“I’ve officially made it in life,” Austin filmmaker Ben Masters excitedly announced. “I make movies about animals out of a rental house with my friends. People look up to me as an experienced filmmaker, and I’m like, ‘Y’all, I’ve got cash flow for another two months.’”
The economics of documentary filmmaking are perilous, to say the least, but it’s flow of another kind that really concerns Masters right now. This weekend sees the release of the latest film under his Fin & Fur Films shingle, The American Southwest, a portrait of the Colorado River, the diverse ecosystems it supports, and of how human mismanagement means that it no longer reaches the sea.
To celebrate opening weekend, Masters and members of the Fin & Fur crew will attend special screenings at AFS Cinema Sept. 4-5 (tickets available at austinfilm.org).
Narrated by Reservation Dogs star and activist Quannah Chasinghorse, the film is undoubtedly a call to arms, but Masters’ hope is that this is a cause that everyone can get behind. He said, “One of the few things that does unite us as a culture is a shared love of wildlife. Everybody wants there to be a lot of wildlife. Everybody wants healthy rivers. That’s something we have in common, possibly more than anything in American society. It transcends political beliefs, and there’s a lot of common ground to be found there.”
Austin Chronicle: Your films tend to deal with a big thematic issue, like the border in The River and the Wall, or Texas in Deep in the Heart. What’s the process for picking and refining that topic?
Ben Masters: I think that the topics that I’m most interested in come from life experiences. It’s just about stuff that I care a lot about. I’ve spent a lot of time in the American Southwest. I’ve been deeply impacted by the public lands, the big, vast open country, the wildlife out there, and I’ve always wanted to make a movie that gives back – to the land, to the animals, to the people, to the culture, and this is my best attempt to try to inspire further conservation for both the wildlife and the landscapes out there.
And for the river as well. I think it’s insane that it’s acceptable to completely deplete a river until its dry, and I think most people agree that it should change. That’s a prerequisite to the idea of a river, that it has water, and the fact that we’re following the rules and framework for the river that are over a hundred years old, that intentionally manage it to be totally drained dry, is something that should change. The river should have water in it.
AC: How did we get in this situation?
BM: There’s policy issues and there’s values issues, and I think a lot of people don’t consider the health of the Earth, whether that’s their local community or state or national level, in the decision-making process or within their business, and I think that’s systemic in our culture. We don’t think about the full cost of a product, or the full cost of a policy.
Something that seems local isn’t, and a river connects the watershed from the highest peak to the delta as it runs into the sea. It connects forest to desert, it connects small communities to big one, and it’s really an indicator of our society’s health as well as the landscape’s health – probably more than anything else.
Without a doubt, the Colorado River Basin is crying out that things need to change. It’s the worst case scenario, that there’s been intentional management to drain the river dry and it just doesn’t need to be that way. We can change the management of the river so that our communities thrive and do well, and live in in a place that has water, not just a desert wasteland.
AC: That’s the thing. The Colorado is the life blood for a whole region of a continent.
BM: 40 million folks rely on it.
AC: And all the wildlife.
BM: That’s the interesting thing about wildlife movies. One can say that The American Southwest is really a movie about river management and biodiversity loss and climate change, told through the story of beavers building dams, elks rutting, and immigrant jaguars. It’s almost easier sometimes to tell stories about our own society and human problems through the lens of wildlife than it is through human characters. It’s almost easier to empathize with a jaguar than it is with an immigrant, or it’s easier to sympathize with a Cutthroat Trout than it is with a person who has lost their water.
AC: You have your big topic, and it’s an entire ecosystem. How do you find the animals and the environments you wanted to look at to explain the greater Colorado?
BM: The American Southwest follows two storylines. The primary storyline is the Colorado River from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the river’s delta in the Gulf of California. So that’s our point A to point B. The second storyline is our society’s evolving relationship with wildlife and with water, from pre-Colonial times to current day. So as the river flows down and embarks on its journey, the movie also flows chronologically from the 1800s to modern day, where we start to chop up the river, to divert it, to build dams, and to take us into this current state where the river is entirely depleted and great changes need to be made. One can say that it’s kind of symbolic of the health of the world in general.
“The Colorado River Basin is crying out that things need to change. … One can say that it’s kind of symbolic of the health of the world in general.”
Right now, 25% of the entire water within the Colorado River is diverted into California’s Imperial Valley, where the largest crop alfalfa, and then a third of that alfalfa is shipped overseas to feed livestock in countries on a different hemisphere. Is that really the wisest use of water in the Colorado Basin during a time of shortage? In my opinion, no. If there’s enough water to be exporting, by definition there is a surplus and there definitely should be some river dedicated to the river itself if there is a surplus.
AC: Speaking of the condors, the sequence in which a young bird leaves the nest for the first time may be the most stressful scene in any film this year. How was that for you to film, knowing you’re watching this endangered animal that is integral to the future of its species in incredible peril?
BM: There’s fewer than 100 condors in the Arizona population, so each of these individuals are incredibly rare and incredibly important to the species as a whole. Watching [a condor fledgling] plummet several hundred feet down a cliff, we didn’t really know, is he going to be OK, is his wing going to be broken, is he going to be able to make his way back to the nest? We just had no idea.
But also, what were we going to do? Rappel down and go get him? Free solo there? Dart him? We couldn’t help him. He was on the side of a cliff. So we didn’t have a choice, really, except to watch and see what’s happens.
AC: That was the most stressful moment, but was there one that really left you astonished, where you get to go, ‘I can’t believe I get to see this, this thing that is so magical and wonderful and yet is just part of the life of this environment that most people never get to see’?
BM: I think seeing the jaguar footage was a moment that really was transformative for me. To realize that this is an animal that is so powerful and legendary and amazing that it’s literally a god in all the traditional Meso-American cultures. This animal, its historic home is in Texas, in Arizona, in New Mexico, in Southern California. That critter belongs in the United States, and seeing the size and the power it was really emotional for me.
Nobody had gotten really good footage of jaguars on the border, at least in really good cameras and filmed cinematically. Austin Alvarado was there by himself whenever he first got this footage, and he was filming himself with the GoPro. The sheer joy of getting that shot was like seeing Bigfoot. To realize that there’s a jaguar that looks like that, that exists in Arizona, that’s so cool.
AC: The film’s deeply timely, because major parts of the interstate compact that govern the management of the Colorado expire next year. Negotiations are ongoing, so what role do you hope this film will have in that larger conversation?
BM: What I hope, after people watch the movie, whether it’s just an average citizen, whether it’s a state senator or one of the seven state representatives that are renegotiating the river compact, is just to look at the river basin as a whole and realize that there’s a lot of opportunities if we manage it as a whole rather than divide it up among all the different states. If we manage the river holistically as one entire watershed that is connected from the headwaters to the sea then we can make the waters go a lot further. We can make it support healthy rivers, support wetlands, have better fishing, have better hunting, have better river paddling, have better canoeing, be able to produce more agriculture and have healthier communities. There’s opportunity in redoing a lot of the management and working as a whole river watershed, rather than little isolated units that are just using their lawyers to get as much water as they can at the expense of the greater good.
The American Southwest opens nationwide on Sept. 5. Director Ben Masters and members of the crew will be in conversation with Sarah Schlessinger, CEO of the Texas Water Foundation, at screenings at AFS Cinema Sept. 4-5. Tickets available at austinfilm.org.