Watson film humanizes the Sea Shepherd's uncompromising eco-warrior
Lesley Chilcott’s new Paul Watson documentary traces his life from serial runaway to Greenpeace cofounder to a man in exile at sea
Eco-activist Paul Watson in the new documentary Watson.
Watson opens in theatres on November 7 and 10, and streams on theimpactseries.net starting November 27
WE CALL IT PLANET EARTH, says Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson, “but it should be called Planet Ocean.”
It’s one of the pithier lines delivered by the veteran eco-warrior in the new doc Watson, which opens in theatres in Vancouver on November 7 before heading to the streaming platforms later in the month. After a lifetime of aggressively defending the world’s aquatic life-support systems, now approaching critical fail, his gift for a focused soundbite—or “mind bomb” in the words of his old Greenpeace partner Bob Hunter—is as sharp as it ever was.
All the same, one might ask if the inhabitants of Planet Ocean need yet another documentary about Paul Watson. Including his own Whale Wars TV series, Eco-Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson appeared in 2011, while 2015 gave us a vivid account of Watson’s early years as a sea fighting man in How to Change the World. But between the ever-increasing urgency of his campaign and the excitement mustered by Lesley Chilcott’s new film, along with its deeper personal inquiry into Watson himself, the answer is an obvious yes.
“He’s a badass,” says the filmmaker, reached at home in Los Angeles. “I’m a big fan but at the same time I didn’t want to make the movie like a fan girl, I wanted to show him from all sides. Which is why we show so much in-the-moment action footage and use some of the more controversial things that he says. But he’s not really controversial. He’s passionate, he’s dedicated, and he knows the science. He’s not a politician.”
Chilcott recalls meeting Sea Shepherd staffer Farrah Smith in 2016 and wondering why there wasn’t a more comprehensive movie about Watson's life. Smith challenged the filmmaker to take on the job herself. Says Chilcott, whose production credits include An Inconvenient Truth and, as director, 2015’s CodeGirl: “That’s literally the origin story.”
And so we arrive at Watson, which happens to include Paul Watson’s origin story. It isn’t pretty, but it might explain a few things. Watson’s father was abusive and his mother, remembered adoringly, died when Paul was 14. A serial runaway and a loner, Watson found his calling after arriving in Vancouver as a teen in the late ‘60s. But his pugnacious nature—hatched in the spaces between natural compassion and family trauma—would contribute to a fractious relationship with the group he helped to found: Greenpeace. At 65, he’s no less blunt, provocative, or committed to action.
“He will not compromise when it comes to saving the creatures of the ocean,” says Chilcott, who interviews her subject at length. “I find that incredibly admirable. And sometimes he’ll say things that don’t benefit his own cause because he’s so uncompromising. But if you break it down, he’s generally right. The method of delivery might be a little harsh or crude, but he’s generally right.”
Pity in the path of an angry whale
Chilcott’s film ably handles the early part of the story, with the youthful Watson radicalized—right before our eyes—as he climbs onto the carcass of a murdered whale calf. Watson tells Chilcott about another primal event, when a skirmish with a Russian vessel put the environmental warriors in the path of an angry whale. “It could have killed us,” he relates, as the creature reared up from the ocean, catching Watson’s eye. “But I saw pity.” He ends the anecdote by explaining that whale oil was being used at the time—mindbogglingly—in the production of ICBMs. His lifelong leaning towards what critics call “misanthropy” was cemented in that encounter. ”I feel personally indebted to that whale,” he says.
Chilcott’s film is packed with these moments, big and small. We see Watson’s suicidal disregard for physical safety when he handcuffs himself, in Arctic waters, to a Norwegian whaler’s winch line, and we see his smouldering disillusionment (his word is “betrayed”) when Greenpeace concedes to seal hunters in ’76. The film really goes into high gear with the founding of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society a year later. An aside reminds us that the student Paul Watson encountered Marshall McLuhan at SFU and remains devoted to the power of the moving image—hence the extraordinary wealth of footage at Chilcott’s disposal, much of it capturing courageous acts of direct action on the high seas, or helping to demystify events like the group’s 2002 confrontation with the shark-finning boat the Varadero 1, which landed the Sea Shepherd with eight bogus counts of attempted homicide.
This synthesis of activism and media savvy is infectious; it invades the film’s handling of another notorious episode in 2010, when Sea Shepherd ally the Ady Gil was rammed and scuttled by the Japanese vessel Shonan Maru No 2 in the Arctic Ocean. Says Chilcott: “It wasn’t shocking that Sea Shepherd was filming this encounter, it’s what they do, but for some unknown reason the Japanese had posted the footage from their boat on their website! That’s why we were able to cut it like an action movie.”
Intervening in something that’s already illegal
Filmmaker Lesley Chilcott
The final third of Chilcott’s film covers Watson’s exile at sea as he flees INTERPOL. It also redoubles the effort to humanize a man comfortable in his view that phytoplankton trumps people in the natural order of things. “They don’t need us; we need them,” he shrugs, not incorrectly. In the end we’re a little closer to knowing a true anarch now enjoying a measure of family security—fourth marriage lucky—as he presides over the largest non-government navy in the world. If the language of human politics is distasteful to Watson, let it be said that the organization he created is at war with rapacious capitalism, which—as we learn in one of the film’s devastating end captions—conjured in 2019 a $3.1 million price tag for a single bluefin tuna.
If the frequent charge of “eco-terrorism” looks absurd stacked up against that kind of madness, Chilcott points out that Sea Shepherd abides by laws that the fishing and related industries flagrantly don’t.
“They didn’t light a building on fire in your jurisdiction and burn it down. They intervened in something that was already illegal when there was nobody else to do it,” she says. “Do they go too far sometimes? Maybe. I mean, I’m not out there all the time. I don’t know. But I think what they do as an organization is super important and I think a lot of people are getting more and more frustrated by the main care of society being for private property and not for things that we all need. It sounds obvious but we all need clean air, we all need clean water, and we all need food, and with over seven billion people on the planet, we have to make different choices. That’s my tirade.”
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