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“The Link Between Exploration and Exploitation”: Eleanor Mortimer on How Deep Is Your Love
How Deep is Your Love Barbie Pig, Gummy Squirrel, Psychedelic Elvis Worm. These are not quirky colloquialisms for party drugs or Trolli candies, but rather taxonomic shorthand for deep sea creatures. For her debut documentary feature, director Eleanor Mortimer boarded a research vessel for an extended two-month expedition in the deep Pacific and encountered these alluring and alien animals firsthand. How Deep Is Your Love chronicles the work undertaken by taxonomists, who are slowly trying to identify the estimated 1.75 million undiscovered ocean species. Already a herculean task, the looming likelihood of rampant commercial deep sea mining—which intends to extract precious minerals like cobalt, nickel and copper from the ocean floor—threatens to impede further scientific advancement.
Then again, there’s the thorny issue of the taxonomists’ research being commissioned by the very entities that could decimate this ecosystem. Though Mortimer wasn’t allowed to record the 2023 International Seabed Conference that sought to negotiate regulations for deep sea mining—which ended in a technical stalemate on the issue—she filmed committee members during recess, asking them a sweetly disarming question about what sea creature they would choose to embody. Despite many of these individuals voting in favor of this exploitative practice, they can’t resist engaging with the question. The intoxicating power of the ocean is impossible to deny—doesn’t a small part of everyone wish that they could truly call it home? As opposed to conquering this expanse with colonial-minded chutzpah, it would do everyone well to reflect on how we could collectively ensure its protection while facilitating our understanding of it.
Mortimer and I chatted via Zoom the week before her film’s world premiere at True/False. Our resultant conversation covers the production’s spontaneous inception, her initial resistance toward incorporating voiceover and a specific deep sea creature she feels kinship with.
Filmmaker: Your previous short films have tended to focus on science and nature. What made this deep-sea expedition the perfect subject for your first feature?
Mortimer: It was a bit of serendipity. I grew up near one of the biggest ports in the UK, Felixstowe, and it had always been my dream to go to sea. As a little kid, I watched ships come and go, and I really wanted to go on them. I made a short about seafarers, and I’ve always been ship and sea adjacent. Then I became interested in the deep sea because I learned that it was outside of national jurisdiction. It was so curious to discover that this was a last frontier for humans. This is here on Earth, and no one owns it.
One of my first shorts, Territory, was about monkeys on Gibraltar, and it’s basically questioning this idea of ownership from the monkey’s perspective. The monkeys don’t care where the line is drawn in the sand, they just want to explore this space. I realized that the deep sea has this kind of question mark around it for humans because we’ve not been able to go there. Historically, it’s been impossible to get to. But now it’s this territory people are becoming interested in because it has this resource. From the very beginning of this film, I was thinking about it from these animals’ perspective, that have existed for millennia with no intervention. Suddenly there’s this light coming down from above, like an alien. What would that feel like? It’s a dark, dark place.
I became interested in the deep sea just as a general thing, but I didn’t know how you make a film about that. Jacob Thomas, a producer I worked with on a few of my shorts, his partner happens to be a scientist at the Natural History Museum. We were having dinner one evening and she started talking about her work with taxonomists. She works compiling the new animals that are being found in the deep sea. I had no idea what taxonomy was, and I was really fascinated to learn that there are loads of new animals being discovered by scientists. The process of that is a really long, drawn out and meticulous thing. It’s basically looking at tiny animals, drawing them and literally describing them. They have to write down what they’re seeing. Like, “This animal has centimeter long legs with tiny little hairs.” I was interested in marrying that and like the bigness of this unknown, undiscovered territory. I was like, “This is suddenly a film, not just like an abstract thing.”
I spent a year observing taxonomists in laboratories and filming the taxonomic process. I was always like, “Can you take me to sea, please?” And they were like, “No, we don’t have any space. That’s never gonna happen.” Then literally a week before they were going to go on this cruise, a piece of equipment broke, which meant that the person who operated that piece of equipment would no longer go, which meant that I could have a berth on this cruise. I had a week’s notice. I was like, “There’s no way I’m saying no to this. I have to go.” So I quit my teaching job and had to do a sea survival training course. I even had to have my wisdom teeth taken out. One of the things that you have to do before you go to sea is go to the dentist because it’s a two month long cruise. You have to check that you’ve got no problems that are going to come up. The dentist was like, “Well, there’s no guarantee that your wisdom teeth aren’t going to flare up in the next few months. I’ll just like taking them out now.” So yeah, that’s how I joined the cruise” basically last-minute and barely able to talk because my mouth was so numb [laughs].
Filmmaker: Aside from getting your wisdom teeth taken out and quitting your job, how else did you prepare, perhaps even mentally, for this extended time at sea?
Mortimer: The truth is that I didn’t. I knew that I needed to buy steel-capped boots, but I was also so naive. I took loads of warm clothes with me. My mom’s friend gave me this knitted bonnet because they were like, “You’re going to sea, you’re gonna be freezing!” It was the Pacific in early March [laughs]. It was freezing in the UK, but it was boiling out there. I had one pair of shorts!
But one thing that I had done—which basically meant that the process worked—was that I knew all the people going and they trusted me. Although the crew had never met me, I’d hung out with the scientists themselves in labs and during lunch two days a week for the better part of a year. That meant I was part of the wallpaper. I was really aware that I was going into this very confined space with 50 people and a camera. My first week was really about talking to everyone on board, making sure that they all knew that they could opt out and that they could talk to me about anything. I wanted them to feel safe because that was the place that they were living and working in.
Apart from that, I messaged a couple of people that I knew who had gone to sea. They were like, “Have a routine for yourself.” From the beginning, I made sure I had some sense of what my routine was, so as not to just drift about, which is sometimes what I found myself doing. Everybody else was on shift and I would be moving around according to what needed filming.
Filmmaker: You didn’t have a lot of time to plan things out, but how did you navigate prioritizing your own footage versus what the scientists were recording themselves?
Mortimer: I saw it as a chain of observation. I saw myself observing them while they observed, and then the sea creatures observing us back. I deliberately, as the filmmaker and as the narrator, wanted this slightly removed, slightly quizzical tone. Me, the scientists, the sea creatures, we’re all slightly trying to work each other out. I wasn’t really trying to intervene much in their filming. I mean, I did a filming workshop on the ship—just about holding shots, you know?—and they themselves really thought about lighting. I was surprised how aesthetically minded they were. I was interested in how they turned the seabed into this studio; they lit the creatures in some amazing ways.
Filmmaker: What was narration something that you always wanted to implement? What was the process of writing that for you?
Mortimer: I’ve never done narration before. I’ve always been an observational filmmaker, and I shot this film as an observational film. I had no intention of doing narration. I had the idea of using some text, almost like a Star Wars vibe. But the film was increasingly calling for the voice of an observer. There were certain things that the scientists were tunnel-visioned about in their research. They will talk about the details and the minutiae of a deep sea animal, but I didn’t want to force them to be the voice of something that they were not. That’s where my voice as a filmmaker came in, because there were elements of this story that I just really wanted to include. I didn’t want to have to make the characters say things that they wouldn’t actually say. We started working with Maya Daisy Hawke as an edit consultant. I would be showing her this footage and she’d be like, “Just say some stuff and we’re gonna stick it in here,” and it worked. I have to say, it was quite an uncomfortable thing for me to do. Even now, I slightly resist it, but this film was calling for it. I think it works, but it doesn’t mean that I liked doing it at all [laughs].
I didn’t write it separately to the edit, so some of the writing process happened in pre-production. I had millions of notes during the research stage, but I didn’t think that would be used as voiceover. I would record a note on my phone while I was on the train or something, so it didn’t really feel like writing, in that sense.
Filmmaker: This next topic is a bit complex, but I would like to pick your brain concerning the threads of British imperialism at play here. The research vessel you board is named after James Cook; Jamaica serves as the home base for the International Seabed Authority; the act of both collecting samples and extracting resources from the deep sea could both be seen as disharmonizing. What personal or artistic revelations did you make along the way on this front?
Mortimer: Something I thought about a lot was the link between exploration and exploitation. I went on a journey with these scientists who were passionate about what they were observing. I also had to question myself and my own role as an observer and think about what that actually means. I can’t say that I came out with any answers, but I think that’s part of what the film is. It asks a lot of questions. There are ethical hurdles that the scientists come across, like the fact that they cannot observe this space without changing it. You could say that you wouldn’t be able to mine the deep sea if we had no idea what was living there. The people who want to mine the deep sea have to carry out scientific research. So there’s this kind of link that goes on. It’s interesting because there’s this moment in the film where we get targeted by Greenpeace, and that’s exactly their argument. I’m with the scientists and that’s when this bubble of observation bursts. But what if we didn’t see [this research] at all? That’s a question for the audience, because I don’t think that a lot of people get a chance to see what is in the deep sea. The narrative of the mining companies and those who want to mine the deep sea is that there’s nothing but a barren landscape there. I think in a way, the audience becomes inadvertently complicit in this observing process with me. I guess that’s not really an answer, but that’s the journey I went on.
Filmmaker: The film even ends with you turning all of this on its head, allowing these creatures to infiltrate the terrestrial world on their own terms. Did the comic drawings of sea creatures examining humans under microscopes by that one scientist serve as inspiration at all? Or was this always a conscious idea of yours?
Mortimer: Jacob, the producer, is a hard nut to crack. I was like, “I want to make this film.” And he was like, “Yeah, but no one’s going to be interested. How would this film end?” I said, “The sea creatures would come into the human world.” It would be an imaginary ending, of course, but it would be a challenge to the audience. It’s an invasion of sea creatures, which is basically what’s happening in the universe. What amazed me about these scientists is that they were so creative, cool and fun. That scientist, Lucas, had been drawing the entire trip. I had actually no idea when I did that interview what he was going to show me. I thought they were just going to be little sketches of sea creatures. He came up with this and I was like, “That is amazing, because it’s also what I’ve been thinking about.” I think the scientists have a level of self-reflection about themselves and what they’re doing. It really helped with the edit of the film, because then the idea of them coming into the human space organically came out of the film as well as being part of my narrative.
Filmmaker: Something I appreciate is your gravitation toward women scientists and crew members. Was this another case of serendipity, or did you find that a lot of women gravitate toward this scientific area?
Mortimer: Both, in a way. I was gravitating towards the women scientists that I met, partly because I just felt this affinity towards them. Taxonomy is a field that is not really paid very well. It’s not taken that seriously. There are many women in my family who do a lot of work, but they don’t get much kind of recognition for it. I feel like the world is full of these people and a lot of them are women. I was really drawn to the fact that they do all this laborious, amazing work of describing and naming a new species. It feels like a labor of love, but they’re not really getting the recognition. They’ve also got this edge to them where they love these animals, but they will bring them up and dissect them. I was drawn to their passion, even if there was sometimes an edge of darkness to what they do. They’re not self-promotional, which is where I felt I could come in and be like, “I’m platforming you guys.”
Filmmaker: It’s interesting because I’ve had a fascination with the sea since I was a child. I was curious if women are particularly driven toward this interest.
Mortimer: Maybe there is. There’s this amazing book that I read called My Life in Sea Creatures while I was making this film. It’s an autobiographical book by a queer woman, and she tells parts of her life through sea creatures. I thought it was really interesting because I do think, perhaps, there is something about the sea as this dark space of the imagination, an uncharted territory that could be claimed as ours. Perhaps we feel like a lot of the Earth is a patriarchal space that we don’t necessarily feel like we belong in.
Filmmaker: Not to get gender essentialist, but there’s also the connection to the moon cycle. There’s also the running joke in pop culture that every girl wants to be a marine biologist when she’s five years old.
Mortimer: Yeah, I think there’s something to that.
Filmmaker: To pivot a bit, I adore Portishead and was happy to hear their music in the film. How did you settle on the soundtrack?
Mortimer: I have to credit Nicole Halova, the editor. We talked about it being almost like the Golden Record that gets sent to space. What does humanity sound like? We kind of deliberately approached it without any rules. Like, “Let’s just pull these totally different pieces of music and make it work as a soundtrack of humanity.” We wanted pop music, and I think Nicole chose Portishead. We just tried a lot of things and that was how the edit worked. But I think there’s also something bittersweet about the music, which worked really well with what we wanted the vibe of the film to be.
Filmmaker: Not to harp on the topic, but “Glory Box” is also about women’s relationship to men and the frustration in that.
Mortimer: Absolutely. Another rule that we had is we wanted female vocals threading through different music and the score, as well.
Filmmaker: I must also point out that the Bee Gees song that shares a name with your film’s title never plays. Was there any specific reason for that?
Mortimer: We used it as a temp track for the dive, actually. Nicole and I talked about our love lives a lot while we were editing the film. We felt like there was this love story going on between the scientists and the animals, like this love that becomes overbearing and obsessive. But the song was way too expensive, basically. We couldn’t afford it. Then at one point, Maya was like, “Can’t this just be the title?” That title also has this bittersweet thing going on, while also being playful and inviting. So the title stuck, but the song, sadly, had to go.
Filmmaker: You ask several representatives at the ISA conference what sea creature they would be. Do you have an answer for this yourself?
Mortimer: I haven’t thought enough about this, which I probably should. I think I would be the urchin, a little round red one with loads of spikes. It’s so cool because you kind of look at it and think, “okay,” and then when it walks, it’s amazing. I don’t even know how it does that. It somehow walks on its spikes. I would love to have spikes and just roll.
