He just had to say it in penguin

Writer-director Jordan Roberts has always wanted to make movies about the importance of family and dedication and the simple impossible beauty of love’s survival.

He just never thought of using penguins to do it.

Now, as he watches “March of the Penguins” become the breakout hit of the summer, he thinks about it all the time. About what the film’s resonance says about us as a culture and him as a filmmaker, what we see in these unlikely birds, about how success can sneak up behind you when you least expect it disguised as a phone call and an overnight package.

“March of the Penguins,” which follows the Antarctic mating ritual of the Emperor penguin, is now the second-highest grossing documentary ever, after Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It did $23 million in six weeks on just 700 screens; last weekend, the release expanded to 1,867 theaters and brought in an additional $7 million or so.

Roberts is credited with writing the narration for “March of the Penguins,” a revised version of the French documentary “Marche de l’Empereur,” though this is a narrow way of describing the work he did on the film. There is no Writers Guild-approved credit, however, for “culturally re-envisioning,” probably because there is little precedent for what Roberts and composer Alex Wurman did. Which is take a finished film and change it. A lot.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Roberts says. “We should have screwed it up. This should have been a big mess. But we didn’t. And it wasn’t. And that’s a miracle.”

For him, the timing could not have been better.

Every year, a number of people learn the lessons of Hollywood the hard way. Faster than you can say “William Goldman,” every actor/director/writer/guy on the bus will tell you that “no one knows nothing about nothing” in the business, that it’s a crapshoot, impossible to predict which films are going to nosedive and which will light up the box office.

But no one really believes any of this until it happens to them.

Last year, it happened to Roberts.

The newly formed Warner Independent Pictures released Roberts’ highly personal directorial debut, “Around the Bend.” Roberts, a successful script doctor for almost 10 years, had poured years of his life and much of his soul into the film. It did well at the Montreal Film Festival, winning an acting award and Oscar buzz for Christopher Walken and general newcomer-interest in Roberts. Opening in a limited number of theaters last fall, the film received less than positive reviews and disappeared quickly.

That this is how most people experience Hollywood most of the time provided little solace.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Roberts says. “I could not believe that what I had been trying to say was so misunderstood.”

Still, he already had another film in the works at Warner, where his relationship with its president, Mark Gill, had been cemented by Gill’s unflagging support for “Around the Bend.” The two talked often, so Roberts wasn’t surprised when Gill called him from Sundance this year: Could Roberts take a look at a French documentary Gill and the folks at National Geographic were interested in? Of course. The next day, the film was at his door.

Watching “Marche de l’Empereur,” Roberts was struck by two things: the amazing and poignant story that the extraordinary images told and the way in which the voices used to express the thoughts of the male, female and baby penguins took him completely out of the movie. The French pop soundtrack didn’t help either.

If this were his film, he thought, he would get a new soundtrack and go solely with a narrator. Morgan Freeman and James Garner immediately came to mind.

“I knew it was a cultural thing,” Roberts says. “I mean the movie did tremendously in France and it was an unbelievably moving story. But I was very worried. I thought maybe Mark just wanted me to translate it and I couldn’t write dialogue for penguins. I didn’t think the film would work that way. At least not here.”

Neither, it turns out, did Gill. And so Roberts agreed to take a whack at writing narration. He didn’t expect it to be a big job and he certainly didn’t expect a big payoff -- at first, he told Gill he’d do it in exchange for a flat-screen TV.

The Writers Guild of America has rules, however, so eventually he received a contract for scale plus a bonus should the movie hit a certain box office level. Neither Roberts nor his agent ever expected to see this.

Meanwhile, he began his own rare journey -- to rework an already finished movie that many people, including some at National Geographic, an equal partner in the North American distribution, thought was just fine.

“Initially I was not convinced,” says Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films, which had been tracking the film since the crews had gone to Antarctica. “I knew the film needed to be translated, but I think the French version is very valid and I thought there was a way to keep the voices.”

When Warner and National Geographic bought the North American rights to “Marche,” the contract stipulated that they had the rights to modify the film for the American audience. But what Roberts and Gill were suggesting included a completely new score and a reworking of the film’s tone.

“The narrative was originally from four points of view, including a mother, father and baby, and the language was very, well, French,” Gill says. “Very poetic.”

This did not play anywhere near as well at Sundance as it had in France. Reviews out of the festival boiled down to: amazing shots of penguins, lose the voices.

American audiences, Gill and Roberts believed, expected a more traditional documentary feel with such extraordinary footage.

“We were more interested in how far the penguins went, how much weight they lost, why they do what they do,” Gill says. Director Luc Jacquet and the French producers, Gill says, were remarkably gracious about having their film fiddled with. “They said, ‘We know France, you know America.’ ”

(They balked at Roberts’ idea to include footage of the crew shooting in the end credits, but Roberts stood firm.)

The first draft of the narration was done in a weekend. After some back and forth, Leipzig agreed with the changes and a team of penguin experts was put at Roberts’ disposal.

“If you’re going to state facts in a National Geographic film,” Leipzig says, “they had better be right.”

“Those guys were great,” Roberts says. “I mean, they kept me toeing the line. I, of course, wanted more fable than fact, and they would send me these great messages saying ‘tsk, tsk’ when I strayed too far from the literal truth.”

Composer Wurman was hired, and he and Roberts went through the film over and over again, divvying up the film among narration, music and natural sounds.

Freeman signed on, but he could give them only a day at the end of May, which was close to the film’s scheduled June release date. So it was up to Roberts to record versions of the narration, seven times, so they could get the right timing and tonality. Roberts took a crash course in Morgan Freeman, hoping to emulate the actor’s cadences, his well-placed pauses.

“My wife got so sick of hearing me doing the Morgan Freeman voice,” Roberts says. “I got pretty good at it though.”

All along, the issue of anthropomorphism dogged the process. Sleek and unexpressive, the penguin is, oddly enough, a perfect looking glass for human emotions. They walk like us, they play like us, their family units resemble ours and they have no facial expressions to compete with our fantasy of what they might be thinking.

The story of the amazing lengths to which the Emperor penguin goes to reproduce is the heart of the story, but as the reaction to the French version proved, Roberts had to walk a fine line between making them human and keeping them real.

“I tried to pull back on the word ‘love,’ ” he says. “I think we used it twice. Because it’s hard to know what is instinct and what is love, but you couldn’t be true to the original wonderful story without having it be a love story.”

The fine tuning of just how human the birds were went on up until the end, with Freeman making some last-minute word changes of his own as he recorded the narration. Because the French director was not available, Roberts stepped in there too.

“We were really lucky in Jordan,” Gill says. “Because as a director he was able to work with Morgan in the studio.”

For Roberts, finding himself in the studio with Freeman on a project that he at first thought would be just another rewrite was fairly remarkable. He got his bonus. (“It was very generous and a nice surprise,” he says. “I bought my flat-screen with part of it.”) But he also got the satisfaction of knowing he had helped tell the sort of story he had always wanted to tell, the sort of story he thought he’d told in “Around the Bend.”

When “Bend” did not do well, Roberts says, his response was to stop writing about the things that actually mattered to him.

“I thought, ‘I’ll write something edgy, something out of my box completely,’ ” he says.

But apparently fate had something else in mind -- many phone calls are made from Sundance and very few end up in the type of unexpected success of “March of the Penguins.”

“It was such a relief to me,” Roberts says. “In my first film, I wanted to take people a certain place and I didn’t get them there. This time I did. It’s hard these days to tell a story of beauty and be taken seriously,” he adds. “But this film does.”

That it took penguins to make it happen does not seem as odd or accidental as it once did.

“At first I thought, ‘Well, it’s all about the extraordinary nature of what the director has done, this unique footage, which is amazing.’ But now I think it’s also easier for us to accept the positive qualities of character when they are given to animals rather than humans.”

Audiences, Roberts says, are more generous toward loving or resourceful or determined animals than they would be toward their human counterparts.

“We’re cynical about people,” he says. “We see an act of generosity, we figure there’s an agenda. Penguins have no agenda.”