42* Degrees of Separation

42. It’s a significant number to me at the moment. Well, how many of you have experienced 42 degrees of heat (or indeed have wanted to?) It may not be the answer to life, the universe and everything but it’s quite the experience for a pasty Brit flying for 13 hours to edit next to a mountain range, 150km east of Cape Town. The dusty idyll of McGregor, in wine- tasting country, is a charming little village quite unlike anything I have experienced in Africa... apart from the heat. Now, I can sense you may be thinking things along the lines of “some people have all the luck,” or “nice work if you can get it.” Well, to the last I will say it IS fantastic work if you can get it, working on the third and final part of an award winning, world class trilogy with world class filmmakers, Will and Lianne Steenkamp, who’ve become great friends over the 8 years we’ve been working together on five films. 

 

But also consider that I’m not a confident flyer (this is an understatement as my many discarded foil wrappers of Xanax can attest), I can walk my dogs in the depths of winter with no discernible layers needing no gloves and I am, reasonably you may say, not up for sharing space with a motley selection of creatures that can do me serious harm. No, not the filmmakers but those that live secret lives in the surrounding veldt that now and again pop by the tenderly tended garden to see if there is anything worth investigating. They sting, bite and spit but I’m assured that it’s nothing personal, you understand. There is a phrase over here that goes “You will probably not die from a scorpion’s sting...” (phew) “...but you may wish to die from it.” OK. So shake shoes and just be wary of every dark shape on a cream stone floor. Especially if it moves... 

There is also the undeniable fact that a cutting room in Soho is somewhat like a cutting room in McGregor aside from the mozzie nets, the naughty snacks placed to tempt me from the path of dietary righteousness and the tremendously smart and creative minds and hands-on support from the filmmakers sat behind me. It’s a keyboard, a mouse and two screens. If the budget is reasonable, it’s a keyboard, a mouse and three screens. Is this worth flying all that way? You bet your ass. OK, a scorpion in my bedroom on night one and a cobra in the garden in my second week stand to remind me that I’m not in Kansas anymore. A man died last year hereabouts from a cobra bite. Right. “I hate snakes, Jock. I hate ’em!” I really don’t but I have boundless respect for an organic length of animated rope that can stop a human heart in shock. Remember the natural history filmmakers’ dictum: “There is no such thing as a poisonous snake. You can happily eat any of them. The dangerous ones are venomous...” 

 

In a country that specialises in meat, hugely expensive in the UK, but bread and butter to South Africans, it was a shock to my hosts that a higher than comfortable cholesterol reading had me on soya substitutes, lots of fish and a no butter diet back in the UK last year. I can still replay Will and Lianne’s palpable disappointment given what they had lined up for my usually enthusiastic consumption. You can rarely find soya meat substitutes here (the mere idea is risible) and so of course, they cost a small fortune. We met halfway. They couldn’t find or quite reasonably didn’t want to spend a lot more money for any meat substitutes so I ate meat. OK, three quarters of the way. I have never tasted ‘braai’ (grilled) meat as succulent and tasty as I had on my fourth day here. In fact, the food rustled up by the filmmakers has been consistently superb and I am the pickiest eater you could find east of Hannibal Lecter. Knowing my great enthusiasm for air conditioners having run some poor models to death in the past in other sunny climes, the filmmakers proudly showed off their various units scattered throughout their stunning residence. They all work perfectly. Bliss. As a living space, the house is luxurious as it should be as it’s rented out to holidaymakers earning its keep generating a supplementary income. Filming difficult wild subjects for months on end in the furnace of a Namibian desert or the unpredictable seasonal flux of Zambia’s Luangwa Valley means that Will and Lianne are away a lot so it made perfect sense to make their home pay while empty. Filming in the intimate style that is their trademark just got a lot more challenging with two sons to both bring up and bring along on their adventures. 

And so to business. In March 2023, I did a pre-edit in Holland of all the main scenes of the third desert lion film, the fitting end of a truly remarkable story. Our six weeks under the African sun was for what is contractually known as a ‘rough cut’  - a cut about as rough as a polished diamond - and subsequent fine cut. And then a few months before the cut started, tragedy struck. Will and Lianne worked hard to find a producer who could take a load off their shoulders and were thrilled to find Kurt Mayer, the head of Austria’s Kurt Mayer Films. Kurt and his team largely took care of the deals, the negotiations, the contracts and the money side. His role was undeniably important to allow the filmmakers to concentrate on the films themselves. 

 

Kurt died in October last year after a short illness. He was 72. As tragic as any event is in this or any other context, his passing put the third desert lion film in serious jeopardy. But Will and Lianne are nothing if not resourceful and made a huge effort to transfer Kurt’s responsibilities on to their own shoulders to make this landmark film a reality. 

 

I’m at the tail of week two and we will have our hour bolted together tomorrow so plenty of time to take our time and hone. We also have the lion researcher who looks exactly like a lion researcher in the desert should look, arriving tomorrow to throw his hand into the creative ring for a few days. I will never forget showing Philip ‘Flip’ Stander the first cut of Vanishing Kings in Austria in 2014, our very first desert lion film. He was stunned, vigorously swearing in delighted surprise and was simply an über-fan sitting watching the lives of the lions (I will not fall in to the Dian Fossey trap of using the possessive word ‘his’) more intimately than even he could ever observe. 

Desert lions tell us more about ourselves than a casual observer may think. They prove, in life and death, what contradictory animals we primates are. A collared lion is not a zoo specimen. It is a wild animal. In the desert lions’ case, they are wild animals living in a sandscape that appears to offer no sustenance. Lions used to live here and have only just moved back to roam the beaches of the Skeleton Coast. It’s the effort of dedicated people over decades - in this case, Dr Stander – that ensure the natural world and its creatures can still live here but they have to be trackable. Why? Human beings... On one side, Flip may represent conservation but villagers losing livestock to lions have legitimate grievances against the apex predators but while we swat flies and think nothing of it, shooting and poisoning desert lions is the ongoing cumulative destruction of a unique natural phenomenon. It is a very human contradiction. Protector and destroyers all in one primate package. 

 

We sailed through three Zoom calls of executive feedback (we had to please the French, the Austrians and the Americans) and I have a week left now to cut a 52 minute, 3 second film down to 51’ 45”. It’s one hell of a mountain to climb but we’ll get there. 

* Douglas Adams (to younger readers), was the comic genius who created The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio 4 comedy series in the far off yesteryear of 1978 and the subsequent drip feed of five novels. He died in a Montecito gym in California at the obscenely young age of 49, exactly four months before 9/11, 2001. At the end of his first book, supercomputer Deep Thought takes seven and a half million years to work out the answer to the question of “Life, the universe, and everything.” Two philosophers were given the answer “42” which did not go down well at all.