Hardwear Sessions

It's a bold pronouncement for Low, one of the best of a very small handful of prolific IMAX producers in the world - his Montreal-based company is currently juggling a half-dozen giant screen projects at once - since he's taken his big camera to 16,000 feet below the ocean's surface, into the cockpits of F-15s and Indy cars, around the Titanic and ... just last week ... inside the break of Tahiti's famed and feared Teahupo'o surf wave.

Today's shot? "You'll have to ask Will (his assistant camera operator), I was so focused on looking through the lens I can't even really tell you exactly what happened. I just know it was great."

Will Allen watched the scene unfold from just below the surface: "A pair of big humpback's were swimming side by side on the sandy bottom when one rolled over and looked straight up at us. Almost in slow motion the male - at least I think it was the male - broke away and started floating straight up at us before flicking it's tail ten feet from the camera and swimming off. They were definitely performing for us."

We spent the day watching first a trio then a quintet of big humpbacks feeding and fighting, breaching then resting, just outside the coral reef. I've been out on this reef edge many times before, in boats ranging from kayaks and outriggers to Zodiacs and mahi-mahi boats; the view back at Moorea's jagged green mountains is always beautiful, staggering, especially from sea level.

Whenever the whales glide beneath and linger, over the edge of the boat go the $1.5 million camera, Allen and Low. (The film stock is eight times the size of film used to shoot a big feature film and one magazine lasts just five minutes; changing film is a pain,, especially on the water. Since this is film not video, it takes more than a week for Low and company to view what they've been filming, since it is shipped home to Montreal, processed and returned on DVD or by Internet.) At one point the whales start jousting beneath the surface, just beneath Low, which though he stays steady with the camera makes him ponder what would be the result if their playful and not so playful fighting caught him with a tail slap, or if the big guys were to blast to the surface directly through he and Will ....

Which leads to a long, seaborne discussion of whether or not the whales stick around knowing we are watching ... or if they are just doing their thing, irregardless of whether we are there or not. Low insists they are not so different from pet dogs. "They are watching us, observing us, responding to us ... no question."

As the support boat parallels the reef, captained by Michael Poole, an American marine biologist and whale expert whose lived in Polynesia the past twenty-two years, Low tells a true horror story about an inexperienced group that chartered a sailboat, went far out to sea and all jumped overboard for a swim ... without realizing they'd not lowered a ladder nor thrown out a safety line. "None of them could get back onto the boat and all drowned," shaking his head at the image of the poor souls, unable to climb up to safety.

Low and crew have been filming in Tahiti for a month, making what the first dedicated IMAX surf movie, in 3D. With the main surfing and stand-up paddle board action in the can - starring surf king Kelly Slater and local Tahitian surf hero Raimana van Bastolaer - they are hanging on, gathering as much B-roll as possible, which includes humpbacks, drift dives, schools of sharks and plenty of aerias. The film - Ultimate Wave Tahiti - is due out in February, on two hundred giant screens around the world. If it runs a similar course as previous Low IMAX films, it will ultimately be seen by several hundred million people, numbers that have lured a trio of high-end sponsors, Suzuki, Quicksilver and Tahiti Tourism, to pay for the filming.

Ultimate Wave is Low's 14th IMAX film; it will require a long, successful run to top his best-selling film to-date - Beavers - an up-close look at a family of beavers shot near Banff. It is Canada's biggest-grossing film ever. "The great story about Beavers," says Low, dried off and in the bar at Moorea's Pearl Resort, "is that in a weird way it started as a film about nuclear power in Japan ... a film I did not want to make. I told the nuclear plant people that what they really needed was a film about beavers, which they politely declined. A few months later I get a call from them saying, 'Actually, we do want to help you make a film about beavers,' and wired me $5 million."

Son of documentary filmmaker and early IMAX explorer Colin Low, Stephen insists the surfing movie is taking him back to his roots. "Growing up I was convinced I was an aquanaut. I would make them stop the family car so that I could run into the lake." His favorite movie growing up was Journey to the Center of the Earth and his first jobs in the industry were as an underwater cameraman. His first Hollywood job - on location in Newfoundland - was as Bo Derek's Zodiac drive in "Orca, Killer Whale."

The trickiest in-the-surf shots captured last week at Teahupo'o were mostly shot by veteran surf cameramen but Low reserved the rest of the underwater shooting for himself. "That's the part of the job I still really love," says the 58-year-old. "The rest - traveling, managing, working with sponsors - is just work."