Film & TV

Five wildlife film-makers nominate their favourite living artist in their field

Alan Root on Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone

Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone have produced an unbroken string of great wildlife films, notable for the variety of creatures depicted, the strange behaviours captured, and the stunning photography – but most of all for the quality of the storytelling. Giant crocodiles stalk their prey; hippos open their mouths to have their teeth cleaned by schools of fish; tiny wasps hatch into the extraordinary world hidden inside a fig; a fish opens her mouth to release tiny fry, not realising she has been cuckolded, and they are someone else's young. They have brought so many new, extraordinary sequences to the screen, all of them woven into deeply satisfying stories. And that, for me, is the raison d'etre for film-making.

Alan Root's 1978 film about termites, Mysterious Castles of Clay, was nominated for an Oscar.

Gavin Thurston on Martin Dohrn

Dohrn's technical innovations are inspiring. The lens systems he designs and builds might look very Heath Robinson, with all their buttons and dials, but they serve a purpose: they have allowed us to see new behaviours in the wild. Using military technology, he came up with the Starlight Camera, allowing him to capture animal behaviour in the wild in complete darkness, for a film called Mara Nights, shot in a Kenyan national park. As soon as you turn a light on, nocturnal animals change their behaviour. But film in the dark and you'll see things you'd never normally witness.

Film cameras are generally so huge, you can't follow something such as an ant. So he built a miniature one, called an "ant cam", that lets you shoot at knee level. It was like having a camera in a tiny helicopter. Rather than being stuck in one position, suddenly you could do tracking shots around army ants, or follow them through the rainforests of central America.

Gavin Thurston worked on the BBC's Life in Cold Blood and Planet Earth.

Sophie Darlington on Doug Allan

Allan is one of those people who goes beyond the call of duty. The results are extraordinary and inspiring. He did a lot of work on Blue Planet and Frozen Planet. When he became one of the first cameramen to dive under the Arctic ice, I thought: "I couldn't do that." He brought us images we'd never seen before: his footage of sea stars feeding under the ice was not only beautiful but a revelation, too. It showed the seabed as such a hostile environment.

One of his standout sequences is of a polar bear trying to capture beluga whales in Blue Planet. It is extraordinary, in such extreme conditions, to capture this kind of behaviour: their scars; the bear's jump. It's never been filmed before. But then he's always pushing his work to the next level. He has filmed polar bears and killer whales a number of times, actually, but each time he goes back he will use a new technique, or look for new behaviour, so his work's always fresh.

Sophie Darlington has worked for the BBC, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel.

Charlie Hamilton James on Hugh Miles

I was nine when I saw Miles's On the Tracks of the Wild Otter. It changed my life. It didn't just turn me into a cameraman, it made me an otter-obsessive. The best wildlife cameramen put in a huge amount of time, and he puts in more than just about anybody – to the point where the animals trust him. He is profoundly patient. Sometimes his films take years to make. With that patience come those amazing moments other people would miss. He filmed polar bear cubs emerging from their den in the Arctic: to get shots like that takes weeks of waiting – in freezing conditions. And when those moments finally happen, he has the skill and level-headedness to film them beautifully.

Charlie Hamilton James's films include My Halcyon River for the BBC.

Doug Allan on Alastair MacEwen

MacEwen shoots in all kinds of ways: he can do long lens work, say, in the African savannahs, as well as macro footage, closeup stuff like insects, rats and mice. Unless you're working in the desert, you just don't see animals like that scurrying around, so you need to build sets. That takes skill: you need to look after your animal so it accepts your set as its natural environment and will carry on displaying the behaviour you want. He is very good at building – and lighting – sets.

He has been principal cameraman on a lot of David Attenborough series. I remember he filmed some archer fish in the Amazon that use spit to shoot insects off branches and down into the water. It was covered from lots of different angles – and in slow motion. He is quite a technical man. He takes the latest technology, wrestles it to the ground, and comes back with amazing pictures.

Doug Allan worked on BBC's Blue Planet and Frozen Planet.

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Friend to the artist, foe of the horror movie participant, fog has been all around us this week

Dickens would have been good on the fog that shrouded much of Britain this week. Fog always brought out the best in him. Think of Bleak House. It opens amid "implacable November weather" with a dense description of London in a fog that is as much moral as physical. Scrooge in A Christmas Carol also exists in a fog "pouring in at every chink and keyhole", until the sparkling Christmas morning on which he finally sees the light.

For the Victorians, fog was spectral and deathly, a world in which phantoms roamed. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the devil dog emerges from the Dartmoor mist: "an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen". TS Eliot, who would have experienced many a pea-souper, echoes Dickens's sense of fog as invader in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. His fog is cat-like, rubbing its back on the window panes before curling once about the house and falling asleep, suggesting torpor rather than terror.

In films, fog is invariably a cloak behind which bad things lurk. In John Carpenter's The Fog, a California fishing town is attacked by the ghosts of dead sailors when fog descends; in Stephen King's novella The Mist, another small town is similarly terrorised, but this time the fog contains tentacled monsters. Alfred Hitchcock loved a good fog. His early film The Lodger, about a serial killer, was tagged: "A Story of the London Fog."

When fog descends, normal rules are suspended and anything is possible. In films, that generally means death. In popular music, though, it can mean life and love, as in the Gershwins' A Foggy Day in London Town: "For suddenly I saw you there/ And through foggy London Town/ The sun was shining everywhere."

"Without fog," said Monet, "London would not be a beautiful city. It is the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth." His portraits of fog-bound London captured that ghostly beauty, while Henri Cartier-Bresson took evocative photographs of Paris in the fog. Fog may be synonymous with danger and moral blindness for writers and film-makers, but for painters and photographers it provides a way of seeing the world anew. The mellow fruitfulness of mists.

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Terence Davies' new film features a bored 1950s wife who leaves her husband after some earth-moving illicit sex. It's how he wishes he'd lived his life, he says

^'I'm gay, I live alone and I've been celibate for 30 years," says Terence Davies. "So in a sense, I can't imagine what it's like." The 65-year-old director is talking about women trapped in unfulfilling marriages in the 1950s. And yet, in another sense, he perfectly understands their plight – having witnessed, as a boy in the 1950s, his own mother's brutal marriage.

"My mum had a terrible life because my father was a complete psychopath," he says. "She never once complained. She got on with it. That's what you did. It moves me more than I can say." I can't help thinking of the unbearable scene in his autobiographical 1988 film Distant Voices, Still Lives in which the father bawls "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" over the mother's howls as he batters her to the hall floor. "My poor mum," says Davies. "Where do you go with 10 kids? There were no women's refuges. If you had a bad marriage, that was it. Women did not leave their husbands."

In his new film The Deep Blue Sea, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play, Davies explores what happens when a wife does what his mother could not: walks out on a 1950s British marriage. But the real shock of The Deep Blue Sea for Rattigan's original audiences is that Hester (played by Rachel Weisz in the film) does not leave her husband because he's a brute, but for something even more socially unacceptable back then. "At 40, she discovers sex and it absolutely overwhelms her," says Davies. She's married to what the film-maker calls "a very nice and cultured man", played by Simon Russell Beale in a rare cinematic foray. But he's also sexless and in thrall to his mother. "That combination of love and sexuality makes her say, 'I've got to go with this, I've got to follow my hormones.'" Davies pouts and adds: "If only I'd done that in my life. But let's not go there."

He was asked to adapt The Deep Blue Sea by the Rattigan Trust, to mark the centenary of playwright's birth. Rattigan, who was also gay, is rooted in austere postwar Britain and Davies is a master at conjuring up the period. He has made two great films about his Liverpool childhood: Distant Voices in 1988; and its 1992 follow-up, The Long Day Closes. "Because I grew up in the 50s, I know not only what it looked like, but what it felt like. It was drab, but what you had you kept well."

Let's not overstate the drabness, though. His film's palette is dark but sumptuous, like the claret coat Weisz wears throughout. "That would be the only coat that she took when she left her husband. And when you see her in it, it's so full of meaning and warmth and life against a relatively muted background." In fact, Davies makes austerity Britain look so seductively warm you almost want to go back and live there. Almost.

Surprisingly, he wasn't familiar with Rattigan's work and familiarity hasn't endeared him to the playwright. "Perhaps it's too reserved," he says. Rattigan's devotees may be alarmed by what Davies has done to the play. He's junked pages of exposition, rewritten lines, refocused characters. Why? "Rattigan wants to explain things all the time, and that's not interesting. Once I decided the drama is from Hester's point of view, that made it easier. We then concentrate on her actions – so instead of being told she has tried to commit suicide, we see it."

More radically, he applies his cyclical notion of narrative to Rattigan's linear drama. "The getting there should be more subtle," he says. "What interests me about cinema is that you have that linear narrative but you move in and out of memory. And memory is cyclical: it prompts other memories. You remember something being funny; you remember some awful crisis."

The Deep Blue Sea's love triangle is substantially the same as that in Brief Encounter, David Lean's 1945 film of the Noel Coward play, but with this twist: while Brief Encounter's heroine returned to a dull marriage after her tea-room dalliance, Hester has no direction home. Her decision to follow her hormones proves disastrous. She junks her upholstered marriage after falling for sexy but emotionally immature ex-RAF pilot Freddie. At one point, Hester explains to her husband, a wealthy and sophisticated judge, why she left: "You can't go back to living on the plains after you've discovered something so …" He says: "Primitive?" She replies: "Shall we say natural?"

Why did two gay playwrights, Coward and Rattigan, dramatise women's marital frustration? "Perhaps they have a closer sensibility to women. I don't know if that's true, but I certainly know I feel that closeness, especially to northern women because they're funny." There's also the possibility that The Deep Blue Sea dramatises Rattigan's grief over a lover who killed himself. "All the main characters want a different kind of love. None of them can reciprocate – that's the tragedy."

Amazingly, Davies had never heard of Weisz before they worked together and she, to return the compliment, hardly knew his work. "I don't watch much television, but I saw her in Beeban Kidron's [1997 feature] Swept from the Sea, with her utterly luminous face and beautiful eyes, giving a wonderful performance. I waited for the credits, then rang my agent and said, 'Have you heard of Rachel Weisz?' He said, 'You're the only one who hasn't.' So I sent her the script and she rang me and I said, 'If you say no, I've absolutely no idea who I'll cast.'"

Davies channelled the spirit of his dead mother in order to understand all the drama and desire underpinning The Deep Blue Sea. "The great love in my life was my mother. I always, always, always dreaded her dying. She lived to be 90." He recalls the last time he saw her. "She was staying in a very good council-run nursing home in Liverpool. She'd just had her hair done. I sat with her and she said, 'I love you' and I said, 'I love you'. We didn't say anything else. I just held her hands and I thought, 'This will be the last time I see her alive.' I thought, 'I would give everything I have for her to live.' But then I thought, 'No, that's sheer selfishness.' She was ready to go and my feelings were irrelevant. She wanted to go, I know she did. That was hard."

This was in 1997, and the ensuing decade was difficult, both because he struggled to get over her death and because project after project was scuppered, his acclaimed 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth notwithstanding. Only his fond love letter to his native Liverpool, Of Time and the City, emerged from the noughties. When the Guardian interviewed him in 2006, he railed against the UK Film Council for nixing one of his films. "What happened after that was they got the right people in the Film Council, people who understand and love film – and then they abolished it! Only in this country."

The world's slowest car chase

He hopes The Deep Blue Sea is a success, partly so he can get funding for earlier, thwarted projects, including an adaptation of Sunset Song, a glorious evocation of Scottish peasantry and subsistence farming at the time of the first world war, written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in 1932. He has also been asked by Wyndham's theatre in London to direct Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in 2013. "I could make a pig's ear of it, but I hope I don't because I love the play so much."

Time, so often cyclical in Davies's work, is linear in one sense: he isn't getting any younger. "I'm knocking on, so I can't wait around for work like I used to." He readily concedes, though, that his cinema is a little out of step with the prevailing culture, and that producers may still find it difficult to justify funding him – for all the awards he has amassed during his 35-year directing career.

"I don't know why people go to the cinema any more. People don't run around with guns blowing things up in my films. If I did a car chase, it would be two cars going very, very slowly. I was once sent a gangster script and I said, 'What do I know about gangsters? Or drugs?' I took the odd junior aspirin when I wasn't supposed to. But nothing stronger."

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Kermit, Miss Piggy and pals are back with a new film and a TV series in the works. Hadley Freeman fondly remembers the satirical puppets and the massive role they played in her childhood

Some of us, for the record, have always played the music. And some of us, also just to clarify, never stopped lighting the lights. That's because, for us in the cultural elite, we are always ready to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight.

When it was announced on Tuesday that US TV broadcaster NBC has commissioned a script for a new series of the Muppets, the reaction among critics, commentators and tweeters was, frankly, remarkable. It is rare that a four-decades old franchise can announce a return to TV and prompt such unabashed enthusiasm as well as a total lack of cynicism about quality control. Everyone loves the Muppets – that goes without saying. More surprising is how many people want them back, creating, satirising, karate chopping.

The Muppets are definitely having what Miss Piggy would call, with a proud tilt of her snout and a toss of her blonde mane, "un petit moment". The Muppets, the latest Muppet movie, opens in America this week and magazines across the nation have enthusiastically taken advantage of this to feature the cloth-covered puppets on their covers, in all their anarchic glory.

That film, though, has been slightly gazumped by the extraordinary documentary, Being Elmo, about the man behind possibly the most famous Muppet not on The Muppet Show but on Sesame Street. This beautiful movie has reminded audiences, if any needed reminding, that the Muppets were always more than just clever satirists but an integral part of American culture and society.

When Eddie Murphy dropped out of hosting the Oscars two weeks ago, a campaign was instantly launched for the Muppets to take his place. "Can Muppets Save the Day?" read the headline on the LA Times. "If the position were chosen by popular vote, the beloved Henson creations would likely come out on top," the journalist concluded. Sadly, the position is not chosen by popular vote and so the hosting duties went to another comedy throwback, Billy Crystal. But if the Muppets don't at least get to present an award, Miss Piggy should karate-chop Crystal. Hiii-yah!

Here is where I should, really, put the responsible disclaimer: my love for the Muppets is not without personal loyalties. My mother used to work for the Children's Television Workshop (CTW, now called Sesame Workshop), the non-profit organisation behind various Jim Henson shows. Incidentally, that is the coolest thing about me. It's all pith from hereon.

She worked on Sesame Street (The Muppet Show was, in fact, produced in England, as all English fans of the show tell me within one minute of first mentioning the programme – that explains the extraordinarily high number of cockney singalongs). Yet it's fair to say that I grew up in a household predisposed to watch all things Muppet-based. When I think back on my childhood, one of the first tableaux that comes to mind is me, my sister and our parents watching Sunday night screenings of reruns of The Muppet Show. It's a vision that seems so inspired by a 50s advert for TV sets that I'd doubt it – if my family didn't have a habit of making Muppet Show references to one another, if not on a daily basis then certainly on a weekly one, from Miss Piggy chasing her "Kermie" around, to the Mahna Mahna song. That Sunday night ritual, with my sister and me laughing at the slapstick gags, my parents laughing at the satirical ones, was as comforting as being tucked into bed later. It was like being told that everything, in the end, would turn out just fine.

But in all professional and personal honesty, I cannot imagine that if my mother had worked on, say, The Magic Roundabout, I'd have loved The Muppet Show any less.

For those who have – bafflingly, tragically – not yet had the pleasure of seeing The Muppet Show, I shall explain. Presented as a chaotic variety show – replete with unruly audience, fond of throwing things at the MC, a little green frog called Kermit – with a different celebrity guest in every episode, The Muppet Show was Henson's attempt to break out of the children's-entertainer niche he found himself in after the success of Sesame Street. And to a certain degree, it was a success. Unlike Sesame Street, The Muppet Show was not interested in educating its viewers in anything other than funny pastiches of, say, Bohemian Rhapsody as performed by Gonzo and his chickens, or the brilliant comedy potential of pairing, say, Carol Channing with Miss Piggy for a rendition of Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend. It was, at times, so surreal that one could only wonder how on earth it ever got on air, with scenes such as Miss Piggy trying to remove Rudolf Nureyev's towel in a sauna and Roger Moore beating the hell out of a bunch of Muppets. But it never sacrificed comedy for surrealism, let alone for the celebrity guest stars' egos. Like a Muppet-based version of Michael Frayn's classic play, Noises Off, or the great MGM musicals Singin' in the Rain and The Bandwagon, The Muppet Show was about the difficulties of putting on a show, with the main plots revolving around the relationships between the characters backstage (Miss Piggy pursuing a frazzled Kermit, Fozzie Bear always looking for and failing to find a joke), and the onstage set-pieces acting as comic relief. And as funny as those setpieces were, the personalities of the Muppets always struck me as the funniest part of the show, and seemed to amuse the celebrity guests most, too.

When I interviewed Dolly Parton for this paper over the summer, I tried to resist asking for my first question how she felt when she was honoured in Muppet form as "Polly Darton". I failed. Yet Parton, to her great credit, did not seem the least bit miffed: "Well, I was so excited! Who wouldn't be? I love that show. That was just a hoot! People your age still ask me about that – well, every week."

Stevie Wonder once said that playing Superstition on Sesame Street with the Muppets (and an amazingly enthusiastic small child in the background) was one of his career highlights. Roger Moore's Muppet Show appearances were absolutely his career highlight. Even Elton John – not a man known for handing out compliments lightly – has said that his 1977 appearance on The Muppet Show was "the most fun" he ever had and, I think it's safe to say, Elton was a man who knew fun from fun in the 70s.

Children's TV shows – and despite Henson's attempt to escape the "children's entertainer" tag, The Muppet Show was, ultimately, for kids – always spark silly sentimentality. But the Muppets are not petrified in nostalgia. If anything, the original shows look better today than when first screened in 1976 (they ended in 1981). The genius of The Muppet Show was that it was ironic without being cynical, sharp without being cruel, sweet without being sappy, anarchic without being too chaotic, timely without being dated. These balancing acts sound impossible today, particularly if one spends too much time, as I do, reading internet blogs and pop culture magazines in which the only language spoken seems to be Snark. (Although it is perhaps inevitable that my favourite characters will forever be Statler and Waldorf, the snarky critics in the box, passing dismissive judgment on one and all. Well, what else would you expect?) It is a satire of a 70s variety show (especially through the house band, Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem) and of American TV of the time (Veterinarian's Hospital, the show's take on General Hospital, remains one of the best TV satires, ever) yet it is timeless for a simple reason: it is very funny and, crucially, very kind.

So, when I said the coolest thing about me was that my mother worked for the Children's Television Workshop, that was perhaps not entirely true. I do have another, possibly even more trumpity-trump card in my pocket.

In 1989, my family moved from New York to London. It would, our parents assured us, be just a temporary move. But within a year, it was obvious that we were never going to move back as a family and so, in March 1990, my mother, sister and I travelled back to New York to pack up our childhood home. I'd already had to give up my dog, my friends and my life (in that order of importance). Selling the apartment – my bedroom! – seemed the most unbearable change of all.

In an attempt to distract us from our prepubescent grief, my mother took us to Disney World afterwards. It was OK. On the third day, as we wandered from one hour-long queue to the next hour-long queue, I heard a familiar voice.

It just so happened that our trip to Disney World coincided with the filming of The Muppets at Walt Disney World, a made-for-TV movie in which the Muppets meet the Disney characters, and we were suddenly standing about 4ft away from Jim Henson himself, bearded, sun hatted and in a lavishly patterned shirt, giving the frog hoiked up on his arm that reassuringly familiar voice as well as that endearing personality. Behind Henson, Frank Oz was adjusting Miss Piggy, doing her splendid diva head-waggle as she addressed her "Kermie". During a break, Henson smiled and said hello. Kermit shook my hand and hoped I was enjoying my vacation more than he was. He didn't like the heat that much; he wanted to get back to the swamp. I had met the Muppets, even if not, strictly speaking, on The Muppet Show tonight, and it was easily the most magical moment, quite possibly, ever.

Two months later, Henson died suddenly at the cruelly young age of 53.

We went back to London where we lived for the next 20 years and made new lives. When The Muppet Christmas Carol came out in 1992, the first Muppet movie since Henson's death, my family and I all went to the cinema together and we were relieved, we agreed, to see that it was up to the high Muppet standard. No matter what details changed and how life moved on, there will always be the Muppets. And everything, in the end, turned out just fine.

• The Muppets film is released in the UK in February 2012

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