Icy Issues: the problem of credit
I have been vaguely following the story about the March of the Penguins lawsuit but I recently read an article by Madelyn Grace Most in the International Documentary Association’s magazine Documentary and was newly intrigued by it all. Of course it’s always hard to get at the truth on stories like this but the gist of it seems to be that cameramen Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison filmed in Terre Adelie in the Antarctic for 13 months whereas the director, Luc Jacquet, was only there for two brief periods in February 2003 and November and December 2003. Chalet’s lawsuit asks that he be recognized as a co-director of the film because of this. Chalet and Maison nearly lost their lives when they got caught in a snowstorm and endured months of extremely difficult filming conditions, earning only 500 Euros per week, and yet they were not invited to the Oscars where the film won the Best Documentary Feature Award in 2005 - or even thanked in the acceptance speeches. Moreover, according to the article, Jacquet talked to the press and to audiences about how hard filming in the Antarctic had been and how difficult it had been to adjust back to reality again at the end of it, horrifying the French Society of Cinematographers (AFC) who had read the same words from Chalet in their magazine, Lumieres.
Is this a case of a camera person getting greedy after a film hits the jackpot? It was after all Jacquet’s original idea and he was the one who found the money, hired the talent and saw it through post-production. How do you work out the tricky issue of credit, especially when a project changes over time (which let’s face it is an occupational hazard in the world of docs), or when you suddenly find yourself involved with the second highest grossing documentary in North America and the highest grossing French film EVER.
I always find it interesting to see who gets to go up to the podium and get their pictures in the papers, obfuscating the many people and creative inputs that are all part of how a film actually gets made on the ground.