Love, Knowledge, Action: A Conversation with the Creators of the Lush Musical Documentary “The Colorado”
The documentary film The Colorado has an ambitious and vital aim: to celebrate the Colorado River Basin and warn of the overdevelopment and overuse of the river’s resources. Narrated by Oscar winner Mark Rylance and shot over the past five years in the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado and the wetlands and mudflats of the Mexican state of Baja California by filmmakers Murat Eyuboglu and Sylvestre Campe, the documentary is a stunning visual, musical, and narrative exploration of the region’s past, present, and future.
The Colorado is also a musical endeavor, boasting a score arranged by five acclaimed composers: Grammy winner John Luther Adams, William Brittelle, Glenn Kotche of Wilco, Paola Prestini, and Shara Worden. As part of the project, Eyuboglu, Prestini, and producer Courtenay Casey plan to host live performances of the film’s narration and score around the country, beginning with the Metropolitan Museum in New York City in May.
Three members of the Colorado team spoke with us about the project’s sweeping scope, the creative journey involved in bringing it to the big screen, and the timeliness of its message.
Interview by Rebecca Hiscott.
The Colorado is described as “a film about the North American West, a musical tribute to land and water, and a cautionary tale about the environment.” What made you want to create a project of this scope about the Colorado River Basin?
Murat Eyuboglu: There are a number of places with environmental issues in that region, most of them centered around water, drought, and the dam-building culture. As I researched, I couldn’t find any resources that put these issues into a larger narrative. The idea of this film was to tell that larger story. The region we are exploring in The Colorado has been inhabited for the past twelve thousand years, but its acute problems have begun emerging only during the past sixty years.
Paola Prestini: Murat is a filmmaker I’ve admired for a long time and a friend. When we began talking about this project, it felt like a real opportunity for us to take on something that would really make a difference. It’s been an extraordinary collaboration.
Courtenay Casey: The aspect of the project that I found so fascinating when Murat first approached us was the idea of telling this story using the visual anchor of the Colorado River along with unique and distinct composers, being able to parallel the very complicated and large scope of the story of the Colorado River [through music].
The Colorado is not just a documentary film — it also involves live performances and an educational textbook. Can you tell us more about the different components of the project, and how they come together?
Paola: We’ve recorded the score for our label, VIA Records, and that record will be released simultaneously [with the film]. The live performers are Roomful of Teeth; Jeffrey Zeigler, a cellist and one of the co-producers of the record; and Glenn Kotche, an amazing percussionist and one of the composers for the film. And there’s narration [during the live performances], which will be different each time we do it. We’re hoping that for the Met event, the narrator will be Mark Rylance, who’s narrating on the record and in the movie.
Murat: There’s also a textbook. The film has nine sections, and the nine sections cover a sweeping range of topics that weave together everything from environmental history to social history. Each of those sections includes roughly three minutes of voice-over followed by about five or six minutes of music. That’s the emotional, sensorial way of immersing oneself in that particular topic. The textbook has chapters that correspond to each of those sections, so anyone who is intrigued and wants to find out more will be able to go to that textbook and read something much more in depth. The book is designed with educators in mind.
It seems like there is a broader message in the film about climate change and environmental exploitation. How is that addressed?
Murat: There is one section in the film specifically on climate change. In the U.S., the Southwest has had some of the most obvious symptoms of climate change. The Colorado is a cautionary tale in the sense that things that are happening in the Southwest today are forewarnings for other regions in the country.
You’ve been working with an incredibly talented, award-winning team. How did everyone get involved?
Murat: It happened a little bit on its own. I started working with one or two of my favorite composers as collaborators in the beginning, and then when VIA Records came in, we started thinking more about composers [to include in the project]. But some serendipitous things happened as well. For instance, when I first spoke to Paola, I learned that one of the stories we tell in the film was taking place where she grew up in southern Arizona. We were telling the story of a seventeenth-century Jesuit father who was one of the earlier explorers of the Colorado River, and Paola’s father’s family is from the town in Italy that he came from.
Mark Rylance was on one of the Grand Canyon rafting trips, so we got to know him there. At the end of the trip I asked him if he would like to narrate the film, and he said yes. And [script writer and consultant] Bill deBuys’ book Salt Dreams is the inspiration behind the project. It takes this approach of intertwining social and environmental histories to tell the story of a smaller region in the Colorado River Basin. With his help, we took that approach to tell the larger story.
So it all happened pretty organically, the way that different people joined and found their places in the project. I think that’s one of its strengths — everyone feels they’re part of something larger. It’s really important that this is not about a single person’s vision, because this is such a large and complex story.
You’ve been working on this film for four years already. What have been some of the most exciting or rewarding aspects so far?
Murat: The most rewarding thing for me has been to learn about the region and meet people who live there. Most of the people I met have a deep level of dedication to that region and environment. There’s one section at the end of the film where we focus on agriculture: for a number of weeks, a colleague and I went to the fields and met and spoke with day laborers. That level of engagement with people who live there, whose lives are deeply intertwined with that region, has been the most rewarding aspect.
The idea is to tell the story from various angles so that people start identifying with it on an emotional level, which will in turn make their environmental commitment deeper. If we are to nurture something or protect something successfully, we need knowledge and we need love. We are trying to provide both. We are trying to inspire a kind of intimate love in people, to get under their skin about the people living there and the sublime landscapes— as well as those that are not sublime, that are damaged. We’re also trying to provide the knowledge that people will need once they are inspired to do something.
Courtenay: For me, what’s been amazing has been engaging different kinds of communities, the environmental community and the film community, and spreading a message about what I love. Art and music are things I feel passionate about. To bring that to the environmental community and have people really engage with issues that we’re bringing up [through art] is really exciting to me.
Paola: For me it’s been this world that Murat has assembled, which I would never have had access to had he not presented us with this project. Being able to go down the river with this group of people, being able to learn directly from Bill deBuys, being able to score part of this film in a part of the world that I had grown up with, these were all incredible opportunities. When you dedicate four to five years to a project, as Murat has, and for us several years as well, it has to be something that you really passionately believe in and that’s going to change your life somehow. This has.
To learn more about The Colorado, visit their Kickstarter campaign here — it’ll wrap up March 25.
