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All right, Mike, can you give me an audio check?
MIKE deGRUY: Copy that.
Bellows are set.
Relatively comfortable in there? Over.
Absolutely. Everything's go.
Oxygen's set. Vacuum has been pulled.
I'm looking at a minus pound of pressure in here.
If all goes well, today I will break the Pacific Abyss records,
it is the first time that I will actually go beyond the range
of even our deepest divers.
In the immortal words of Buzz Lightyear:
To infinity and beyond!
Yeah, okay. Confirm feed off. And we're power up.
- Power up. - Power up.
Okay, Mike. Ready for deep dive? We're gonna let out umbilical.
Okay, I'm going down.
Just passing 223 feet.
And I'm still heading down.
I'm now at 232 feet.
This is where you start feeling like, "Mm, I'm alone down here now."
No divers, nobody. Just me and my space suit.
I'm now at 385 feet.
Still descending.
But it's dark out there!
Right now, Mike is deep enough
that, uh, we don't have any divers on board
capable of any rescue or interventions.
He's the master of his own fate right now.
He's on his own.
Study under the ocean these days,
means you've got to be very good at doing quite a lot of things.
And if you're going to really study deep water behavior,
you've got to be able to go there.
That's a rather different proposition than saying,
"Join me at the laboratory bench."
Like, the best scientists, the best explorers that I've ever encountered,
they have never quite grown up.
Fortunately, Mike never did.
It became who he was.
Sorry.
Good luck, little guy.
See you later.
MIMI deGRUY: It just seemed to me that he understood we all love the ocean,
and that it appealed to our better natures and that it united us.
I think if you were to say
what was the one defining characteristic of Mike as a professional,
as a filmmaker, as a person, it was enthusiasm.
It used to remind me of throwing potassium into a glass of water.
You're nuts! Because it's freezing cold.
- It's dark and it's a long way home. - Right.
Mike became a celebrity host on Shark Week.
I'm Mike DeGruy and I've been lucky enough
to swim with and film sharks like this for 30 years.
The problems of getting those sort of shots depended on people like Mike.
And, of course, there weren't many people like Mike.
When I think of Mike, I think of panache.
He... he didn't just tell the story.
He told it with, with, you know, with style.
He always spoke two languages simultaneously.
English and hands. You know?
All that hammerhead has to do is slightly tilt up,
slightly tilt down, and it becomes extremely maneuverable.
FRANK deGRUY: He was mostly an explorer
and a discoverer
because he liked to come back with the stories.
He would say,
"Let me show you what I saw!
"Let me show you this!"
He would come back all excited and enthusiastic...
at something that nobody had ever seen before.
He always looked at it like he had found this secret code
that unlocks this whole other room,
and he just was shocked that everybody
didn't wanna come into the secret room with him
and see this whole other world.
As crazy as Mike sometimes was,
we all know he did a lot of crazy stuff,
and some people may have looked at him and said,
"That's irresponsible. You're nuts."
This is classic reef life good behavior at night.
Mike, I knew I could depend on if I was in a tough situation.
I knew I could depend on him.
Mike was a risk-taker,
but Mike was a superb risk-taker.
He always landed on his feet, on that featherbed.
There was a moment I felt
it's just not worth it, the risk is not worth it.
It's not worth it to the families to get that phone call.
I couldn't even believe that what you were about to tell me
was even, you know, possible.
It was late at night, I was home alone
when I got the phone call telling me that Mike had died.
And I remember going outside,
it was a really clear night, and thinking,
"This doesn't make any sense. I spoke to him this morning."
How can someone so full of life
be here one minute and then gone?
I mean, this was my husband,
the father of my children,
my filmmaking partner.
He was everything.
When I finally made my way back into our edit room,
I started watching footage.
It was almost like Mike came alive.
And then, I found this piece of footage shot shortly before he died,
and I watched it over and over.
To the insane amounts of money...
Because he was so different from that enthusiastic, joyful Mike.
And it seemed to me that his whole life had led him to that moment
and he really wanted to share his outrage with the world.
But then he couldn't.
So, I knew I had to tell his story.
I don't remember how this started.
KATHERINE deGRUY: He was a different little boy.
He really was.
Mike was an animal lover.
He had two ducks herding the puppies together
and taking 'em down in the backyard.
He was like a child.
Everywhere he looked, no matter what he saw, what it was,
he wanted to go touch, feel,
examine, get up close. "Ooh, it bit me. Oh, well." You know?
I remember him getting his thumb stuck
in the mouth of a Komodo dragon in the Galapagos, you know.
That's not something you want to be reaching out to pet.
But that was Mike.
Another adaptation that the silky sharks have made for...
Shit!
Living in the pelagic environment...
I was just bitten by one, actually.
The, uh...
Actually, my hand hurts.
- So you think you gotta come up? - Yeah.
Mike had more enthusiasm and interest and excitement,
and he usually would take things farther than the rest of us.
But there was a lot of energy. Four boys in five years.
It was a little bit like,
"Don't anybody strike a match in this room."
He collected animals a lot more than the rest of us did.
Most of the time, that went pretty well.
But sometimes, that went awry.
I think it was a garter snake. It might have been a green snake.
Some kind of snake got away and we forgot about it.
He said, "Mama, I can't find my snake. It got away."
A lot of distress. No snake to be found for months.
And out of the TV, the snake came up,
and I don't know why it wasn't electrocuted
with those tubes and everything there
because Mike was a little bitty boy, so TV had just come out.
And I could have killed him. I could have killed him.
I said, "You get that thing and get it out of this house!"
But it was those early days of snakes and frogs and lizards
in the Mobile delta that probably got me started.
He loved the water from his earliest childhood.
We lived on the water
and we had rivers and bayous, sounds, lagoons
and the Gulf of Mexico.
We had a lot of different kinds of water around
and we fooled around in all of that water.
And Mike was more interested in it than any of us.
You know, he spent his summers at the pool, swimming pool, diving.
We were all divers growing up, springboard divers.
Their daddy, at first, coached 'em.
GLENN deGRUY: My dad, in order to make himself coach better,
he went and got an eight millimeter camera
and filmed us diving,
where we could play it back and watch it.
That had a lot to do with getting better.
And it got Mike interested in filming,
and he made crazy home movies.
When Mike started out as a diver, he was scared.
He wouldn't try new dives.
He was just afraid to do 'em.
And then one day,
he decided that he was gonna do 'em, and he did.
Mike got on the boards and started trying stuff.
He was flipping and twisting. He was landing flat.
He would get back up there and try it again.
We couldn't believe our eyes.
My dad and I looked at each other like, "What happened?"
He quit being scared. I don't know how
he exactly looked fear in the eye, but he did.
That marked an inflection point in his psychological development.
He never went back.
He had more guts. He had more courage.
He would push things farther and harder
than anybody I knew from then on.
My oldest brother and Mike, my younger brother,
both beat guys that won the Olympics.
It just so happened their timin' wasn't right to be in the Olympics.
Diving is all about incredible timing
and incredible precision.
And so, I think he carried a lot of that Olympic training that he had
into how he even approached his career.
This dive is so hard.
We saw one Russian attempt it in Munich
and he landed flat on his back.
Now, let's see what Mike can do.
It's an awfully difficult dive.
Oh, terrific!
His lust for life, his gusto, and in part, the diving developed that.
That freedom that you get when you're really good,
free-falling in the air, line up right.
There's nothing as exhilarating as that.
You're free of gravity.
You're free of the constraints of normal human limitations.
His body was his wisdom as much as his mind.
The wonderful thing for me about diving is that you can fly.
I just love the feeling of weightlessness.
Scuba diving is incredible, or free diving even better,
where you're completely supported by this body of water.
I feel nurtured by it.
And therefore, I started working very hard to learn as much as I could about it,
and at a certain point, decided to make films about it.
So I'm still with it a lot.
So I was working at the Waikiki Aquarium.
That was three years, and I just had a little bit to go on a PhD.
A guy walked into the aquarium one day
and he saw the chambered nautilus on display,
which a friend of mine and I had collected.
And it happened to be the animal that was my study animal
as a grad student.
Anyway, this guy wanted me
to collect some for him
and send the nautilus back to Florida
so he could have them on display.
So he sent myself and some friends out to the South Pacific
to collect chambered nautilus for him.
And we did. We made a film which was horrible, horrible.
No, it was not. It was a good film.
- Said my wife. - For you at least.
Yeah!
It was the most fun I had ever had.
And finally, there they were, nautilus.
It was a big moment for me and my friend Bruce Carlson,
with whom I first collected nautilus.
They've probably been here for hundreds of millions of years
in this kind of habitat.
And I thought, "Well, wait a second.
"This was so much fun,
"and I can make movies about the animals that I've been learning about.
"Maybe I should just be a filmmaker
"and teach to the millions rather than the hundreds."
And so, I literally came back from that trip,
quit school, hung my filmmaking shingle,
never told anyone I didn't know what I was doing,
and just started making films.
But the point of it all is that it was fun,
and I just kept doing it and kept doing it
and got better and better and better and then got paid for it,
and it's the only job I've ever had.
When I first met Mike,
it was when we were coming to film in Samoa
with both of you, all three of you,
and I'd been told that he'd had a shark attack
and his arm was all messed up,
and I expected to meet this kind of immobilized, gimpy guy
and he walks in, and here's this muscular
just, you know, very vi...
- Vitalious? - I was gonna say virile.
That didn't really sound right.
- That's what you were thinking. - I know!
I really didn't know what to make of Mike those first few days
because he was so flirtatious.
So I just thought, "Uh, no."
But then something happened.
We had an underwater shoot,
and I had never seen anyone like him.
He was almost amphibious.
And I just wish, like anything I wish,
that I had 10% of Mike's skill being at home underwater.
And he was so curious,
he effervesced with this joy and he was funny.
He was incredibly funny.
And he seemed to me to be in really deep conversation with the ocean.
He became this kind of emissary or shaman from that world,
and suddenly, I was hooked.
And I fell totally in love.
I was living in Hawaii when Mimi and I met.
Mimi was living in Atlanta.
And we had this long-distance relationship going
and you know how wonderful those last.
Mike and I stayed in touch after we met,
and he would write me these beautiful, long, descriptive letters
about a film he was making with Paul and Gracie Atkins.
I was so fascinated by his adventurous spirit
because it wasn't a simple adrenaline rush,
he really had a higher purpose.
We're fairly early in our careers,
and we want to do a great natural history film about Hawaii.
We made a list to the BBC about all these sequences that could be filmed,
and they said, "Great, you're off and running."
I mean, it was barely a proposal or a budget or anything.
So here we are making this film,
and only one other cameraman in the world
had ever shot an image of lava flowing into the ocean,
and it had been off Hawaii years before.
We're not sure what the film is really about, you know?
And Madame Pele let us know.
We were a little bit nervous about getting up close to the lava.
So we're sitting there on the boat
trying to figure out exactly how we're gonna conduct this dive,
and Mike, while we're talking this out, grabs his boogie board,
grabs his underwater housing,
and swims right up to the lava, right where it's going into the water.
So being his assistant, I jump in, I swim up behind him.
All of this is brand new. Nobody's done this before.
And Mike is right there in the heat of the moment, in the eye of the storm.
We didn't know this at this dive,
but over a few days, the shelf builds up.
The slope gets steeper and steeper until suddenly, it lets go.
There were flaming balls of methane gas
that were going off in front of your face.
You'd feel this whoomp against your chest as they would go up.
Scientists were aware that methane gas was being created by the lava,
and it would blow trees out of the ground on land,
but no one had seen the effect of that methane underwater.
It's like you're driving down a freeway in a car,
and as long as you don't stick your head out the window,
you don't realize you're going 50 miles an hour.
Until you stick your head out the window, you know?
And that was like we were in a car,
dropping down with all of this rock.
So I had no idea how deep we were going or when we would stop,
and unfortunately, I got tossed out to the side.
We all did, at various depths.
Everything was fine, but that was the end of our lava dive.
Eventually, Mike and I realized we really wanted to be together.
So I left my job and went to work with him,
and we had a commission to do a film on sharks.
Mike was so charismatic that he talked me,
a girl from Pittsburgh,
into diving with sharks two weeks after I was certified.
We took three years traveling all over the world,
finding the best shark behavior stories.
Those were the days when the budgets would support that.
The days before reality TV and that endless appetite for cheap programming.
We often spent weeks just observing
before shooting even a single frame.
You know, when he was in the ocean,
and trying to decide whether to roll on something, it was hard
because you only had so many minutes of film,
you were all the way down at the bottom, all this heavy gear.
It was almost like he knew exactly...
the moment that he should start rolling.
I don't know if that's intuition or just skill.
His sense of what was going to happen next was very good.
His intuitions misled him sometimes.
I think it's impossible for me to tell you
how I feel emotionally right now.
This is the first time I've returned to Enewetak Atoll
since the single most extraordinary event in my life took place
in the lagoon right out there.
I was scuba diving with a friend of mine at about 50 feet.
It's a beautiful day, a beautiful dive,
everything was going according to plan.
I was taking still pictures.
There was a variety of sharks around,
and they were coming particularly close.
And, as a matter of fact, I remember thinking,
"Boy, this is a great roll. I'm getting good close-ups of this fish."
One of them in particular, it was a five-foot female,
was going through a very dramatic posture where its nose was up,
its pectoral fins were lowered, its mouth slightly open.
And I looked at it, and my immediate reaction was,
this was a warning I was seeing, that it is a threat posture.
The more I looked at it, the more injured it appeared.
So I took its picture.
The moment the strobe fired, so did the shark,
and it broke out of the posture.
Before the mirror in the camera
even returned so that I could see
through the viewfinder again,
it had halved the distance between us.
So, all I could do was just push the camera out toward it.
At that point, it seemed like
things were happening in slow motion.
I could see the shark coming right at me.
And right as it got to the camera,
it started opening its mouth
and pushed the camera to the side,
which naturally presented my elbow.
And again, in slow motion,
as though it had rehearsed it a hundred times,
just grabbed my arm in its mouth,
shook and took off the top of my arm.
He was in the hospital six weeks
because they had to take parts from all over his body
to get that arm back where he could use it.
And it was amazing.
And they wanted to patch it up to make it look better.
It looked like a quilt, you know.
But he wouldn't do that. He said, "I've had enough."
KEN deGRUY: Typical Mike, good spirits.
We're talking about the shark that they found dead washed up on shore.
I said, "Really?" And he goes,
"Yeah. He died of food poisoning."
But he healed and he had a great scar
to tell everybody about for the rest of his life,
which he did.
I think he was particularly fond of the fact
that part of the grafted skin came from his buttocks.
Anybody less full of whim than Mike wouldn't have survived that.
And yet, not only did he survive,
he went back and going on doing it.
Extraordinary.
JOE MaclNNIS: Risk is something
that's so essential to our lives.
You go out there because it's a discovery of the other world.
The ocean world, the depths, the creatures.
But it's a self-discovery as well.
And risk is the catalyst that allows us...
It's a lens that allows us to look inside ourselves
and see who we really are.
One of the things that I don't buy about sharks
is that they're unpredictable.
And that is exactly why I went back to Enewetak
and recreated my shark attack.
I knew that if I put that shark and myself in a position,
that I could get that shark to attack me.
And sure enough, I covered myself, protected myself,
and I was able to press the shark and elicit an attack.
Now, is that unpredictable?
I was really moved by Mike's reaction
because he could have hated that shark that nearly killed him.
But he understood that he'd made a mistake
and the shark was just behaving naturally.
It was a really beautiful and brave response.
Mike loved to tell people he had two birthdays.
The second was the day he survived that attack
because he really felt he'd been given a second chance.
I think Mike took that scar,
not as a badge of courage about what he had survived,
but I think he took it as an impetus
for standing up and saying,
"If I can tell you that sharks are not deadly,
"they're beautiful and magnificent creatures,
"they need to be saved,
"and this arm is evidence of my being in a different situation with the shark,
"then you should give my words some credit."
Some people always have been susceptible
to wanting to watch programs about sharks killing.
Eating people, killing things.
You know, that image sticks in people's minds.
And it sells.
To me, it's like animal pornography.
Look at the heat profile of this shark...
Mike was always getting into a battle with producers
over this sensationalism
versus trying to tell a more honest story.
We've seen an incredible variety of sharks in this program,
but is one of them more perfectly designed than another?
I don't think so.
Seems to me, they're all perfectly designed for their particular niche,
and the time that they lived in.
They're very sophisticated animals.
I mean, anything that's had 400 million years to evolve,
you can imagine how good they are at what they do,
and that's where sharks are.
They're extremely well adapted to the environment.
And to be underwater and look at these animals
is something that can take your breath away.
They're beautiful!
Mike was like a missionary.
He was so driven to share his admiration for sharks,
in part, I think, because they're so diverse,
and for him, it was a lesson in life
that diversity is what's going to enable you to survive.
There were at least nine shark-attack survivors on Capitol Hill today
lobbying to protect their toothy attackers.
They want the Senate to pass the US Shark Conservation Act.
Joining us now is Mike DeGruy.
What I try to tell others about,
especially others in a position
to, you know, enact law,
is that they're...
They're are a lot more than, you know, feeding machines
that run around making baby sharks
and eating anything in sight.
More appropriate to why I am here,
with the rest of the people who have been attacked,
is that they're vanishing.
My experience with sharks has left scars.
But more importantly, it has given me knowledge
about these beautifully designed creatures.
And I believe knowledge dissipates fear.
I'm convinced that the more we know about them,
the less we will fear them.
And we'll realize that they are not our enemies.
My hope is we can stop being theirs.
In those early days,
Mike was also working on a David Attenborough series
called Trials of Life,
And he would be away for long stretches of time.
Well, it's April Fool's Day.
How you doing, Mimi?
It's kind of strange talking into this thing,
but it seemed like a good idea.
What you hear out there
is an incredible wind.
I'm sitting on the edge of the beach
and I'm thinking of you
and missing you and wishing, wishing, wishing, wishing,
wishing that I were with you,
there, here, anywhere!
It's terrible.
I first met Mike in 1990
when I went to look at some mind-blowing footage
of killer whales taking sea lion pups in Patagonia.
It was the first time that anyone had ever seen that.
And, of course, it was sensational.
At that time, animal behavior was very rarely filmed.
That was one of the wonderful things about working on that series.
Almost all the sequences had never been done before.
But at the same time,
that was very worrying because we didn't know
whether we were going to succeed often.
So I spent a lot of time with these baby sea lions.
I would put on my wetsuit, roll around in sea lion dung,
put my camera on a boogie board
and slowly inch my way up to the colony.
And after a while, they pretty much ignored me.
And suddenly, killer whale fins turned up,
and we thought, "Oh, boy, here we go."
And the sequence started unfolding
just as we had imagined that it would.
We were shooting all of it from the beach,
and it was time to get in the water.
Juan Carlos Lopez, the scientist in Patagonia
who had been studying this population of orcas for over 20 years,
had made it crystal clear to us
there is no way you can safely get into the water with the orca.
Just about everybody in Argentina said, "You would die,
"because these are killer whales that hunt mammals,
"and you're a mammal."
For weeks and weeks I watched this behavior.
These killer whales moving back and forth,
and a sea lion pup would go out into what we call "The Kill Zone."
And over the weeks, I saw a pattern develop.
There could be a bunch of sea lions crossing this channel.
And there could be adults, males and females,
and hidden in there in the surf and in the crazy,
will be one little pup.
And if there was one pup in there,
killer whales who were sitting out, 50 yards out or 40 yards out,
and unable to see,
but using echo-location or passive hearing,
were able to detect whether in the group there was a pup or not
from 50 yards out.
And if there was a pup, they would attack.
If it was the same sort of group of sea lions with just adults,
they would just sit there.
So, obviously, their sensory system was so fine-tuned
that Mike and I were convinced that they were never gonna mistake us,
with metal tanks, big metal housings,
for a seal.
After seeing probably 30 of these die a violent death,
now it's my turn to put on my little sea lion outfit, wet suit,
and go into the water and try to film this behavior from the water.
So I didn't take this lightly.
And the fins got closer and closer,
and I remember, at one point,
I, like, motioned to Mike and said, you know,
"Look, behind us," and we turned around
and the seals...
The sea lions were all over the beach, like, looking at us.
I could just see it in their eyes. They're like,
"Get out of the water! Are you crazy?
"Do you see what's coming?"
Being on snorkel, being in the killing zone with a camera in your hands
and there's a fin six feet tall coming through the water,
and every primitive instinct you have is screaming,
"Get out of the water!"
While all that's going on in the back of my head,
I'm hearing Mike and Paul saying,
"Roll! Roll! Roll! Roll!"
I noticed one of the killer whale fins turned straight at me.
Just started moving in.
And as I started to back up, I realized
"There's no way I have time to get out of the water."
I was now committed.
So, all I could do was take a deep breath,
go underwater and start rolling.
Something started emerging in the viewfinder.
It was a sort of a milky white color
which turned into a killer whale head.
And it came right at the camera,
moved past the camera,
and kept going past. Kept going past.
Kept going past. It was like a freight train going by me.
And then, I started hearing this "Boom! Boom! Boom!" sound.
"What the heck is that?" And I realized it was my heart and lungs!
I hadn't been breathing!
So I had to leap out of the water and take a big breath.
I worried about how it would be received.
People saw that this was a straight, scientific,
dispassionate eye trying to look at how the world works.
And it caused a sensation in the unit.
Everybody was talking about it.
The moment had been shown.
We wanted to expose the audience to the truth about, what we felt,
the truth about what we were seeing.
The absolutely extraordinary beauty and terror of nature.
It is a complicated, dangerous business
and Mike and Paul had worked at it.
They set a high watermark
which nobody else came near for a long time.
People making natural history films
can be given some kind of credit
for opening up all kinds of windows on the natural world.
And scientists who lead us most of the time,
just every now and again,
can learn a bit from what the cameramen have discovered.
And so, those pioneering sequences,
I think, actually hold their place in the history of discovery.
And they've raised a lot of questions.
People think fish feel no pain.
But, Mike, he knew full well that fish do feel,
they have families, they have all kinds of connections
that we never really give them credit for.
And he just had that ability to get people to think outside of themselves.
Now, this is a perspective I've never seen.
Well, welcome to our octopus gymnasium.
Each one of these tanks was built specifically
to show off one of the many talents that the octopus has.
That tube it's trying to pass through
is one-tenth the size of its body.
He would use every bit of gear he could find.
Beyond scuba, he would use rebreathers
because those would let him go deeper
and allow him to stay down for longer lengths of time.
He used full-face masks
because those would let him talk...
Chased away the sharks.
Haven't been able to get near them since.
Nonstop.
So, I'm gonna go get rid of it.
Anything that got him into the ocean
where he could also share those experiences
just thrilled him.
There we go.
I'm just gonna lay down right next to him.
So, anyway, this is what we do.
We sneak up on otters.
The likes of which we can't see.
Peep holes, and look at that.
Who would know that we're a floating iceberg?
While Mike was thousands of miles away
filming beneath the ice in Antarctica,
I was at home on bed rest, pregnant with our first child.
I jumped into a seal hole,
pushing the ice away as I entered,
and they handed me my camera.
Suddenly everything was quiet,
and I found myself looking at,
easily, one of the most extraordinary scenes I have ever, ever experienced.
This was a filmmaker's conundrum.
It was an incredible opportunity.
We needed the money,
but it was a really delicate time for us.
Everything above me on the land was roaring with wind.
And down there, there was absolutely no sound
except for the distant trills of Weddell seals.
Max, give us a smile.
Ooh!
Hi.
There you go.
Zooming in.
Good morning.
If we couldn't be out in the world with animals,
they seemed to find their way inside with us.
Hi, Max.
Hi, Max. Hi.
God, this focus is terrible.
Hi, Max.
Max, you got a hummer.
You got a hummer on your tummy.
A hummer, Max!
You don't even know it!
Max, the hummingbird is growing up.
Today, he's gonna fly away.
In about 18 years, you'll do the same thing.
It wasn't too long before we had a second child,
and we realized,
our life was fairly indistinguishable from work.
And we would find ourselves looking at our kids like little animals.
Little mammals.
Max, why don't you stop and talk to us for a second?
There you go, small circles...
You guys were there,
the kids were there, we were there.
It was cool. It was just this kind of unique atmosphere
where exciting work kind of overarched everything.
"Where were we going?" "Oh, we're off Australia. We're going to Indonesia."
So you were either coming home
or getting ready to go to some exotic locale.
The only thing hard about it was just how long you'd be gone for.
And sometimes, that was the biggest bummer.
I don't remember him missing things.
You know, every big part of my life that I remember growing up,
I don't know whether it's because I kind of insert him
or if it's because he actually was there.
But it didn't really matter because it felt like he was.
In the end, I think, the stories that he would tell,
I gotta be honest, they're cool.
The cool knickknacks he would bring back
from all the different places he would have been.
Those kind of made up for the times gone.
If you ever really want to get away from it all
and see something that you have never seen,
and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen,
get in a sub.
The first time I went down in a sub was actually in Hawaii.
I was in the Star boat, you know?
- Oh, I do. I do. Yes, I do. - Yeah, the Bocalii.
As you well know, you go down in this acrylic sphere
and suddenly it goes away.
I know, you're in the water.
-You're in the water! But you're dry! -Not wet.
I love this!
Mike liked the deep because it literally was a final frontier opportunity
short of becoming an astronaut and going into space.
He became a pilot of a number of different subs.
And, you know, every time he got ready to go down,
you could see a twinkle in his eye.
He just absolutely adored that.
It changed me. "Wow! Here's a place."
It's another planet.
They're alien animals, only this is on Earth.
It's our planet, it's not an alien place.
We're the aliens, if anything is.
Exactly! There's a lot more of them than us, and they've been there longer.
What I'm seeing is...
ink blackness.
Why do people like Mike and myself
want to get into little experimental vehicles
and go down into the cold, dark depths by ourselves?
But I'm not sure what I'm gonna run into.
It's pretty simple.
It's the same thing that has driven
human exploration from the get-go.
'Cause we wanna see what's there.
Mike was extremely precise
in life, and especially in his filmmaking.
Once he had made a decision, that was the decision.
And lightning could have hit you,
and you could have been warning Mike about the lightning
and he would have proceeded along without you and got the shot.
Some people would say stubborn.
The most stubborn person. When he got his mind on something,
it was...
Stubborn.
It was our major issue,
because he saw the world one way,
and that's the way the world was.
And it was really difficult to convince him
there was another way of seeing things.
He would say, "No, it's black and white."
And I'd say, "No, there are all kinds of shades of gray,
"and that's what makes it interesting."
He wouldn't recognize that his take
was just one take of many on the world.
He was in the world.
And so, how he saw it is how it was.
He and I could disagree about a production,
but if he wanted to do it, there was no convincing him otherwise.
He could drive me nuts.
One of the things I think he got wrong,
and I said this to him,
he was too passionate when he got cross.
You know, he wasn't a politician, Mike.
This just isn't gonna work. I can't see anything.
To win the war, you don't have to win every battle.
But Mike had to win every battle.
Mike sometimes struggled with broadcasters
because he really wasn't willing to compromise his standards or integrity.
I definitely remember this one time,
he slammed the phone down,
threw it across the room, and I said, "Well, you just burned that bridge."
One of the problems in doing deep dives in filming
is that these submersibles that we're using
were built for research, not filmmaking.
They've had our two best lights,
the HMIs,
way up on the top next to a big xenon spotlight.
And that works great for science.
Gives you nice, flat light,
lot of information in the frame.
But that's not what we're interested in.
We wanna get shadows and detail and darks, and lights.
I had these guys build big booms
that I could spread out and put the light way away from the camera.
I think Mike was always actually rather frustrated by his gear.
It was never good enough.
Apart from the fact that he used to lose quite a lot of it quite often.
When we were filming the Abyss projects,
he was rechristened as Mike Debris
because he had an ability to break cameras like nobody else.
He was constantly complaining to me,
"I want the lights out here. I want the camera out here."
And always fighting with the guys that ran the submersible
saying, "Well, if you do that, we'd probably get stuck on the bottom."
He says, "I don't care, we need to get a better shot."
I don't think he ever, ever said, "I'm happy with my gear."
Not in my experience, ever.
You know, you were always aware
that he was thinking, "Oh, how can we improve this with what we've got?"
Which, for some people, could be stubborn,
but I think I always felt it was him trying to be creative.
I think Mike had a very clear vision of what Mike wanted to do.
I think we all saw that.
But with that came a wonderful generosity of spirit,
a wonderful enabling of people.
It was funny, for a man with enormous presence, and enormous energy,
he actually had rather a small ego.
The deep diving definitely worried me,
but Mike was so excited about it,
to ask him not to would be like asking him not to breathe.
MaclNNIS: When you've been at sea for months at a time,
and you come off the ship and you come back into the terrestrial world
in the world of your family,
and those responsibilities,
it's a serious decompression.
Many nights I've spent growing up
when he was away on those trips.
I was probably thinking about what he was doing, like, imagining
what kind of weird fish he was looking at 2,000 feet under the ocean.
So I think there was a lot of wonder.
MaclNNIS: It's like combat.
If you weren't there, it's very hard to describe,
so a lot of folks come off the ship,
and they don't say very much about the hardships and the exhaustion,
and the risks and the close calls.
Because that stays on the ship.
I remember Mike telling me, he said,
"I don't know that I'm feeling like diving this deep
"or taking these kinds of risks anymore."
You can press your luck only so long before something's gonna happen
because he had kids and he had a family to worry about.
I saw him as this very brave,
adventurous, kind of invincible person that, I think,
definitely didn't occur to me that anything would go wrong.
Why or how have we allowed it to go so long and know so little about,
you know, depths beyond scuba?
And... why do I care?
Why does anybody care what happens
way the hell down there in the bottom of the ocean in the mud?
To me, it's one of the great mysteries of the sea,
why we have so neglected the ocean.
Imagine if you just knew about the skin of our own bodies.
We need to care about the stuff that goes on inside the ocean.
It's taken us a long time just to even begin to ask the right questions.
The deep ocean in terms of volume for life on our planet
is 90% of the actual space in which animals live.
Five percent of that has ever been explored.
There's so much more to discover.
We'll never discover a new species on Mars.
Every single dive you do in a deep ocean submersible,
you have a very high chance of seeing or discovering a new species.
It's crazy.
And when you look at the vast variety of creatures that you see,
utterly unlike anything you've seen before,
well, if that doesn't blow your mind,
you have an unblowable mind.
Every time you find a hydrothermal vent
in a different part of the ocean,
you'll find a different set of life.
So why is it that we are spending so much money
trying to find the meaning of life on a rock
spinning around the universe
rather than actually looking at what's in the ocean,
which is really the lifeblood of this planet?
I think we're drawn up towards space
because to dive deep into that abyss is scary.
It's dark, it's mysterious,
and in many ways, it's analogous to our own inability
to be introspective.
We don't really like to explore our own darkness.
I think you could say that going into the deep ocean
is more of a spiritual interior journey,
and going out into the universe is more of a dualism
between the feminine and masculine spirit.
You know, we go and we conquer space.
You don't conquer the ocean.
You understand the ocean, you become intimate with the ocean,
you let it teach you.
The mid-ocean ridge is a huge mountain range 40,000 miles long
snaking around the entire globe.
And they're big mountains, thousands of feet tall, some of which
are tens of thousands of feet and bust through the surface
creating islands like Hawaii.
In fact, this whole area is like a Yellowstone National Park
with all of the trimmings.
And all along the sides of these chimneys
is shimmering with heat and loaded with life.
You've got shrimp, fish, lobsters,
crab, clams and swarms of amphipods.
This whole ecosystem wasn't even known about until 33 years ago.
And it completely threw science on its head.
It made scientists rethink
where life on Earth might have actually begun.
And before the discovery of these vents,
all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth
was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis,
but down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis.
It's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it,
and it's also ephemeral.
For him, seeing those volcanic processes firsthand
was to witness one of our lifetime's great scientific discoveries
and to see part of Earth's very core.
And for me, looking back now at his excitement,
that it was all ephemeral, is even more poignant.
Tonight, an offshore oil rig is in flames
in the Gulf of Mexico,
and rescue teams are desperately searching for survivors.
When I heard on April 20th,
that an oil rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and was on fire,
it got my attention. I knew straightaway about this.
I was there. I was listening to the news.
Then two days later, it sunk,
dragging a drill stem down with it.
It is nearly a mile deep and more than 20 miles long.
Deep sea life is threatened by the oil
that scientists say is not going away any time soon.
I grew up near here. I grew up in Mobile.
And I spent my, some might say, misguided youth
running around these bayous going into the Mobile delta,
spending a lot of time in Mobile Bay
fishing, swimming, learning to scuba dive in the Gulf of Mexico.
This is home for me.
The spill is spreading,
and has grown considerably over the past two days.
Mike was desperate to get down to the Gulf.
He recognized that the spill was growing
into one of our country's worst environmental disasters,
and he really wanted to tell the story.
But he couldn't find anybody willing to fund it.
So finally, he just grabbed his camera and went.
When we went down to the Gulf,
Mike, and Max and I
were basically scouting,
but capturing some footage while we were there.
It was hard for me 'cause I wasn't ready for such a shift
going from my dad being a funny guy,
who was pretty easygoing about most things, to going...
Come on, you need to wake up. We're gonna do it, okay?
You know, full-on rigid mode.
"We gotta get this shot by this time
"or else we're totally off schedule."
Every time I talked to Mike,
he was so frustrated because he was denied access
and was having such a hard time getting the story.
This was not an easy task.
You know, we had to use everything we could think of
to get into these areas we were not allowed.
One morning, we decided to head into the PX store owned by BP
'cause we need rubber boots.
So we drive in there like we own the place,
and they thought we were working for 'em,
and they just handed us as many rubber boots as we needed.
The reason that I wanted to come here
is because I wanted to find out from a scientific point of view,
what they're finding in these waters,
in the estuaries,
in the bays,
and in the Gulf of Mexico.
From a scientific point of view, what is this oil doing?
What is this dispersant doing?
And what do you think might happen three or four years from now?
So we're about, what, 25 miles southeast of Mobile,
and we just started coming out and kind of getting a little bit of sheen on the surface.
Then the next thing that happens is
we started seeing what looked like possibly were some bait fish,
something along those lines.
Then we smelled it.
We slowed down. There was a sheen on the water.
Then we got out here, and there's just this massive slick
after slick after slick in rows.
What were the real consequences
for the people who were affected?
It's changed their lives,
but the creatures who cannot speak for themselves,
they're the ones who have to bear the brunt of the impact.
I've spent a lot of time in the water with whale sharks,
and I see them often on the surface,
mouths open, literally skimming,
and they were going into areas of oil.
I mean. could they possibly survive that?
If this stuff was ingested,
it would probably take the matter of seconds to coat the gills,
and they're gonna basically succumb and sink to bottom.
The chemical dispersants used early in the spill
were like carpet bombing the Gulf with a toxic stew of chemicals, oil, and gas.
The job of dispersants is to break apart oil.
It breaks it apart into little droplets.
It's a detergent, in a way.
A very powerful kind of detergent
that you shake it up and, as waves would do,
you get the little droplets of oil throughout the whole water column.
Which is exactly what happened in the Gulf of Mexico.
Our goal, our mission is to document photographically
exactly what's happening to the corals
about a mile below us right now,
and see if it's somehow related
to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Macondo oil.
Finally, with the help of Dr. Chuck Fisher from Penn State University,
we were able to get a grant from the National Science Foundation
to follow the science of that spill.
I have never seen anything like this
in any other ecosystem.
We dove at 30 different sites all over the Gulf.
We've never seen a coral community that was dying.
And when you have animals that live as long as these do,
a whole field of dying corals is an alarm bell.
That's just something you don't see
unless something is killing them.
This was the thing that really kind of got to my heart,
and made me really sad was that these sea fans,
these guys are 500 years old.
The brittle stars that normally are bright red and proud,
and wrapped tightly around these gorgonian corals that we were seeing,
limp and pink,
and not doing well.
And these dead and dying corals were covered
in some sort of brown material that we couldn't quite identify.
We have now identified it, and it was indeed oil.
And we're trying to fingerprint it
to find out where that oil came from.
But I think we all know.
It was pretty darn clear to everyone on that boat
that there was a serious impact
that this oil and dispersant had had
on the Deepwater coral communities in the Gulf of Mexico.
We went back to the Gulf as a family
and it had its moments.
Max, come in here and zoom in,
reframe it, then we're gonna pick up on that.
You've worked for 45 minutes and you've burned out.
- I know. Unbelievable. - Yeah, you guys are lazy.
- You're right. - Everything's rolling.
I'm done. I'm done. - long time. If you're in the back row,
- don't sigh, and rolling your eyes. - Go, Dad. Please, just go.
It's been almost two years
since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded
in the Gulf of Mexico some 60 miles from here.
And in that time,
it may have left the headlines of the news, but we're still doing it.
We're still drilling in Deepwater, in the Gulf of Mexico
as well as many other places in the world,
and issues are still coming up.
BP unleashed a huge experiment
on the public and on the ecosystem
by dumping probably what will amount
to over two million gallons of dispersants in our ocean.
You know, when people would ask me about dispersants,
my answer was always we just don't know enough to be doing this
because we don't have any background information
on the effects of these dispersants.
The only tested it on a zebra danio,
and a freshwater shrimp.
And that was the only life they tested it on.
And they didn't test it in conjunction with oil.
So let's see what happens
when we add Corexit 9500, the dispersant of choice in the Gulf spill,
into one of these beakers.
This is a qualitative experiment.
Nevertheless, here we go.
That should be enough.
Wow.
That's not taking very long.
We'll just let that spin for a while.
Wow.
This, to me, is just a completely different material now.
Seems to me that by not dispersing the oil,
and allowing it to concentrate on the surface,
you're dealing with a layer of oil
that is at least accessible.
You can get to this, you can scrape it,
you can skim it, you can burn it,
you can do something with it because there it is.
It's concentrated on the surface.
You disperse it, you get this.
How in the hell can you clean that up?
How is it possible that BP was allowed
by the US government to release two million gallons
of a known toxin to be dumped into the Gulf of Mexico?
In this country, I just go back to "The spiller is in charge."
Basically, the industry has looked for
what would be the cheapest way to do a spill response.
According to the BP scientists,
just because the dispersants pushed the oil out of sight, out of mind,
they're declaring dispersants are a success story,
and that this is not an alternative method of treatment now,
this is the method of treatment for future oil spills.
This is a stream of consciousness,
and I just can't stop and start over.
This was the footage I couldn't stop watching in the edit room.
Because Mike had so obviously become a different guy.
And I realized his entire life and career had led him here.
Tell me what's happened.
What was it like before? What is it like now?
What will it be like in three years?
Those were the questions that I wanted answered.
And we weren't getting those answers.
So I thought, "Well, they don't want to answer
"or they're legally bound not to answer."
And the more scientists that we spoke with,
the more I started feeling,
well, maybe that's not actually what's going on.
I started feeling, what's going on
is these people really don't know what's going on.
When we got into the details
of the specific species that were impacted,
we didn't even know their names.
We didn't have any previous data
on their life history, on their associates,
on their interaction with other fauna.
So we were in some ways working in the dark.
People often ask me,
what are the broader effects of this spill
on other animals associated with the corals.
We don't know what those animals are.
And you're just looking at, you know,
the instant data set that you have right now.
You have no idea what it was a week ago,
a month ago, a year ago, ten years ago.
And we know very well that it takes around two decades
to get enough background data to see natural change.
We don't have anything close to that in the Gulf of Mexico,
or most other places in the ocean.
And it seems what is happening
is that the scientific community in the Gulf of Mexico
is seriously underfunded,
and I think "underfunded..."
How much money do you need?
And I get figures like, "Well, we just got a $100,000 grant,
"and we're really happy about that. Next summer we're going out."
I'm thinking $100,000, okay, that's a lot of money.
But compared to the insane amounts of money
that corporations like oil companies
spend pulling oil out of the environment,
trashing the environment in the process.
A hundred thousand dollars?
They're spending billions of dollars exploiting
and destroying the very habitats
that we don't even understand
because the scientists don't have $100,000
to go out and study the sargassum?
Why isn't there more of a parity?
I think there should be.
And I think, until there becomes more parity,
and we release more funding to do more science,
and understand what we're dealing with,
and give ourselves the tools
to better manage these places,
that we're doomed.
MaclNNIS: This injury to the Gulf where he grew up, he took personally.
I've never seen the depth of feeling for the ocean
that I saw in Mike at that time,
and he wanted to do something about it.
This was a problem that needed solution.
He felt like people just didn't care.
They don't care about the environment.
They don't care about underwater wildlife.
These big corps care about making money and that's it,
and that just went against everything Mike believed in.
Maybe I just had never seen
what heartbroken Mike deGruy looks like,
and heartbroken over something that is so avoidable.
I remember, he was mad because that's what
we were in the Gulf for, and that's why we were filming.
It was something that really mattered to him
and it was really important and he was really angry.
For the first time, maybe, in his career
he was faced with a situation
with a film that he couldn't quite get his head around.
It really was eating him up.
I really didn't know what to do
because he didn't wanna talk about it.
And I thought, "Wow,
"you've taken me into the ocean,
"so come with me to explore this inner space."
But he just didn't want to do it.
It was ironic because here's this deep ocean explorer
and I couldn't get him to explore his sadness.
But he was not particularly psychological-minded,
not the same kind of...
exuberance at discovering a psychological truth
as a physical truth in the world.
He wasn't gonna be able to keep going like he'd been going.
He could throw in the towel or rage at the world
or he could come to a new accommodation.
But in order to do that, he was gonna have to learn some things about himself.
So here's a 60-year-old guy
really breaking into frontier psychological territory for the first time.
He didn't like it. He didn't wanna talk about it,
but he knew he was gonna have to do it.
He was scared to death.
For the first time since he was a young springboard diver,
he just couldn't push through that fear.
I think he was scared of the depth of his rage.
He couldn't believe we were so disconnected from the natural world
that we would let that spill happen to the Gulf.
Director James Cameron is on a mission
to dive to the deepest point on the planet.
That voyage deep into the sea.
When Jim Cameron called
and asked Mike to join his next expedition, he jumped.
Mike saw it as a resurgence in an interest in the deep,
and it thrilled him.
That one very talented guy with a capable team
would be able to do what no government had done in 50 years.
It's 36,000 feet down.
That is seven miles to the bottom.
Mount Everest could fit in the trench with 7,000 feet to spare.
We'd worked with him before, in 2005, at Titanic.
We knew that he was the most capable guy out there.
He knew subs, he knew underwater lighting.
He would put the right kind of spin and pizazz on it.
And Andrew, as the director of the project,
really wanted Mike at his side.
And of course, he jumped right in with his usual enthusiasm.
And said, "Okay, you know, when, where, I'm there."
Mike was just so excited... Yeah.
You know? He was like a kid in a candy store.
Oh, absolutely.
MaclNNIS: And at that moment, when it was clear
that the sub was gonna work, and we were going to sea,
Mike was excited.
As excited as I've ever seen him.
That expedition was really energizing him,
and I could hear in his voice his old enthusiasm
coupled now with a determination,
and I was so excited to see where it was gonna take him.
I had performed a test dive
that was resoundingly successful.
And Mike was in the water. He's videoing at night.
So he got to shoot the mothership,
you know, which is what it looked like.
So we came up and we were just high as kites.
I mean, it was just so much fun to get it all working.
And to know the next stop was gonna be thousands of feet deep.
Don, do you have any tips for Jim
if at about 20,000 feet, if he hears a crack?
If you can hear it, you're still alive,
and might as well keep on with the dive.
You never hear the one that gets you.
There was a real festive atmosphere on the ship that night.
We got together for a glass of wine afterwards,
Andrew, myself and Mike, and we were all telling stories.
And they were all the kind of "old-dog" war stories.
"Yeah, I remember this thing, and when I saw that, and how I photographed it."
There were a lot of laughs and went on till, you know, 2:00 in the morning
because we felt we'd really...
We just turned a corner.
- All right, we'll see you at the bottom. - All right.
We'd completed all our checks.
Ronnie was in the sub, we'd bolted the hatch down.
And the sub was just about to be launched
and Mike and Andrew were coming out
to film it in the helicopter.
We were just about to lift him
when my deck supervisor, David Wotherspoon,
came to me and said, "There's been an accident.
"The helicopter is down."
And I said to David, "All right, let's not overreact,"
because I heard that it crashed on take-off.
So most helicopter crashes on take-off
are very, very low-speed incidents,
and usually the helicopter's just sitting there broken
and everybody's standing around.
MaclNNIS: And then Jim went ashore to the crash site,
and then I got a call to come ashore and meet Jim.
When he turned and looked at me, I knew what had happened.
And we embraced. There was a long...
profound embrace with tears.
And... we were shattered.
American filmmaker Michael deGruy
and Australian filmmaker Andrew Wight were killed
when their helicopter crashed soon after take-off.
It was like he left me mid-conversation.
I just found myself thinking "Wait, you know,
"we had so much more to do,
"I had so many more things I wanted to say to you."
Did I tell him that I loved him enough?
Had I been afraid to love him as fearlessly as he'd lived?
I think there was a lot left unsaid.
I'm grateful that our last conversation was a really good one,
like, a really good one.
I'm super grateful that that is my last memory with him,
but really sad that, you know,
we didn't get to make the most of that time left.
But how can you know? And that's a good lesson.
Good lesson I learned.
I think that...
I don't know. That's the thing I want to know.
I would want to know what he would be doing,
and I want to ask him what I should be doing.
Zest, wonder, energy, laughter...
courage, companionship...
wonder.
Wonder.
Mike wasn't here just to entertain us, which he did,
or educate us, which he did,
or inspire us, which he did,
or to love us, which he also did,
but to get inside us and change us,
to make us behave differently.
His enthusiasm, his excitement,
his beautiful silver hair and that unfortunate haircut.
His sense of wonder.
Terry Ellis described Mike as a human exclamation mark.
You know, when his brother said that,
everybody in the space said, "You know, actually,
"that's a really good way of describing Mike."
There was a wonderful, I think, Hawaiian-inspired ceremony,
of throwing flowers into the ocean.
We were holding hands, and we were all very emotional, actually.
And it was a wonderful sunset, and then suddenly, in the sky,
as clear as day, was a cloud formation
that was an exclamation mark.
And it wasn't sort of a "maybe."
It was absolutely clear,
and everybody who was there, it suddenly went quiet.
We were all chatting, we looked at it, and people said, "Wow."
That was a phenomenon.
I don't think I've ever seen a more powerful,
you know, testimony to there's something,
you know, beyond just organic life
than that exclamation point.
And I remember thinking to myself,
that bugger, Mike deGruy,
he's never, ever gonna miss a party.
There is no way that we're not gonna know he's there.
That noisy, energetic, amazing guy, even...
even after death,
made sure that we still knew he was around.
Mike's energy drew both people and animals to him.
That was his magic.
It might send down a tentacle, caress me with its sucker discs.
It's just unbelievable what this animal is capable of,
and I loved them.
He wasn't this earnest environmentalist.
He wasn't driven by duty in that kind of sense.
Just within him, there was just this great
warm, throbbing kind of, you know, "Isn't life great?"
These jack number hit the thousands!
In this last year, he was retooling.
He was determined to get the truth out.
We'll spend billions and billions and billions of dollars exploiting an area
that we haven't even spent a little bit of money understanding.
It doesn't make sense.
If everybody could take a little bit of that juice,
the inspiration, the fire that burned so brightly in Mike deGruy,
if we could just spread it around,
there'd be no problem. Everybody'd be wanting to get out there.
When I talked with schools and kids,
"Well, gee, how do you become an underwater filmmaker? I wanna do that."
"Just do it. Just start making movies.
"They'll be horrible at first, it doesn't matter."
You know, you'll still have fun doing it.
I fell so in love with Mike
and saw the ocean through his eyes,
and it was clear to me that he wanted us all to love it like he did.
He would be shouting from the rooftop
that the ocean is not for sale.
And it's up to us to have those difficult conversations now before it's too late.
And to take care of the ocean like our life depends on it.
Because, honestly, it does.
I've been to a lot of lectures where at the end of it,
inevitably, one of the first questions that comes up is,
"But what can I do?"
My answer to that is don't look at the big,
overwhelming issues of the world.
Look in your own backyard.
Look into your heart, actually.
What do you really care about that isn't right where you live, and fix it.
So we've returned to my hometown, Mobile, Alabama,
to talk to a lot of people and get people involved,
and maybe, you know, we can...
We can make the world a better place.
Cut.