Nature’s movie mogul

Greg MacGILLIVRAY may be the most successful film director you’re not aware of. Over the span of MacGillivray’s 40-year career, his films have grossed more than $700 million worldwide and he’s been nominated for two Oscars. But because his critically acclaimed films -- which include “Everest,” “The Living Sea” and “To Fly!” -- are Imax documentaries, they don’t get nearly as much media attention as Hollywood features, even though they’re consistently profitable and attract a loyal, upscale audience interested in both intellectual enrichment and breathtaking visual images.

MacGillivray’s latest, “Coral Reef Adventure,” which illuminates the beauty -- and alarming destruction -- of the world’s coral reefs, has grossed $21 million domestically since February, when it began its gradual rollout across the country. (It opens in Los Angeles exclusively at the California Science Center on Jan. 30.)

It’s his latest film, after the Oscar-nominated “The Living Sea” and “Dolphins,” to deal with the ocean -- a personal passion for MacGillivray, 58, who got his start in the 1960s shooting 16-millimeter surf documentaries. His 25-person company, MacGillivray Freeman Films, is in Laguna Beach, and he lives nearby in a house on the shore with his wife, Barbara, a clinical psychologist who works part time writing and researching for MacGillivray’s films.

“I’ve always been a water rat,” MacGillivray says. Growing up in Corona del Mar, he started surfing when he was 8 or 9, often stealing away to the beach with his father, a one-time lifeguard. MacGillivray still swims and surfs just about every day. “I just have always loved the ocean,” he says, “and it’s in my veins.”

At UC Santa Barbara, where he was planning to become a physics instructor, MacGillivray started shooting shoestring-budget surf documentaries that he would screen in college auditoriums. After his first film turned a sizable profit, MacGillivray realized he could make a living as a filmmaker, and in 1963 he and best friend Jim Freeman founded their company.

Having seen the effects of pollution on local beaches, MacGillivray joined the burgeoning ecology movements of the time, taking politicians to task in films such as “Five Summer Stories.” A strong environmental message runs through his films to this day, and it’s especially strong in “Coral Reef Adventure.” It’s part of his everyday life as well: A sign on the seaside wall of MacGillivray’s home, visible to the strollers on the public beach below, urges people to help keep the beaches clean because they belong to everyone.

“I want to communicate my love of the ocean to others, to try to get people to love it as much as I do,” MacGillivray says. “I’ve seen a tremendous change in the purity of the ocean over the past 50 years, but I know that through good science and through communication, humans can turn around problems. It’s been proven so many times in the past that once the public understands a problem, they’ll respond to it if they think it’s important enough.”

“Coral Reef Adventure” is the most expensive and most complicated film MacGillivray’s made, even more so than the smash success “Everest.” “It involved more days, more people, more money, more questions, more difficulties,” he says. MacGillivray first noticed articles in 1998 about how many of the world’s reefs were dying because of the multiple pressures of global warming, pollution, over-fishing and coastal development. When he learned that coral reefs potentially hold more medicinal value than the rainforests and are home to 25% of all marine species, “I finally decided that it was so important that I had to do something and had to make a movie about it.”

Pushing the boundaries

For “Coral Reef Adventure,” MacGillivray recruited expert divers and underwater cinematographers Howard and Michele Hall, who took Imax cameras down 350 feet, which “had never been done before with these cameras and had rarely been done even without a camera,” MacGillivray says. “Not very many people have gone that deep without being in a submarine.” The Halls had to use an apparatus called a re-breather, which mixes oxygen with other gases in precise amounts. (It was originally developed by the Navy SEALS for long-term deep-sea diving.) The team set up dives in 40 locations, and MacGillivray hopes to go back to the same places in 10 years with Imax cameras to track the changes, providing valuable data to scientists.

The colors of coral reefs’ intricate flourishings, coupled with the eye-popping variety of marine life swimming by -- five new species of fish were discovered during filming -- make for a striking Imax experience. “It’s different than watching it on a television set,” MacGillivray says. “Seeing it 100 feet wide and seven or eight stories tall with that crystal-sharp imagery is, frankly, better than actually diving on the reef. You don’t have the fog of your mask. You have the beautiful lighting, and you have this steady image. You’re not being buffeted by all the currents.”

MacGillivray has shot film while surfing, skiing, hang-gliding and mountain climbing. “I really love action filmmaking,” he says. In the 1970s, Hollywood took note of his surfing films and he was soon shooting second-unit footage for films such as “The Towering Inferno,” “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” And the Smithsonian commissioned MacGillivray and Freeman to create a film for the National Air and Space Museum in a new giant-screen format.

Two days before the 1976 premiere of their first Imax film, “To Fly!,” about the history of human flight, Freeman died in a helicopter crash while working on a Kodak commercial. MacGillivray was devastated, and he keeps Freeman’s name in the company’s name.

MacGillivray has faced quite a few close calls himself. “I was filming on ‘The Living Sea’ from a single-engine airplane and we came probably within a split second of crashing into a cliff,” he says. “And another time, shooting ‘Big Wednesday,’ I was almost killed shooting in 25-foot surf on Sunset Beach.”

Such hazards are common on his projects, which critics praise for their mastery of the Imax format. During the making of “Everest,” members of an expedition climbing at the same time as the film’s team were trapped by a massive storm system before reaching the summit; although the “Everest” team heroically helped rescue some of the climbers, eight people died.

On a dive during the filming of “Coral Reef Adventure,” Howard Hall developed a life-threatening case of what divers call “the bends,” a buildup of nitrogen and helium bubbles in the bloodstream. After emergency treatment in a hyperbaric chamber and two months of rest, he considered the risks and, after long talks with MacGillivray, decided to forge ahead with production. The episode is chronicled in the film.

The Imax cameras carry a maximum of three minutes of film and the film can’t be reloaded underwater, so Hall would sometimes dive for eight or nine hours to find the perfect three-minute opportunity, searching or waiting for a certain animal behavior, like the schooling of a group of sharks seen in the film. MacGillivray says Hall “was finding and shooting things that people haven’t seen ever before.”

The hunt for subjects

With the proliferation of documentaries on cable channels like Discovery Channel and Animal Planet over the last decade, MacGillivray has to search harder for fresh subjects and get to them before other Imax filmmakers. But “it’s all friendly competition,” he says. “I know all of the filmmakers who are making Imax films and they’re all friends. We share ideas about cameras and what subjects to make movies about.... Everyone is rather peaceful and happy.”

Still, it’s a struggle to find funding. “Coral Reef Adventure,” at a cost of $10 million, is the company’s most expensive ever, and three-fourths of the budget was financed by the company. “We took the biggest gamble that we’ve ever taken, principally because I felt it was important,” MacGillivray says.

Only part way into its run, “Coral Reef Adventure” has already outgrossed James Cameron’s more-hyped “Ghosts of the Abyss,” about the Titanic, even with only a fraction of that studio-funded film’s advertising budget.

Last year’s “Bowling for Columbine,” which became the highest-grossing non-Imax documentary, topped out at $21 million. “Coral Reef Adventure” “will probably end up at $60 million, maybe higher,” MacGillivray says. “It takes usually five or six years to get through the entire [Imax circuit],” he says, “and then they keep running for 20 years.”

MacGillivray has six projects in various stages of development on such subjects as democracy in ancient Greece, the Nile and, of course, another ocean-themed project about water conservation to be shot all over the world.

“My mission is to try to get people to be conscious about conservation and pollution and try to get kids interested in marine biology and becoming oceanographers,” says MacGillivray.

He has noticed that even his own aquatic backyard is less pristine compared to 35 years ago when he purchased his home. “It’s still a beautiful, wondrous environment and full of life,” he says, “but you have to fight to make sure it stays that way.”

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Box office

Worldwide gross in millions through December

*--* “Everest” (1998) $125.7 “To Fly!” (1976) $116.6 “The Living Sea” (1995) $87.6 “To the Limit” (1989) $69 “Dolphins” (2000) $69.6 “Coral Reef Adventure” (2003) $24.6

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*All films are still playing