Every year, two communities descend on Central Park in large numbers -- millions of birds of stunning variety, from hummingbirds to herons to hawks, and birders, the people who press binoculars to their face in the hope of a glimpse.
A new documentary premiering tonight on HBO tracks the trials and joys of the latter as they search for the former. An hourlong darling of this year's SXSW Film Festival, "Birders: The Central Park Effect," represents the fruits of 5 years of labor by director and birder Jeffrey Kimball. Kimball's footage of Central Park in every season is interwoven with observations from the park's most avid birders, from Starr Saphir, a Shakespearian actress-turned-septuagenarian-matriarch of the community, to Jonathan Franzen.
Kimball spoke to the Huffington Post recently about his meticulous debut. Read on to find out about the holy grail for birders, the coolness issue, and why it can be easier to film a great American novelist than a nesting owl.
What's your birding background?
I started about ten years ago or 15 years ago, as an antidote to New York City. I needed a way to get out in nature that wasn't just taking a picture. As a little kid, I could sit still in nature for two hours if I had a fishing line in the water, because I felt like I was doing something. Looking for birds and identifying birds became a kind of type A activity in that way.
When did the birding scene strike you as rich territory for a documentary?
I moved to the Upper West Side about 17 years ago and I was shocked when I learned that a quarter of all species [of birds] in America come to Central Park each year. And when I would tell that to other people, I would see the shock on their face.
My wife is a documentary filmmaker, and I'd talk about this with her, and she's say you've got to make a film. My background is in fiction films -- I was a music supervisor for a big part of my career at Miramax -- but I started in documentary, and I was missing the early days of having my hands on the camera. I thought, well I’ve never made a feature, so I’ll do something easy. I live near the park. It’ll be easy. Of course, that was four and a half years ago.
What was the process of filming in the park?
There’s a shot of an owl flying out of a hole at night. The way you get a shot like that is by putting your camera on a tripod and waiting. I remember, I looked at my phone and when I looked back the owl wasn't there anymore. I thought, "I sure hope I caught the shot."
The first couple of years, I was shooting anywhere from three to four hours up to four times a week, depending on the month. The hour I spent waiting for the owl is one of 200 hours of footage, but you use six minutes of it.
As a birder yourself, did you find you agreed with the observations of the other birders you spoke with? Was there anything you would have added?
If there’s one subject I might have gotten more into, it's how birding takes you out of yourself for awhile. I’ve spent a lot of time in theaters and concerts, and usually in the back of my mind I'm still thinking about things. In birding, I’m just totally, 100 percent present. I've learned that if I have an important phone call to make, I have to set my alarm, because there’s no way I’m going to remember. It's very much a zen quality, an extension of the same concept of being able to ignore the helicopters and the sirens -- you don’t notice the rest of your life.
I never wanted to make a how-to, or to defend birding. I was trying to explore that mystical magical thing. But then my own 17-year-old, very cool son, he saw the film and looked at me and said, "Okay. I get it."
Getting Jonathan Franzen to appear in your debut is no small coup. How did you get him on board?
He's written beautifully about birds, not just in [his latest novel] "Freedom," which has a warbler on the cover and is all about protecting the habitat for birds, but in some wonderful New Yorker pieces -- one called, "My Bird Problem," and another about the slaughtering of songbirds in the Mediterranean. In "My Bird Problem," he talked about his discovery of birding and how it sort of changed his life, and how it happened in Central Park. I was a big fan [of Franzen] and had read most of his books -- "The Corrections" is one of my favorite things -- so when I read that, I thought, I would really like to see if I can get him. Then it was a question of asking around, do I know somebody who knows somebody. Franzen obviously has more firewalls up [than the movie's other participants]. But once I was able to get to him, it was very easy. He was like, "That sounds like a worthwhile project." He didn’t show up with agents or a lawyer, he just showed up with his binoculars. And he was great.
Full interview at Huff Post
Kimball spoke to the Huffington Post recently about his meticulous debut. Read on to find out about the holy grail for birders, the coolness issue, and why it can be easier to film a great American novelist than a nesting owl.
What's your birding background?
I started about ten years ago or 15 years ago, as an antidote to New York City. I needed a way to get out in nature that wasn't just taking a picture. As a little kid, I could sit still in nature for two hours if I had a fishing line in the water, because I felt like I was doing something. Looking for birds and identifying birds became a kind of type A activity in that way.
When did the birding scene strike you as rich territory for a documentary?
I moved to the Upper West Side about 17 years ago and I was shocked when I learned that a quarter of all species [of birds] in America come to Central Park each year. And when I would tell that to other people, I would see the shock on their face.
My wife is a documentary filmmaker, and I'd talk about this with her, and she's say you've got to make a film. My background is in fiction films -- I was a music supervisor for a big part of my career at Miramax -- but I started in documentary, and I was missing the early days of having my hands on the camera. I thought, well I’ve never made a feature, so I’ll do something easy. I live near the park. It’ll be easy. Of course, that was four and a half years ago.
What was the process of filming in the park?
There’s a shot of an owl flying out of a hole at night. The way you get a shot like that is by putting your camera on a tripod and waiting. I remember, I looked at my phone and when I looked back the owl wasn't there anymore. I thought, "I sure hope I caught the shot."
The first couple of years, I was shooting anywhere from three to four hours up to four times a week, depending on the month. The hour I spent waiting for the owl is one of 200 hours of footage, but you use six minutes of it.
As a birder yourself, did you find you agreed with the observations of the other birders you spoke with? Was there anything you would have added?
If there’s one subject I might have gotten more into, it's how birding takes you out of yourself for awhile. I’ve spent a lot of time in theaters and concerts, and usually in the back of my mind I'm still thinking about things. In birding, I’m just totally, 100 percent present. I've learned that if I have an important phone call to make, I have to set my alarm, because there’s no way I’m going to remember. It's very much a zen quality, an extension of the same concept of being able to ignore the helicopters and the sirens -- you don’t notice the rest of your life.
I never wanted to make a how-to, or to defend birding. I was trying to explore that mystical magical thing. But then my own 17-year-old, very cool son, he saw the film and looked at me and said, "Okay. I get it."
Getting Jonathan Franzen to appear in your debut is no small coup. How did you get him on board?
He's written beautifully about birds, not just in [his latest novel] "Freedom," which has a warbler on the cover and is all about protecting the habitat for birds, but in some wonderful New Yorker pieces -- one called, "My Bird Problem," and another about the slaughtering of songbirds in the Mediterranean. In "My Bird Problem," he talked about his discovery of birding and how it sort of changed his life, and how it happened in Central Park. I was a big fan [of Franzen] and had read most of his books -- "The Corrections" is one of my favorite things -- so when I read that, I thought, I would really like to see if I can get him. Then it was a question of asking around, do I know somebody who knows somebody. Franzen obviously has more firewalls up [than the movie's other participants]. But once I was able to get to him, it was very easy. He was like, "That sounds like a worthwhile project." He didn’t show up with agents or a lawyer, he just showed up with his binoculars. And he was great.
Full interview at Huff Post
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