A home movie for Planet Earth: Ed Sayers on his Super 8 odyssey Super Nature

Ed Sayers’ first feature – and his affinity for the format it was filmed on – has its origins in the previous century. 1999 marked the debut of the now-annual Straight 8 film competition, set up by Sayers as a challenge to filmmakers to make short films each from a single roll of Super 8mm film. It was a “visceral reaction” to a Super 8 nature short that was submitted to a more recent edition of Straight 8, however, that got Sayers thinking about a full-length Super 8 film, one with a view of the whole natural world.

The result is Super Nature, an all-Super 8 film pieced together over a period of five years, from footage shot by Sayers and dozens of collaborators operating around the globe – some of whom had never picked up a Super 8 camera before. For Sayers, the benefits of using the 61-year-old technology to film wildlife are clear: “I think our brain leans in more because there’s something to interpolate, to explore. We know it’s a shot of a kingfisher, but it’s not a clean, crisp rendering… I think it makes us more engaged.”

The grainy abstraction, rich colour and bright, shimmering light of Super 8 brings something of Monet and Renoir to the wildlife photography in Super Nature, whether it’s water buffalo traversing a river in India or geese gliding over rural France. As much as the film is a glorification of nature, though, it’s also a lament for a disappearing world, with that same Super 8 image – romantic, nostalgic, ephemeral – also apt for capturing retreating Alpine glaciers, shrinking Tasmanian reefs or the world’s two remaining white rhinos, roaming a lonely Kenyan reserve.

Sayers spoke to us during a stop on his UK-spanning Super Nature preview tour, for which he has been bikepacking across the country – a deliberately low-emission method of travel to promote a film which, Sayers hopes, will “oxygenate” conversations about human stewardship of the earth.

Early in the film, a member of the Kenyan camera crew is heard jokingly asking why the film isn’t being shot with ‘current technology’. Why shoot a film on Super 8 in an era where digital dominates?

I think Super 8 is a very democratic format. Even though a lot of people who helped to make the film hadn’t even heard of it or hadn’t used it, it’s so easy to teach and it’s so sort of beguiling and charming to use.

[Those who] were already Super 8 filmmakers were generally not nature filmmakers, so they were intrigued at the opportunity to turn their skills and equipment on the natural world around them. What I suddenly found out is that all these people that I already knew that were into Super 8 had a passion that they wanted to share – the weedy sea dragon, or the ibex and the glaciers of Valle d’Aosta in Italy. And I didn’t know that about them, that their hearts were so attached to something to do with the natural world.

So part of it is about the process, but of course part of it is about the result, and the result is this less crisp, less information-heavy image. It’s more like an impressionist painting.

[Super 8 is] also just so organic. In every frame, the grain is so present in Super 8 because the format is so small. So even though it’s exactly the same emulsion that is used on The Odyssey (which was shot on 65mm), because the original capture of each frame is a quarter of the size of my little fingernail, that grain is accentuated… Every single 24th of a second is a different structure. So it’s sort of alive, just like the natural world – no two snowflakes are the same. Look at the veins of a leaf under a microscope and there’s loads of differences – the film itself is doing that.

Super 8 doesn’t record sound, it allows for around two-and-a-half minutes of filming before the roll has to be changed, and the image abounds with ‘flaws’. Could you talk about the art that for you comes out of the unique qualities and limitations of Super 8?

The great thing about Super 8 is, when you get it wrong – if there’s an issue with the focus, or sometimes you’re taking film out to check it’s actually rolling and you get burnout – it can somehow still produce some quite amazing images. Lots of magic is brought to it by chance.

It’s registering an image on physical material, and I think from an artistic point of view there’s something really interesting about that. I’m not a painter, but it’s like using up expensive oils; you’re only going to do a brush stroke if it counts. I think furthermore, when you’re filming in the natural world, [Super 8] forces you to very quickly learn on the job. If you’re not a natural world filmmaker, you very quickly start learning that field craft, because you don’t want to waste film.

What does Super 8 brings to the film thematically? We associate the Super 8 image with memory, with past, and this is a film in part about recording habitats and species that are disappearing.

Since 1965, when Super 8 was introduced on to the market, it’s been used by generations as a memory preservation tool. So you turn it on to the things that you care about, a moment that you want to look back on.

We’ve been culturally conditioned to know that, in a film, where they use a bit of Super 8 for a flashback, we all know what it means. Even a digital-native kid, if you show them some Super 8, they will know it’s about memories.

Like I say at the end of this film, it feels like we made a home movie together about the big family we’re all part of. All the animals, all the organisms, the plants, the environments. This is our home – we only have one. What better way to record it than on the original home movie format?

The film was shot across 25 countries. How do you direct a film that’s being made simultaneously all around the world?

I really wanted everyone to have a lot of autonomy, and not be trying to follow a direction as such. The direction was: this is the film we’re making, we’re filming things we care about, and we’re speaking from the heart. You’re not going to record sound, because it’s Super 8, so we’ll need audio journalling notes on your phone, or your recorder if you’ve got one. And a bit of ambient sound if you can, when you’re filming on a beach in Patagonia or whatever. In terms of shots, it won’t be what either of us are expecting anyway once you’re out there, because it’s nature, it’s going to change!

But really it was down to them, and then the real craft was later on, and how to bring it all into an edit that worked as an 82-minute narrative. That could have been done so many different ways, because there was so much amazing material from all these different people.

There’s so much evidence offered in Super Nature of what is a world that’s rapidly changing due to climate change, but there’s ultimately a sense of optimism to the film. After a summer of heatwaves, wildfires, extreme weather events, how do you keep up that sense of hope?

The thing about the wildfires happening on our doorsteps is that it’s really bringing it home to us. I think people are really revving up to want to find a human tipping point that’s going to match and precede the other tipping point coming our way – which is the heat and the biodiversity loss we’re facing in the world. For 70 years it’s been getting worse and worse. There are a lot of people who want to do a lot, and that’s the thing that keeps me positive. That’s what comes through in the film: there are all these people that care so much, and I want to be in that tribe. And I think the more people that want to be in that tribe, the better.

You’ve talked elsewhere about how you’re planning to continue exploring the connection between people and nature in a fiction film next.

I see myself filming that on 16mm, and it would be a way to explore this deep connection with nature that we have within our bones – and is it even possible to wake it up enough just to be able to get through each day and survive? I’m doing a lot of reading around all of that – books like Walden to Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, and How to Speak Whale. I’m very interested in how we can commune with nature, because we’re the only very verbal animals in the way that we communicate, and nature’s talking to us all the time – it just doesn’t speak our language, and we don’t speak its language. It’s really about exploring if we can awaken that deep connection, literally to survive.

Super Nature is in cinemas from 4 September.