Director Fishes for Truth About BC’s Salmon
SCOTT RENYARD COMBINES PASSIONS FOR SCIENCE AND STORYTELLING IN “THE PRISTINE COAST”
BY TOM HAWTHORN
(This story was originally published in Reel West Magazine, Fall 2014)
As a boy, Scott Renyard walked the wild creeks and rivers near his Revelstoke home. The weekend treks were spent fishing for bull trout and Dolly Varden. Father told son about legal limits and why they were in place and the son indulged an unquenchable curiosity about the natural world.
Fishing demands patience and the pair bonded as they waited for a nibble. Not that the trips were without adventure. Once, the boy’s dog, Prince, a short, white French basset hound-chihuahua cross, tried to sample a porcupine as an hors d’oeuvre.
The wilderness adventures led Renyard to study botany at university, but it was a last-minute, fill-in job on a catering truck on location that brought the graduate student to the movies. That modest taste of the movie world convinced him to combine his love of science with a passion for storytelling.
He continued sport fishing in midlife, angling along the Vedder River in Chilliwack. He noticed fewer chum salmon with each passing year. Fewer coho salmon. Then, the government halved the number of hatchery steelhead you were allowed to catch. He began to wonder if the decreased stocks in the Fraser River and its tributaries could be related to the diseases attributed to the open-net fish farms dotting British Columbia’s inlets.
The result of his inquiries is The Pristine Coast, a documentary that premieres at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival. The doc highlights the controversial research of biologist Alexandra Morton, whose analysis of declining fish stocks in the Broughton Archipelago blames diseases introduced into wild stock by farmed fish.
The filmmaker recorded six days of her Get Out Migration march four years ago, a 500-kilometre walk from Sointula on Malcolm Island to the provincial legislature in Victoria. He also recorded 118 days of testimony at the Cohen Commission, the federal government’s public inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser.
As director and writer, he also includes the research of Dr. Trisha Atwood, an expert in the cycling and storage of carbon in aquatic ecosystems.
Lest that all seem a mite serious, keep in mind the diseases attributed to the fish farms involve the words “lice,” “lesions,” “burn marks” and “bleed- ing fins.” The Pristine Coast is a serious documentary whose subject matter sounds like a horror movie.
“I like to do investigative environmental projects,” Renyard said. “I like to look deep into what’s behind a problem and find out if what happened actually happened and how it happened.”
His formal science education made it possible for him to decipher the technical jargon found in the reams of fisheries reports on the subject.
“Why is disease a problem? How is it being transmitted? What diseases are here? What populations are being affected? In the end, what does that mean in terms of the larger eco-system?”
The Pristine Coast took four years to produce, including an intense 20-month period leading up to its completion on Labour Day. Renyard, who is the kind of guy who prefers to memorize telephone numbers rather than rely on a cellphone’s memory, had a tough time calling an end to the research of an obviously complicated story.
He has been asking questions about nature for as long as he can remember. His family lived in an area north of the train tracks outside Revelstoke known as CPR Hill. “We grew up playing in the bush. We built forts, climbed trees, wandered around and looked at plants,” he said. In Grade 4, his class project involved collecting wildflowers. By the end of the school year, his scrapbook included about 400 different samples, the result of an obsessive pursuit indulged during weekend jaunts with his father and field trips with his class.
A fascination with plants, especially with ferns and the Queen’s Cup, which has a small, star-shaped white flower and grows beneath coniferous trees, inspired an interest in botany. He moved to Vernon after Grade 4 and maintained his passion as he matured even though his peers were less interested in plants than they were in the power plants under the hoods of their hot rods.
After a few semesters at Okana- gan College, Renyard transferred to the University of British Columbia where he gained a science degree with a major in botany and a minor in geography. An ambitious undergrad thesis involved determining whether a commercial use could be found for the milfoil threaten- ing to choke lakes in the Okanagan. He took samples of milfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum) from Kalamalka Lake. He also gathered samples of Potamogeton crispus, a curly-leafed pondweed thriving from the leeching of effluent into Kal Lake, as it is also known. He used those two plants to grow red clover (Trifolium pratense) to see which was the better organic fertilizer.
He took a masters in resource management and regional planning, writing a thesis on the sports fisheries of Burrard Inlet. Even though these fishing spots were within close proximity to the gleaming glass towers of Vancouver, no scientist had ever bothered to do even a basic survey to determine what the anglers were catching, or how long they spent in the pursuit. He wandered the creeks and shoreline around the inlet, interviewing fishermen as they caught crabs and smelt and other small species. He also learned that a bit of salmon fishing took place on the North Shore at certain times of the year. “It was a nice way to connect back to what I had done as a child,” he said.
While writing his thesis, he got a call from a high school friend who needed an extra hand aboard a catering truck. Renyard had been a cook at a hotel and a steakhouse, so preparing gourmet meals from a portable kitchen seemed a good way to replenish his dwindling stock of cash. The grad student was soon preparing meals for the cast and crew of The Boy Who Could Fly, a drama about an autistic boy featuring Jay Underwood and Lucy Deakins and such supporting cast as Colleen Dewhurst, Fred Savage, a teenaged Jason Priestley (in his first feature film role), and Fred (Her- man Munster) Gwynne as a dipso- maniacal uncle. The shoot did not end well for the caterers, who were replaced for going overbudget, but the taste of celluloid glamour left Renyard hungry for more.
“After I got the introduction to the film business, I liked it. I could see it was a sector that was growing. I suspect I was a bit naive in terms of where it would lead, but the pay was good.” He spent the next 15 years working crew positions on a number of productions. “Towards the end of it, I found the hours were getting to me. You work long, long hours. I wanted to still be a part of filmmaking, but I was yearning to go back to my science.”
Renyard, whose credits include writing the final episode of the Neon Rider series, began making annual pilgrimages to what is now called the Banff World Media Festival, where he learned more about the production of Canadian films, shifting his ambitions from larger productions to independent ones. He had in mind a documentary about the death of a killer whale in captivity. While there was interest in the project, his lack of experience as a director was preventing a go-ahead. Then, by happenstance, a producer suddenly needed a director for a one-hour documentary on cougar attacks. Renyard got the job, Project Cougar did well in the ratings for Discovery Canada, and his career was on its way.
He directed a six-part educational series called Check It Out before serving as a producer for the feature film The Green Chain and The Green Film, a five-minute eco-comedy. All the while he persisted in putting together his orca doc, which he financed himself. He was Ahab and a baby killer whale named Miracle was his Moby Dick.
“What intrigued me about that story was I heard they suspected environmentalists had tried to free the whale,” he said. “That’s how it got tangled in the net and died. A lot of people were against the keeping of captive whales and that could have happened. I started to do research.”
The impetus for the documentary had come when his stepfather, Peter Termehr, told him he had reels of Super 8mm film of the rehabilitation of the whale. It had been rescued from the secluded cove of Menzies Bay before being transported to Victoria, where it was at first immersed in the swimming pool of the old Oak Bay Beach Hotel, a spectacle that drew crowds of onlookers. When he first screened his stepfather’s films, he thought: “This is amazing footage! Why hasn’t it seen the light of day?” It turned out several earlier projects had foundered and the film remained unseen by a wide audience.
The resulting documentary told the story of the first juvenile cetacean to be rescued in British Columbia, a story ending when it got tangled in a net and drowned at Sealand of the Pacific, a Victoria aquarium that has since closed. (Spoiler alert: “It wasn’t environmentalists. Mistakes were made.”) Renyard’s documentary won a Golden Sheaf at Yorkton, Sask., for best nature doc, a special jury prize at the Houston International Film Festival, and an honourable mention at the Blue Ocean Film Festival. It aired in Canada on CBC and Nature.
The Pristine Coast has again caused Renyard to dive deep into a complicated mystery.
A lifelong sport fisherman who has long enjoyed the bounty offered by British Columbia’s rivers and ocean, Renyard now finds the idea of consuming local fish to be unpalatable. Populations are in distress and disease is rampant. That’s no fish tale.
