Willem Dafoe was filming Spider-Man: No Way Home in Atlanta in 2021 when he used a day off to record narration for an independent Australian documentary, titled River.
River (co-produced by ABC) is a follow-up to 2017's Mountain, which broke Australian box office records as the highest-grossing homegrown non-IMAX documentary — and was also narrated by Dafoe.
Like Mountain, it blends cinema essay with documentary, to tell the story of one of Earth's formative features: how they shaped first the planet and then human civilisation — before humans learned how, in turn, to shape them.
It was filmed in 39 locations, and features NASA time-lapse imagery and aerial shots captured by an informal global network of drone cinematographers.
Like Mountain, it features music performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra (Mountain was in fact instigated by ACO's artistic director Richard Tognetti, as a live concert film) and a poetic text by British nature writer Robert Macfarlane.
"River somehow seems more political [than Mountain]," says Dafoe.
The environmental message appealed to him, though he didn't want the film to feel like a lecture.
"I guess I feel like this film is an awareness raiser. And then people, as they get more information, and they reflect on how they have to change their behaviour, hopefully there will be a more positive result," he says.
Going with the flow
For Dafoe, narrating Mountain and River are relatively small jobs in a career that spans from Marvel movies to art-house films like The Lighthouse. (His narration for River is just under 1400 words).
He signed on for Mountain after documentary-maker Jennifer Peedom approached him.
"I checked her out, I looked at her films that she'd made — particularly Solo, that she made with David Michôd, and also Sherpa. And then I think she sent me a link to the film and the text," Dafoe says, on Zoom from Italy, where he lives in a place outside Rome.
"I liked how she approached me, I liked the material, and I liked the idea that it would be touring with an orchestra; that's kind of a nice change for a movie. So I signed on to that."
He enjoyed that project so much that when Peedom asked him to narrate River, it was a no-brainer — despite the fact that he was her 'back-up' choice this time.
"She said, 'I'm thinking about a female voice for it. But if I can't find the right voice, would you be waiting in the wings?' And I said, sure," he smiles.
"She was so clear about that, that I was happy to say 'Yes — find what you need. And if you need me to do the voice, I will.'"
Dafoe describes the process of working on both films as a kind of "call and response" between him and Peedom, as they tried to weave the narration with jaw-dropping imagery and the soundtrack (which ranges from Vivaldi to Radiohead to an improvisation by Aboriginal Australian composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist William Barton).
"She kind of leads things, you know — directs me to go against things; to go with it; to explore different ways of doing it. Sometimes very objectively, sometimes more subjectively. It's a fun game between an actor and a director," Dafoe says.
Downriver thinking
Mountain covered terrain close to Jennifer Peedom's heart: she was a long-time climber herself, and had discovered later in life that she had a natural affinity for high altitudes — which made her the perfect fit for filming expeditions.
When the Australian Chamber Orchestra approached her with the concept for Mountain (conceived as a follow-up to an ACO concert film called The Reef), she was already plotting her 2016 documentary Sherpa, shot on Mount Everest with cinematographer Renan Ozturk. In downtime, the two discussed what Mountain might be.
Mountain was also largely shaped by the writing of Robert Macfarlane — specifically, his 2003 book Mountains of the Mind, about the powerful lure of these landscapes. He ended up joining the team, writing the poetic text for the film.
Both Sherpa and Mountain were hits at the Australian box office (taking roughly $1.27 million and $2 million, respectively), making a follow-up seem less like a daydream and more like a smart move.
"[Rivers] became the next logical step when we started to talk about what we wanted to do next," Peedom says.
The narrative arc of River takes in the formation of the planet and the rise of civilisation at the water's edge — and the shift towards humans seeing rivers less as gods and more as resources, to be harnessed.
A significant slice of the film's 75 minutes is devoted to the damming and diversion of rivers — a path paved with good intentions (and many positive outcomes), but with disastrous environmental consequences that flow downstream in place and time. (Cue scenes of eco-horror — including the Darling-Barka river thick with blue-green algae and dead fish.)
The film makes a clear statement: the fate of humans and rivers are fundamentally intertwined.
Peedom thought carefully about the tone and narrative arc of the film — "the balance between hope and despair and urgency" — and went a step further: she tested it with audiences.
"The first test that we did was with a bunch of the film students who were close to where we were editing, at film school. And, you know, I think the first pass [edit of the film] was a little too heavy — certainly one of our producers felt that," she recalls.
"And then we're going to the film school, and all these young people, they said, 'No, you're not going nearly hard enough, you need to go harder.' And so the tone did shift in the editing process."
Shooting globally during COVID
By coincidence, the first day of pre-production on River was also the first day of lockdown in Australia — March 16, 2020.
For a film with a global scope, it was bad news.
"Needless to say, we had intended to travel and shoot more," says Peedom.
"[But] we never intended to shoot absolutely everything, because you just can't — this film was shot in 39 countries. And so we were always going to be drawing on the cinematography of [other] people, like we had on Mountain."
Some of the most incredible shots in the film were supplied by drone cinematographers from across the world.
"We had to connect into all of those networks that we'd established with Mountain, but further extend them," says Peedom.
She and her co-director, Joseph Nizeti (who was tasked with developing and tapping into this network), were pleasantly surprised to discover that the technology and quality of drone cinematography had rocketed in the years between films.
"And so there was this amazing array of these young drone cinematographers," says Peedom — name-checking Dutch drone pilot Ralph Hogenbirk (whose proximity shots of a Norwegian glacier come early in the film) and Australian filmmaker Rory McLeod (whose shots of the Murray-Darling basin were taken while shooting his own documentary).
"The happy discovery was also that a lot of them had seen and loved Mountain, so they were really keen to be involved," says Peedom,
"I think it's partly why the film is the way that it is. And it is a truly global perspective of like-minded people who care about the planet, but also care specifically about rivers."
River is on ABC iview.
