Los Angeles Times - 31.10.2019

T

he 2019 Envelope Live screening series kicked off

early this month at the Montalbán in Hollywood with

“The Elephant Queen.” The Envelope welcomes a select

audience of guild members and awards voters during the

season to consider some of the year’s most talked-about

films, followed by Q&As with cast and filmmakers, mod-

erated by journalists from The Times. For videos of these

sessions, please visitlatimes.com/envelope.

Directors Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble and composer Alex Heffes

were on hand to discuss with The Times’ Michael Ordoña why they made

the nature documentary, and to describe some of the extremes they went

to in order to capture its unique footage — including run-ins with poach-

ers. At one point in the film, Deeble dug a hole in the mud to hide himself

and his nimble RED camera rig in a man-sized metal box to spy on the

tenuous ecosystem at a rainy-season watering hole in Kenya’s Tsavo Na-

tional Park.

Stone said the whole process took about 10 years from conception to

completion, including four years spent in the field with the animals. “It

took a year and a half to find Athena,” she said of the titular heroine, the

matriarch of a group of elephants trying to survive a brutal drought. “We

always feel she actually found us. She appeared behind camp one day, in

the shade of a tree with her family.”

“The Elephant Queen” debuts on Apple TV+ on Friday.

»We’re losing, I

think the figures are

something like

30,000 elephants a

year; so one every 15

or 20 minutes.

MARK DEEBLE

CO-DIRECTOR AND

CINEMATOGRAPHER

»We want to make

a film to reach the

broadest possible

audience, but also

we really want to

make a difference

on the ground in

Kenya.

VICTORIA STONE

CO-DIRECTOR

»It was the balance

between the music

and the sound

effects and knowing

when to pull back,

where to let the

natural sounds play

and where to go

for heightened

emotion.

ALEX HEFFES

COMPOSER

“THE ELEPHANT

Queen” producer Lucinda

Englehart, above left, with

composer Alex Heffes and

co-directors Vicky Stone

and Mark Deeble at the

L.A. Times Envelope Live

screening Oct. 1 at the

Montalbán Theatre.

Michael Owen BakerFor The Times

Apple

‘Elephant’

in the room

THE ENVELOPE LIVE

S24

THE ENVELOPE LOS ANGELES TIMES THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019