Go into the wild with National Geographic’s ‘Untamed Americas’

Think of “Untamed Americas,” a four-part nature documentary, as a bunch of little “Mad Men” episodes [or any drama of your choosing], said producer Karen Bass.

“You’d be surprised the amount of intimate drama you can capture through the survival stories of animals,” Bass said. “It’s better than any action sequence or riveting story line on a TV show or movie.”

The documentary will premiere on National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo Wild on June 10 with “Mountains” (for those who don’t like steep inclines, there’s also “Deserts,” “Forests,” and “Coasts”). It was two years in the making, with filming taking place in 20 countries to capture such instances as a lone wolf struggling to run down a caribou or mother bears stalking elk calves hiding in the brush in Yellowstone National Park or bighorn sheep withstanding 20-mph head butts in the snow-coated Rocky Mountains.

Viewers get to watch it all unfold with the click of a remote. Bass, however, had to put in a little more effort: She climbed erupting volcanoes, was attacked by a river otter and endured those pesky creepy crawlers (aka cockroaches) scurry across her feet while filming in a bat cave.

We spoke briefly with the documentarian about the experience.

With animals being so unpredictable, how stressed do you get through the whole process?

You get used to the unpredictable nature of everything. There’s a lot of research that goes in at the beginning. We’re working closely with local experts and scientists as much as we can. Sometimes it’s good old-fashioned field knowledge of the area. One of my colleagues John Shier was a cameraman who lives close to Yellowstone National Park. He was able to anticipate some of the behavior. There’s a grizzly bear and black bear sequence in the mountain episode as they’re sort of hunting for those elk calves — that had been years of knowledge of him knowing that area and us being able to say it had never been filmed really comprehensively so let’s give it a roll of the dice. It is high-risk but, again, it’s the local knowledge that is really invaluable.

And sometimes you’re going for something like the long-tongued bat, which came from a scientist who was like, ‘Every year I do my research and I go along and I observe them. I’d love to have you guys come along.’ But it happens so fast and it happens at night: How do you get the right equipment? We need to slow the action down using a phantom camera, and then we have to cut little hole in the flower to get the close-ups of the tongue. There’s a lot of research. It’s not just about being at the right place at the right time. You have to have the right technology with you. But at the end of the day, nature is nature and certain things are going to happen that you don’t expect. And some things happen just as you’ve written them in the treatment, which is rare but fantastic.

Have you noticed any change in behavior — or that it’s become harder to predict things like migration patterns or other cues you’ve been studying?

I think so. I think what has happened over the last few years — even beyond this production. I did a series before called “Nature’s Most Amazing Events” for BBC and Discovery and that was all about pinpointing time and when these events are going to happen. And a lot of the sequences we filmed for “Untamed Americas” is the same problem. You hear people say, “Well, in a normal year, they’d do this …” but then they’ll follow it up with, ‘But I can’t say the last few years have been normal’ or ‘I wouldn’t set my watch to it now.’ So you just go on what people are telling you around the world. Things don’t seem to be happening in expected ways as they used to or expected times and sometimes they don’t happen at all. For example, things can happen just by chance that are amazing. We had some contacts down in Baja California and we wanted to film these incredible mobular rays. There’s this amazing scene of tens of thousands of mobular rays — they’re seven feet across. The locals had never seen anything like it. Then they leap out of the air, so they’re flying through the air. Imagine, you’re filming that from the air, you’re filming that underwater and you’re filming from a boat as they’re leaping. That was something which you couldn’t predict. We had no idea. We just thought it’d be great to get a sequence — I had no idea we’d get that.

What was the biggest ‘get’ during production?

There were a few. One of them was amazing footage of mountain lion — or puma — which was filmed in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. I had sort of been on the quest to film them for a few years and this is the best footage that I’ve seen come from there for a very, very long time. And not only was it really great shots of the animals, but it was a whole family — a mother was trying to get her youngsters to get out there and hunt for themselves. They only have a handful of weeks to learn how to hunt before winter descends. It’s a very short summer so they have to go out there and learn how to hunt these Guanacos, which are relatives of the camel. And it’s big pressure for them. If they get it wrong, they’re not going to survive. So there’s a lot at stake for the predators, as well as the prey. To get footage of the story unfolding over those few weeks were terrific.

I think the grizzly bear and the elk sequence was terrific. That was amazing. I think there were four or five hunting episodes so that was amazing. The mobular rays was also incredible. In the “Deserts” episode, there’s a wonderful story of a little thing called a grasshopper mouse — it’s a little tiny mouse that lives out in the dessert in the southwest. It’s not that far from Los Angeles in the grand scheme of things. Right there in your backyard is a tiny little thing with cute ears. And this thing is the most voracious killer. It’s taking out scorpions, giant centipedes. It just goes for it with its sharp teeth and claws. It does everything that you think lions do and it howls at the moon in order to keep its little territory -- it literally howls. A lot of desert creatures are nocturnal or fairly small. But just because you’re not seeing that play out in front of you all the time, doesn’t mean it’s not amazingly dramatic. One of the stories we have from Utah are these desert mustangs. They’re horses, obviously. They’re wild animals. But the idea that this one male isn’t going to make it unless he gets back into the herd, and how he’s sort of fighting for survival in slow motion. It’s breathtaking.

As you’re watching all these moments unfold, what is the overwhelming thought: ‘Wow, we’re capturing something no one has filmed before” or is it, “Wow, this may be something we never see again”?

You never know what can happen to an area, not everywhere is a national park. You never know what can happen to a rainfall pattern and how it might mean that creatures aren’t going to be doing what they’ve been doing for thousands of years. So I think when I see these things play out, the first thing that really goes through my mind is how am I going to piece together the narrative? Sometimes you’ll see something happen but you don’t understand the significance of it and so, therefore, you have to look at everything that is going on around the scene to understand how the story will play out. They’re individual little dramas. Then it’s about finding what shots you’ll need to tell the story fully. When you think you’ve really nailed the story, there is the wow factor because the sheer time, energy, drudge, patience — all of it takes so much to get the shots, that when you do see the shots play out it’s incredible and you realize you can’t take anything for granted because sometime you feel like you’ve seen it all, but you really haven’t. There’s an awful lot of incredible stories that haven’t been told. Once upon a time, we didn’t know what animals were doing at night and then we got infrared cameras. Once upon a time, you couldn’t see from the air, but lenses can be farther away. We can see strategies now. That scene with the grizzly and the elk. There’s a mother trying to protect her calf. It reminds me of Jodie Foster in “Panic Room” — she was like, don’t move a muscle. I have to walk away and leave you. And yet, on the other hand, there is the grizzly mother and she has to feed those cubs. As a Brit, it’s been a great privilege to see what you guys have.

What did you want to convey with this series?

I think the Americas are just amazing, in terms of what a superlative land it is -- the variety and epic nature of these landscapes and the variety of animals that have adapted to survive the challenges of living in these extremes. What we really want to do is excite our audiences and give them a sense of the intimate dramas of these survival stories. And, also, with the soundtrack, we spend a lot of time cultivating that real natural sound and trying to convey a sense of being there because from the Amazon rain forest to the Great Bear Rainforest to the sound of the desert night, it’s just such an exciting experience. If I can convey a fraction of the excitement, that’s a job well done.

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