rivers and not managing our aquifers more sustainably.”
The changes need to happen at a policy and corporate level. He pointed to H-E-B as a company that has made real commitment to the environmental impact of their business, from construction to sourcing. “They do things right,” he said. “I think that’s what it’s going to take for us to recover our rivers and conserve our rivers. Big businesses and big organizations, thinking about the holistic cost of the items that we consume.”
Like the architects and planners who saw the waterways as something to be subjugated to their will, many early wildlife documentarians depicted nature as a resource from which humanity is almost separate. But in Masters’ films, like those of his greatest influence, David Attenborough, nature is a continuum of which we are a part, as connected to it as the Canadian is to the Arkansas and the Arkansas to the Mississippi. If the rivers flourish, so shall we. And if the rivers dry up …
Fortunately, Masters said, “I think everyone agrees that our rivers should have water in them.” For politicians and policymakers on the fence, he has proof that there is a groundswell of support. Last year, Texas voters approved Proposition 4, dedicating $20 billion to water improvement projects, by a two-to-one margin. Masters said, “What I hope is that money doesn’t strictly go to concrete and levees and dam maintenance. I also want it to go to nature-based solutions. I want it to go towards conservation easements on headwaters and towards incentives to intentionally manage our rivers to have functioning springs, functioning wetlands, functioning flow, functioning river bottoms, and be managed in a way that serves not only the wildlife that live there but also everyone that gets benefits from healthy rivers.”
These aren’t just Texas issues. The impact of water mismanagement is a global issue, and while Masters is a Texas filmmaker and a Texas storyteller, he hopes these lessons will be taken to heart everywhere. Moreover, his hope is that, just as he tells the story of Texas wildlife, that other filmmakers will be inspired to tell the stories of the animals and ecosystems of their home states. “I’m one person, we have one team here in Texas that consists of six, eight people making these Deep in the Heart films, but I would love to see more teams in Oklahoma doing this type of stuff, and New Mexico. Every state should have their version of Deep in the Heart.”
While he’s hoping to inspire audiences to get engaged with their own rivers and conservation agencies, at the end of the day he hopes they also find joy in its depiction of Texas’ most vital natural resources. “I hope people love it and are entertained and they laugh and they cry and they hug their kids.”
This article appears in September 25 • 2026.
