The Making of “My Octopus Teacher“ | Hacker News Reader

The Making of “My Octopus Teacher“

seachangeproject.exposure.co

100 pointslocalhost26 comments

I absolutely loved this film, but I wasn’t sure how much was because of its quality or how much was because of how it struck a chord with me personally.

I didn’t have an octopus teacher, but the ocean brought so much light to my life in such unexpected ways. It physically and metaphorically swallowed me up.

To hear and see another person describe that, the feelings, the visuals of the forests of kelp. In a way I feel as though the ocean saved some part of me, but that almost seemed silly. Then suddenly no, someone to share that with. It somehow made my love and incredible experiences even more real.

Free diving is one of the most peaceful and fulfilling things I’ve ever experienced. It has changed so many things about myself and the way I live.

Someone else mentioned it was an indulgent documentary, and I agree I guess. I also think that’s kind of inevitable - the experience of immersing yourself in such an engaging, in a sense isolating, peaceful place is quite indulgent on its own. The story is largely focused on a single person doing this thing. But it’s beautiful nonetheless. I really loved it and felt it was a story well worth telling.

There’s something about the life in the ocean being so foreign and strange, yet so vital, familiar, and oddly comfortable to be in and around. Some dives I wish I could just stay forever - like that’s where I belong. Nothing can describe the deep realization that the earth is absolutely covered in stunning beauty, so much of it unseen. The story of this octopus to me is like a shining sliver of that. Just a brief but stunning glimpse of something incredible that you’d otherwise never have considered.

This doc absolutely deserves to win Best Picture this year. A doc nomination would be a first (and there's a best doc category), but there's no rule against it. It is an absolutely transcendent piece of narrative; so much more captivating than most fantastical things a great writer could conceive. It deftly trumps the best narrative-cum-reality of the type that Herzog regularly delivers.

(If Black Panther can get a nomination, and this can't, I will consider the Academy a truly dead institution.)

whoa hold on there horsie. its a good documentary, but it is just that, one man's hobby project, extremely well shot. i found it a little too indulgent and not that enlightening. i dont know what the other Best Picture candidates are, but i typically like a lil more creativity and plot in my films.

"A little too indulgent and not that enlightening" is how I would characterize every Tarantino movie...but I digress.

In regards to creativity, the acts of exploration and cartography the guy undertakes are about as "creative" as it comes. And with regards to plot, I find it pretty incredible that the whole plot was cogent, given that about half of it was written by an octopus. As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.

No one knows what the other nominees would be, I'm just saying this deserves to be one of them, and would also be deserving of a win.

The thing that really stood out for me watching it last night was the depth of the storytelling. Making sure to create the back-story first (why he spent a year visiting his Octopus Teacher) and then the gradual reveal of the arc of the story over the rest of the film. The effectiveness of the interviews as well where the interviewer was never seen or heard from. It had the feel of a vlog, and you could imagine that he did it all himself. Then in this piece, you see just how much effort and work went into making this an effective story.

There were so many other ways this story could have turned out - I'm happy that it turned out this way!

It really is a one of a kind story.

The filmmaker is incredibly ambitious, much like a lot of the startup founders we see here in the Valley.

He constantly held himself to such a high standard he eventually burnt out. But it’s this tenacity and drive that made the film possible. Diving daily for a year in frigid waters while doing excellent filmography, and then later stitching the story together into an mesmerizing narrative.

Much respect for this man.

I highly recommend this film (available on Netflix)... it shows that there can be friendship between two such utterly alien minds and thus that higher sentience has some common principles even when the "infrastructure" on which it is implemented is so completely different.

I'm making a lovecraftian text editor where silly tentacles type.. what you type.. on a 3d mechanical typewriter.

Someone on twitter called it "My octopus typing teacher" just a few days ago. I didn't realize it was a reference to a documentary.

This is just regular old pop culture permeation, but I can't help but have that weird baader-meinhof paranoid feeling.

Fantastic. I watched this last night with my parents and we immediately wanted to know more about the decade long production history. This piece has more detail than I ever hoped for, and should probably be the basis for a production section on the (currently rather sparse) Wikipedia page [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Octopus_Teacher

I loved this. That said, I wondered how much was true and how much "story" was added by stitching together different clips from different times.

I love being underwater. I can't freedive like him, so I mostly scuba dived. Something about being swallowed by the sea, and having everything forced to slow down (your breathing, your motion, etc) is incredibly therapeutic. It is otherworldly.

One of the things that weirded me out about the cutting of the film was how the guys family was treated- in a way the guy appeared to completely abandon his job, leaving to the ocean and forcing his wife to raise their child essentially alone while he went and had awesome underwater experiences reliving his childhood and becoming one with nature. It’s of course easy to leave and become one with nature if you force all the duties of being a human in society(taxes, cleaning, groceries, raising a child, etc.) onto someone else (in this case the wife).

I highly doubt that’s what actually happened but that’s essentially the first 10-15 minutes of the documentary and really took me out from the main portion, which was the friendship being formed. Then I couldn’t stop thinking whenever I saw this- the octopus is dealing with her life all day, risking life and limb, and in her periphery is a guy who is escaping his everyday life and making someone else deal with it.

I had exactly the same feeling. I didn't sympathise with the guy's situation either. South Africa has massive inequality problems and this guy is living the life in one of the most expensive places you can live (easily rivaling European cities) and he abandons his family over writer's block?!

All of that also made me question the entire narrative of the friendship with the octopus. I'm sure it's possible, but it's also easy to edit things to fit a narrative if you're a documentary film maker. I'm probably just being cynical though...

Yeah I agree it really seemed like a wealth adventure porn but some of the moments he recorded, like when the shark chases left me speechless at the intelligence...problem solving skills in the face of dire consequences...shattered my cynicism a bit.

Yea. It felt a little off to me as well. At the end he tried to spin it about him leaning to spend time with his son... by ignoring his son.

I dunno. I just couldn’t empathize with the guy.

Despite that, the story of the octopus was incredible. If they had cut out 100% of the autobiography, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

As a person grows more imbalanced internally, their impact on those around them can go from positive to neutral to negative. If fixing this imbalance requires a leave of absence, (and especially if they return whole and balanced), the gap can be well worth it.

With 10C water you can only be down there for at most half an hour (especially not wearing a wet/dry suit), so he likely had time for his family and the other less fun parts of life.

That said, I found it a bit surprising that in his small window of time down there he managed to be at quite a few critical events in the octopus' life.

> With 10C water you can only be down there for at most half an hour (especially not wearing a wet/dry suit)

He worked up to spending as long as 2 hours in the water on good days[0]:

"[I]f I've had a bad day or I haven't slept well or I've had an injury, I go in the water and it's very difficult for me to thermoregulate. If I've had a great day, I've slept well, I'm feeling strong, I can stay in for a very long time, up to two hours. But if I'm compromised mentally, I can sometimes be cold within 20 minutes."

[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/15/923915545/filmmaker-finds-an-...

I downvoted this for the tiring HNism of assuming the worst about someone. You have no clue about what his family situation was like, but you're squinting your eyes at the shadows on the wall to draw your own narrative about a mother left alone with bills and groceries while he's out backstroking in the ocean, and then wringing your hands over your own invention.

It's HN's god of the gaps. Except god, it's some awful, unredeemable character trait that someone else must have that explains the bit that we see.

Let's even assume for a second you're right. He saddled his wife with everything while he stalked a common octopus. Now let's assume he's honest in the movie and he indeed came to understand his place in life and became a better dad and husband than he would have ever been. So what?

Someone in this thread calls the movie "wealthy adventure porn", but this thread is aspersion porn. Just like if I decided to lambast you for spending your precious time on this earth judging some guy from the HN comment section instead of being the man that you and your family deserve (to be clear, I think such a judgement is ridiculous).

By that logic anyone disagreeing with a comment is guilty of some "nth level of negativity porn".

He admits to not being able to be a good father to his son. No one mentioned bills and groceries - that is not what raising a teenager entails - that's something you added to fit your narrative. It's a simple, specific criticism that is half addressed in the film and for some people not sufficiently resolved.

It's hardly assuming the worst about him.

I literally said that it's likely untrue in reality but that that's how it's depicted in the documentary. It opens with a guy being so burned out that he abandons being a father to his son and goes swimming every day and how much he loves swimming in the ocean and how awesome that is for him. That's a narrative, editing decision that baffled me!

OP doesn't even say it was the case, and that "I highly doubt that’s what actually happened" - but that this was the impression he got from the movie. Hence it's neither aspersion nor "god of the gaps" - unless theists commonly argue that they also highly doubt god exists?

So, Can I downvote you for assuming the worst about OP? Or for casting aspersion about HN and its "-ism"s?

My wife had a similar comment which surprised me because we are both fairly individualistic and have our own hobbies and passions we spend a lot of "me time" on such as learning to paint and cycling/running and ahem hacker news. I replied that it probably was an hour or two per day most likely at the most although obviously the work spent to stitch the story together obviously took way more time.

I think every human being deserves an hour or two to themselves most days if they need it regardless of their other career and life pressures. If you are rearing a child together you need to try to spell your mate to allow them that too.

I'm down for "an hour or two me time" and 100% agree. It just wasn't made clear in the documentary, so the viewer can only go off evidence provided.

I saw the film with two women who had essentially the same reaction, hating both Craig and the film. What exactly was he suffering from? Perhaps we're supposed to have unbounded sympathy for every 50-ish male?

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. Knowing nothing about film making, I would have never guessed at the number of people and the amount of time it took to make what appeared to be just one man, an octopus, and some other sea life!

I loved this documentary. Watched it with my daughter who is an 8-yo wannabe a marine biologist someday. What always troubles me is that in the end, the film maker just lets the octopus died. I wonder what stops him from providing a sanctuary for it. Another moment in this I found strange is how he didn't want to intervene when the shark came after and ate the octopus arm. Maybe his thought is more about survival of the fittest and didn't want to be the decision maker in the natural food chain.

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