MRH: Is there a specific stage when you bring in the composers, or do you have them write sketches?

TM: Well, in this case, we had a really short time-frame. We knew we had a post-production crunch because I didn’t even get the last footage ‘til late in November, and that was the last whole last expedition, but we pretty much knew that was going to happen.

We had the structure of the film pretty well defined, but in fact this time [the composers] had a music editor who just took care of the placement of everything. [Normally] I do very detailed cue sheets for each sequence, and then we kind of sit down and spot the film.

I already had a temp track on it, culled from all over the place. I knew that we wanted a world music feel to it, and that it wasn’t going to be a sort of classical score. We wanted to bring some of the flavour of Indonesia and the places we shot to it, but it needed to have a lyrical component as well.

I already had “Octopus’ Garden” on the end [sung by the composers' daughter, Leah Erbe], and Doris Day (“Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”) in the middle, so certain things were defined, and boy, the score they eventually came up with totally blew me away. It is really rich, and I’m hoping to get a soundtrack organized for it. I can’t say right now if that’s going to happen, but I hope so.

MRH: As an editor, you have to deal with the music and the sound effects and the picture elements, but the 3D component deserves special consideration. I imagine that when cutting for 3D, there are certain ‘rules’ you have to observe because if certain transitions happen too fast, they can be overwhelming.

TM: There’s always a couple in every film that you can’t really avoid, but you do have to be careful in cutting from radically different focal lengths; sometimes it takes your eyes a minute to adjust.

MRH: You have a lot of subjects that move but stay within a certain depth of field.

TM: Yeah. I work in 2D when I’m editing, but we made a point of printing up to 70mm everything that we knew would be in the film and carrying that along, so when we got to a pretty much rough fine cut, then Julianne Brown and two other assistants match cut the 70mm (I work in Final Cut Pro) so they could take it down to the Scotiabank Theatre and look at it.

Basically there were no surprises, but you do have to be careful not to go to extreme close-ups suddenly from something that’s been a fairly wide sequence, because you can’t fuse your eyes to the change.

MRH: There are some really effective sequences, but I think my favourite involves the sea snakes, because there’s a moment where you eventually get three snakes that converge and get close and closer to the camera, almost drifting onto your lap, and it’s a great trick.

TM: Well, that wasn’t a trick, that’s what they did! What director Howard Hall said is that they liked the vibration of the camera, and that’s what attracts them, so whenever he turned the camera on, they had more snakes than they needed, although they had had to travel something on the order of six to eight hundred miles off from where they originally started looking for the snakes because they had all been fished out… It’s not exaggerating when the narration says most of them are handbags and shoes.

MRH: I noticed in this film, as well as in some of the other work you’ve done, that there’s an ecological theme going on, and I wonder if that’s deliberate, or is that just because of the circumstances of going to areas that are very unique, and how many seem to be threatened by various factors?

TM:  First of all, on this one Alan Horn, the Chairman of Warner Bros. (our sponsor), is very active in the NRDC (National Resources Defence Council) and ocean conservation organizations, and it’s something he cares about deeply, and Howard Hall did want to embrace the theme of global warming affecting deep sea... Deep Sea 3D (2006) was really about over-fishing; that if you take away all the large animals, everything collapses.

In Under the Sea, he wanted to really speak about climate change affecting the oceans. A lot is published on its’ affecting the air we breathe and various other things, but in many cases it’s not really talking about the effect on the animals in the sea – the rising ocean temperatures, and ocean acidification, which is relatively new, but it’s only just begun to be measured by science in terms of the effect on calcium carbonate-based shells and coral.

Howard very much wanted to get that message across, but our mutual feeling has always been that you want to make these films to inspire people, especially young people; first, to see what an amazing environment it is and what incredible creatures inhabit it; and secondly, to inspire people to go out and find out more about it, and do something about it if they want to.

It is not the function of the film to tell people off; I think that there is a forum for a more in-depth explanation, which is television documentaries where you have a whole series, or even a channel devoted to such things. I think for the IMAX 3D experience, what it really is, is to introduce people to the amazing creatures who live in that world as a means of helping them understand that they won’t always be there unless we do something about it.