Making compelling films is a natural

It’s spitting rain on a warmish spring Tuesday on the northern end of Cape Lookout National Seashore, a 55-mile stretch of beach, marsh and maritime forest on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and director John Grabowska is wondering if he’s going to make the day.

Grabowska is consulting with cinematographer Steve Ruth about a shot for his latest film, a sequence involving the carcass of a baby porpoise that has washed up nearby. All morning, Grabowska has been less than inspired by the flat, gray light, and it’s looking more and more likely that, rather than film, he and Ruth are going to spend their time reading, talking and wishing for better conditions.

In Hollywood, each day of production must involve a certain number of camera setups or the director will not have made the day -- in other words, he will have failed to come in on time and on budget. Grabowska isn’t under the same pressure -- he has all the time he needs to make a film that will wind up in Cape Lookout’s visitor center. But, as he leads two visitors to a swath of pristine white beach, he has the watchful look of a filmmaker who’s eager to get something in the can.

While Grabowska and Ruth discuss where to put Ruth’s Aaton XTR Super16 camera, a sea gull alights on the dead porpoise and starts to peck at the poor creature’s head. “Well, this is pretty good,” Grabowska says resignedly. But after a moment, he breaks into a cheerful grin and sweeps a long arm toward the gull. “Let’s get the cycle of life and death! Here it is! And while you’re shooting the dolphin, I’ll go record some surf.”

Grabowska may not be a household name in the film industry, but if you’re one of the estimated 90 million people who will visit a national park this summer, you may well see a film that he has directed or executive-produced.

In addition to winning awards on the festival circuit, his short films have been broadcast on local PBS stations. His “Crown of the Continent,” made for the 13-million-acre Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, has aired as a national special on PBS, which will also show his most recent film, “Remembered Earth.”

Considered one of the nation’s virtuoso environmental filmmakers, Grabowska is part of an exclusive and, by some accounts, disappearing breed of filmmaker: artists who, under the unlikely auspices of government bureaucracy, are creating not beige press releases or out-and-out propaganda, but poetry.

Grabowska, 44, is a producer-director with the National Park Service, one of five staff filmmakers who work out of the Park Service’s interpretive design center in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. As someone who gets to visit some of the nation’s most magnificent natural areas and spend as much time as he needs, Grabowska is used to being told he has the best job on the planet.

“It’s a good gig,” he says. “The spectrum of subject matter is the best. It’s everything from the history of the United States to pre-Columbian indigenes to culture and the natural world.... And what can be better than telling the stories of America to national and international visitors?”

Back on the beach, a few minutes have passed while Grabowska records the tide and consults with Ruth on whether to wait for the weather to brighten.

“We spend so much time waiting for something,” Grabowska explains later. “I was watching some of the DVD extras on ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ and Peter Jackson is sitting there surrounded by all these lights and dozens of people, saying, ‘Well, we’ll just wait for this cloud.’ And I said, ‘That’s what we do! We wait for clouds!’ ”

The son of college professors at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., Grabowska spent some time in TV news. While covering the South Dakota statehouse, he discovered a latent passion for looking through a viewfinder.

“I enjoyed covering all of the issues, but it wasn’t particularly visual shooting committee meetings,” he recalls in his Harpers Ferry office, in a ramshackle building overlooking the Shenandoah River. “So whenever politics was too much with me, I would run off to the Rosebud Reservation or Cheyenne River or Pine Ridge ... and happily spend the day framing the shot and trying to get something visually aesthetic on the air instead of the typical local news stuff.”

In 14 years with the Park Service, Grabowska has become sought after as a filmmaker with an unusual affinity for big nature, who is more inclined to let images and music do the talking, and who isn’t afraid to take chances.

When he made “Crown of the Continent,” Grabowska realized Wrangell-St. Elias was eerily familiar. He asked his mother to send him some old 8mm home movies and, sure enough, his family had visited the park when he was a child. It was one of the last times Grabowska remembered his father, who later succumbed to multiple sclerosis, being at the height of his physical powers. After wrestling with whether to add such highly charged personal memories to the film, he finally did; the result is a spectacular testament to “the architectonics of the planet itself” and a surprisingly intimate and moving tribute to his own father’s dreams.

In “Remembered Earth,” which he made for the El Malpais and El Morro national monuments in New Mexico, Grabowska asked the author N. Scott Momaday to narrate from his own writings, and mined film archives for footage of classic westerns shot in the area. What could have been a plain-vanilla infomercial about geology and weather is instead by turns a poetic and irreverent look at a place that Americans have mythologized, romanticized and nearly destroyed.

Indeed, viewers at festivals and other screenings have been surprised by how frankly -- and critically -- he addresses the effects of the oil, gas, uranium and coal industries on the region. The Park Service has pulled at least one of its films, made for the visitor center at the Lincoln Memorial, because of pressure from political groups.

“I’ve never run into that,” Grabowska says of censorship. “The National Park Service is referred to often as the nation’s premier preservation agency. Its mandate is to protect the resources in these wild areas, so I don’t see any conflict when it comes to defending the environment.”

Grabowska has a waiting list of park superintendents and interpreters who insist on working only with him.

“I not only asked for him, I fought for him,” says Bob Vogel, superintendent of Cape Lookout National Seashore. “He’s not just going to do a beautiful film, but a film that has true meaning.” When Vogel first spoke with Grabowska about doing the Cape Lookout film, both agreed the focus should be on the shore’s ecosystem as a whole, rather than on the park itself. “He first looks at the message that we want to convey to our visitors, which is evoking a feeling and hopefully the spirit of stewardship.”

If you ask Grabowska about his influences, he is as likely to name writers John McPhee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the Hudson River painting school as other filmmakers. Although he’s a fan of documentaries by Jon Else (“Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven,” “The Day After Trinity”) and the fiction films of John Sayles, Grabowska immerses himself in the art and literature of the places he documents, resulting in films driven more by images than words.

You will never see a talking head in a Grabowska movie (“I keep trying and I’m never able to pull it off”). And, although his films are narrated, you won’t hear a lot of words. His script for “Remembered Earth” is “probably five pages, double-spaced.” Park Service movies are shot on film, rather than the cheaper but far less attractive video. And since making “Crown of the Continent,” Grabowska has had all his music composed by Todd Boekelheide at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. As a result, films that might otherwise be as forgettable as a standard-issue government flier instead possess surprisingly high production values, emotional impact and staying power.

“It’s a form of preservation, really,” Boekelheide says. Grabowska is “trying to capture something not just prosaically but capture the spirit of the place. And given that he’s a big walker and hiker, and goes [to the parks] for the enjoyment of it anyway, it is the perfect marriage of a park ranger and a visionary filmmaker.”

Grabowska’s ethos of favoring sound and image over dry information delivery dovetails nicely with the Park Service’s policy of provoking curiosity in visitors rather than spoon-feeding them data.

“David Attenborough can do these incredible natural histories of the birds and their behavior and so forth,” he says. “But I want people’s lives to change. I want them to see the film and be different when they leave the theater, or finish watching it on PBS.”

Roy Wood, who is awaiting approval on a budget for a Grabowska film, notes that his park -- Katmai National Park, 300 miles south of Anchorage on the Alaskan peninsula -- is too expensive and isolated for most people to visit.

“John is able to make a more emotional connection to people who are in a visitor center and are about to go out into a park, but maybe more importantly, to people who may never make it to the parks,” says Wood, chief of interpretation.

The sun is out on Cape Lookout. And, as is the way when you work in the wild, it’s decided to come out just when Grabowska is ready to quit and have a beer -- and minutes after his visitors have left.

Later, he leaves a taunting message for them, rhapsodizing about the flock of ibis and the green heron that made an early evening appearance, allowing him to get the footage of wading birds he was hoping for. Of the half-hour or so filmed today, maybe only a minute or two -- or maybe none -- will end up in the finished film. It doesn’t matter. As the moon came up over Cape Lookout, John Grabowska had made his day.