Jacques Cousteau: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Management and production company Inner Voice Artists (IVA) is teaming with a pair of environmental activists on a docuseries that will explore topics including climate change, mental health and social justice.

Becoming Cousteau director Liz Garbus said her documentary about ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau shows that he recognized the dangers of climate change decades ago. Garbus spoke with Deadline’s Matthew Carey at Contenders Documentary.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticJacques-Yves Cousteau had one of those faces that seemed to come from an earlier time — before the world wars, maybe even before the 20th century. It was a face so thin and tapered yet open, so creased with character, so French.

Addie Morfoot ContributorNational Geographic first approached Liz Garbus at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival about directing a documentary focused on French sea explorer Jacques Cousteau. Garbus, who grew up watching David Wolper’s ABC series “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” was intrigued.

Telluride Film Festival programmers refer to its annual feature program, is back this year with a wide array of documentary award season contenders.Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, Jacques Cousteau, Anthony Fauci, Francisco Fellove and the Velvet Underground are the subjects of various docus in this year’s lineup. The nonfiction lineup also includes films about cows, rivers, caves, and family dynamics.The secretive Telluride team unveiled the 2021 program just 24 hours before the festival begins.

While eye-popping images of ocean life are now commonplace — see the current Oscar-contending documentary My Octopus Teacher — when diving pioneer Jacques Cousteau released his documentary The Silent World in 1956, they were virtually unknown. The color film, co-directed by Cousteau, then 45, and Louis Malle, then 24, and edited from footage taken from excursions on Cousteau's trusty research vessel Calypso, revealed the strange majesty of ocean life.

Out of the vast universe of nature documentaries, I don’t think I’m alone in finding films about life under the sea to occupy a special place. The very fact that they exist, of course, is amazing — though when you watch one, part of the wonder is that you’re not thinking about how aquamarine filmmakers actually hovered in the ocean depths to shoot this stuff. Jacques Cousteau, the pioneer of the genre, liked to place himself at the center of things, but the creators of “Dolphin Reef,” a Disneynature doc that drops on Disney Plus on April 3, simply get out of the way and let the ancient creatures of the sea seduce us with their surreal evolutionary form-follows-function wild splendor.