How My Octopus Teacher turned a fishy friendship into an unlikely Oscar-winner

On Sunday night, the Bafta award for Best Documentary went to one of 2020’s strangest offerings. It had all the ingredients of being a hit: a slow-burn central relationship, moments of peril, and an ending that would break your heart. But it was also about a man and an octopus.

My Octopus Teacher arrived on Netflix with little fanfare last September. It was shot over 18 months by the documentary maker Craig Foster who, every day, would dive into the icy Pacific near his home outside Cape Town, to visit a common female octopus living in the underwater kelp forest. Its extraordinary underwater camera work captured the creature covering itself in shells to hide from a shark, and on another occasion outwitting a predator by climbing onto its back.

There is also the emotional element. Foster, 53, and the creature struck up a bond. The film captures its gentle development: from the octopus reaching out a first, cautious tentacle to investigate the strange new daily presence in her life, to relaxing enough to freely swim beside him and even to lie across his chest. Sadly she died after giving birth just over a year after Foster found her. A common octopus rarely survives more than 18 months in the wild.

Environmental journalist Pippa Ehrlich, one of the film’s two directors, had never made a feature film before but had worked with Foster in conservation. The 36-year-old spent six months learning to free dive with him – that’s how long it takes your body to acclimatise to the cold without a wetsuit – before he even broached the subject of making a film.

“It took a while for Craig to figure out that the transformational experience that he had with this octopus was something he actually wanted to talk about,” she says. “Eventually he said ‘I haven’t made a film for 10 years but I think I have an amazing story.’”

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Soon, Ehrlich realised its emotional power. “I was sitting at my desk at work – and I just started crying. There are many stories about the impact of human beings on the natural world… but what I loved about this is that it’s about the impact of nature on a human being.”

While Ehrlich says that her “mind was blown” by Foster’s footage, she felt that he needed to feature more heavily in the film. Enter James Reed, a British natural history documentary director with 20 years’ worth of experience, who specialises in interview-driven films. Together, the two filmmakers decided that what was needed was a way of allowing Foster to tell his story in his own words, to camera, naturally and spontaneously. “If you’re reading from a script, no matter whether it’s a truthful account or not, it immediately feels like somebody’s acting. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, that’s why David Attenborough does so well” says 41-year-old Reed, speaking to me from under a canopy on the edge of the Kabale rainforest in Uganda where he’s currently filming.

They also wanted to bring in more of Foster’s personal story, which proved a challenge. “Craig’s not somebody who seeks to put himself in the limelight. He really wanted to be focusing on the octopus and what was amazing about her,” says Reed. The final cut is as much Foster’s story as the octopus’s. He explains in the film that he began diving after “two years of absolute hell.” The film does not go into detail about the nature of his suffering but it has been reported that he was recovering from depression, insomnia, and career burnout. In the octopus he finds respite, inspiration, and a renewed reason to spend time in nature with his teenage son Tom.

After a brief Skype to introduce himself to Foster, Reed hopped on a plane to South Africa. Ehrlich picked him up from the airport and drove him straight to the kelp forest for a dive. That experience proved key to unlocking the interview process for Reed: “It gave me just a little glimpse of that world” he says. He “agonised” over where to conduct the interviews: “There’s such a magical world [in the underwater shots] and [the viewer] is going to feel so reluctant to come out of that and into the normal world with Craig. We thought about doing it by the coast but in the end we decided we just needed to prioritise Craig feeling comfortable, and telling his story in the most natural way that he could. So we sat at his kitchen table, because that’s where he would normally sit. And fortunately, it has a view out to the ocean, so there was this interesting connection that you could see him often looking out into it and thinking about what had happened.

The interviews took three intense days. “We didn’t want to rush it. We knew that Craig as a personality would need the space and time to be able to explore those thoughts and memories in his own way” Reed recalls. “So we meandered around his history and backstory, and then obviously, in detail, every bit of the process [of his relationship with the octopus].

“They only stopped when it got too dark. It was probably 10 hours [per day] of extreme focus, with a quick break for lunch in the middle” recalls Ehrlich.

“Did we do 10 hours on any day, that’s terrible?” chuckles Reed. “That’s an industrial tribunal.”

The process was also difficult because Foster had been challenged on certain moments in which he let nature take its course – notably when a shark bites off one of the octopus’s legs and Foster decides not to intervene. “We had to have the confidence to challenge him on certain things,” says Reed. “To ask the difficult question: ‘did you feel a bit responsible for that?’”

There’s a poignant moment towards the end when, prompted by Reed asking if he misses her, Foster starts to cry. “An interview like that is an extremely intense emotional experience,” he says. “When we were talking about her death, I felt myself sort of tingling and welling up. I’m a burly, scruffy Geordie man and we’re not typically associated with being good at talking about our feelings. But I am also a bit of a big softy and I think [Foster] kind of knew that. We just ended up crying together.”

Despite its success, the film managed to open a bizarre internet wormhole about the nature of Foster’s relationship with the octopus (which is deliberate as Ehrlich and Reed structured the film like a traditional love story.) The feminist critic Sophie Lewis suggested that the film’s framing narrative about Foster’s relationship with his son was convenient rather than significant; a way of subsuming the strangeness of a human-animal relationship into a more conventional father-son dynamic.

Ehrlich vehemently disagrees. “Being in nature with his dad has shaped who Tom is, it’s a huge part of Craig’s motivation for getting to know nature.” He and his first wife are divorced (he’s now married to Indian documentary filmmaker and environmental journalist Swati Thiyagarajan) so Ehrlich explains: “Tom comes down on weekends and Craig dedicates his time to teaching him whatever he can about the natural world.” Indeed, a few internet cynics can’t stop this film’s success. Come Oscar night, Ehrlich and Reed might be the first winners in history to thank an eight-legged sea creature.

My Octopus Teacher is available on Netflix