“Becoming Cousteau” may be light on some of the late-years squabbling over his sizable empire, including the bankrupted theme park Cousteau Oceanic Park near Paris. (Cousteau also had two other sons: Jean-Michel and Philippe, who died in a plane crash in 1979.) Working with the family, Garbus says, was “very complicated.” But it took years to get access approved by the Cousteau Society and his estate.Ĭousteau’s second wife, Francine Cousteau, and their two children, Pierre Yves and Dianne, are executive producers on the film. Garbus, the prolific documentarian of two Oscar-nominated docs (“What Happened Miss Simone?” “The Farm: Angola, USA”) and a host of others ( “The Fourth Estate,” “All In: The Fight for Democracy”), first started developing the film in 2015. They were like: These shows are a downer.’” “Certainly he suffered commercially for that, as well. “By the end of his life, I think he felt like Cassandra screaming to everyone about this impending doom,” says Garbus.
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In later years, his popular, Emmy-winning nature series turned increasingly grim and ominous. 24 on Disney+, has one toe in the dreamy mystical realm of Cousteau’s own making - the otherworldly underwater photography he shot with Louis Malle the stylish, high-seas adventures aboard the Calypso - and another in a more sober reality of ocean pollution that Cousteau watched with growing concern. “It is as though you’ve been introduced to heaven and then forced back to Earth.” “I am miserable out of the water,” Cousteau, who died in 1993, says in a recording in the film. It’s a defining documentary portrait of the French oceanographer - the real-life Steve Zissou - as a fish only truly content below the surface. “Becoming Cousteau,” which National Geographic opens in theaters Friday, attempts to frame the singular Cousteau and his legacy as an early environmental defender of increasingly imperiled waters.
In Liz Garbus’ “Becoming Cousteau,” an editor named John Soh from ABC’s “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” wrestles with the difficulty of labeling Cousteau only to conclude: “He was a man looking at the future.” Perhaps more than anything else, Cousteau symbolized a boundless spirit of adventure, leading a landlubbing public into enchanted underwater worlds. Maybe Cousteau’s legacy is, appropriately, more fluid. He was a filmmaker who made otherworldly undersea documentaries - three won best documentary Oscars - but he disliked the term. He was an environmentalist whose voyages were nevertheless sometimes funded by oil companies seeking drilling sites. He was an oceanographer and explorer but held no scientific degree. NEW YORK - Who was Jacques-Yves Cousteau, exactly?
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