Director Eleanor Mortimer’s first feature HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE captures an unexplored world as a group of marine biologists travelling to the Clarion-Clipperton fracture, a 12-day voyage from the nearest land, spotlighting their mission to categorise the mysterious ecosystem against the impending threat of deep-sea mining. Director Eleanor Mortimer talks about her experience living with the taxonomists for two months, her filmmaking inspirations and the limitations of being an observer.

Mia Humphreys: Am I right in saying that HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE is your first feature film?

Eleanor Mortimer: Yes, this is my first feature. I’ve been making shorts for a fair while, since 2013. I never really wanted to do a long film; I really enjoyed making shorts, but this film called for a longer form.

MH: Did you find the experience of making a feature very different to making shorts?

EM: I would say it’s like comparing a marathon to a sprint, really. In some ways its easier editorially to make a feature film, even though the hard thing is that it’s stretched out over a longer period of time, so you have to maintain your stamina. There’s also more money involved in a feature, so there’s a lot more pressure. In a way, creatively, shorts are a lot harder because you have to make really hard decisions about what to put in because you have such a limited timeframe.

MH: How did your interest in aquatic life come about?

EM: I’m interested in things that are a bit hidden, things that are a bit alien. Things we exist with, but we don’t fully understand, and I think the underwater world really represents this. I made this short (BUBBLE, 2019) about a tropical fish shop, and it’s just all about people looking in and projecting their own lives onto the fish in the tanks. I think that’s what humans do when we look at the unknown: we sort of project, and that really interests me. Unknown spaces then reveal quite a lot about who we are as humans and how we look at the world.

MH: The visuals were such a highlight of the film, especially the underwater world that looks so alien.

EM: Yeah, definitely. What I was trying to do with the film was to create distance between us as humans and understand that we are only one being of many existing on this planet and in the universe. I wanted to zoom out on us as a species in this moment in time, asking questions about how we want to behave. The film, yes, is about scientists setting out to explore the deep sea, but as the narrator and filmmaker, I’m interested in exploring us as a species. We haven’t actually been around very long in the history of the planet, and we think we’re in control of everything, but we’ve made some monumental mistakes, and I think it’s a good time to take stock of that.

MH: How was your experience spending so long at sea?

EM: Oh, it was amazing, I loved being at sea, to be honest. It took us ten days to get to the middle of the Pacific, and then that was it for two months. It was a strange experience, at once it’s kind of claustrophobic because you’re on a ship with fifty other people, intertwined with their rhythms. Sharing rituals like mealtimes and gathering to watch the sunset together. But you’re also in an extremely remote place with 5000 meters of water below you and thousands of miles of water on either side of you, feeling this strong sense of vulnerability. At once, it’s this feeling of closeness with the other people on the shi,p but also of separateness from the rest of the planet.

MH: How did you navigate living with and also filming the taxonomists?

EM: That was quite a challenge. I knew the scientists because I’d been filming with them before, but the crew and everyone else didn’t know me from Adam, so the first week onboard was spent having conversations so that everyone knew what was going on. In any film, you have to build a trusting relationship, but this was quite specific in that I was both in their workspace and living space with a camera at all times. I just made sure that the dialogue was open. I was very lucky and kind of amazed that there weren’t more conflicts. Most of the time, they were pretty gentle with me and very open and welcoming. Though I did have one conflict. Doing the sound on the ship was quite difficult, there were a lot of generators, and I was really tired one evening, and basically, I turned off a fridge thinking ‘Its only for twenty minutes’ then completely forgot about it and went to bed. I woke up the next day, and the chief engineer was called in the middle of the night. They thought there was something wrong with the fridge! It was a horrible experience, but it was fine; no scientific experiments were harmed in the process.

MH: What are your influences as a filmmaker, and especially for this film?

EM: I am influenced by a lot of French documentary makers like Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman. I also love the work of Jacques Tati. For this film, I looked at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, which might sound a bit strange. In their film LEVIATHAN, they use separate cameras, which creates a sense of disembodiment and distancing. A lot of my references and inspiration came from personal nature writing, a lot of which is written by women. Books like ‘Surfacing’ by Kathleen Jamie, ‘The Sixth Extinction’ by Elizabeth Kolbert and ‘Why Fish Don’t Exist’ by Lulu Miller. Especially when I was thinking about voiceover, I was thinking of it as a first-person exploration rather than as an observer. I’ve never done voiceover before. I shot the whole film observationally, so in the edit, these were the books that I was thinking about, that chain of observation in the world.

MH: So it was only after filming that you decided to implement narration?

EM: Yeah, I was writing a lot during the process, but I didn’t really think that any of that would go in the film. It was just all my thinking, and a lot of the narration came out of that. In the edit, the narration came out of a necessity to speak directly to the audience, to have a viewpoint that wasn’t the scientific perspective, which can be a sort of tunnel vision. We needed the voice of an outside observer and to also admit that there was a chain of observing going on. The observer, who is me, is a slightly alien character that’s a bit separate, and it was quite necessary to position the film from her perspective.

MH: I feel like a lot of nature documentaries tend to be quite solemn and serious, and so I enjoyed the more playful tone of HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE.

EM: A lot of it is quite tongue-in-cheek. Like when I’m saying, “humans are known for being able to collaborate”, it’s supposed to be a bit playful. It’s almost like the narration is meant to be slightly satirical of ‘the voice of God’. It starts off as maybe a bit more solemn, serious and descriptive, and then you go into the uncertainty of this narrator. Especially around the Green Peace moment.

MH: How gutted were you that you slept through that?

EM: Oh my god, you have no idea. I was very upset. I couldn’t forgive myself for days. I was so worried about sleeping through something really important. It’s part of the limitations of being an observer, which plays into this layered reality that could be more powerful because the footage comes from other people on the ship. Such is the life of the documentary filmmaker: you miss things. Sadly. [laughs] I missed it physically because I didn’t get it, but it was also one of those blind spots for me personally. I was filming with the scientists and really attached to them and what they were doing, and maybe there was a bigger blind spot about the impact of studying something that could have negative effects.

MH: The soundtrack for HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE was another big highlight for me, especially the Portishead needle drop. How did that come about?

EM: So, when we were editing the film, Nicole Halova (the editor) and I landed on a needle drop quite early because we wanted a human pop-y element to some of the underwater scenes. We didn’t want to go for the classic sort of droning music [laughs], but we wanted to lean into that human perspective of the deep sea. We were looking for pop music with female vocalists. One thing I love about a lot of pop music is that it’s quite melancholic and bittersweet, and for me, that really encapsulates the mood of the film. It was quite the fight to get and afford the songs, and I wrote a long letter to Portishead. It’s kind of like the love the scientists had was kind of obsessive, and Portishead and their lyrics about the dark side of love worked perfectly.

MH: Do you have any future projects in the works?

EM: I’ve been living on a canal in London for seven years, and I’m currently in the process of moving away. I really want to make a film that’s the opposite of the deep sea in a way. I want to make a film about the canal with the boaters, and it might include a fictional story woven into it. It’s about collecting the stories of a city and exploring the underwater world of the canal. Hopefully, it will also reveal something about us as a species, but in a different kind of way.

MH: I have one more question. If you could be any sea creature, what sea creature would you be?

EM: Hmm. I would be a Headless Chicken Monster. It’s like a purple sea cucumber that swims, and it has a really amazing form of self-defence where it just ejects the contents of its gut at anyone who tries to attack it. And I just think that’d be great. [laughs]