An unlikely friendship in Disneynature feature film Chimpanzee. (c) Disney 2012

Rusty Pritchard of Flourish Magazine recently interviewed Mark Linfield, co-director of Chimpanzee, to be released today in theaters across the United States.

FLOURISH MAGAZINE: What inspired you to  make Chimpanzee?

Mark Linfield: Well, you know my codirector Alastair [Fothergill] had filmed chimpanzees in that forest 25 years ago, so he always had a hankering to do something with chimpanzees, and I personally had been filming monkeys and apes for all of my career of 23 years, so it just came together. Disney asked us to pitch a wildlife feature film, and chimpanzees seemed like a great subject. We’d already done a global film for them, which was the Earth movie, that they used to inaugurate the Disneynature brand. We wanted to do a single species, and chimpanzees seemed like a real no-brainer, because they’ve got so many things going for them. They’re obviously very close to us–there’s this real resonance that we have with them. If you and your kids enjoyed it you’ll know what I mean. They’re really magnetic to watch. They’re so interesting, intelligent, they have relationships just like our own, they sort of lend themselves to human-style drama in the cinema. One of the things we really wanted to do was to NOT do a traditional documentary; we wanted to give people  a more cinematic experience where they felt that they were being swept along in a strong story with great visuals, and that they learned about chimpanzees through the back door, almost incidentally so that it was a more entertaining experience.

Of course the thing that really made it an entertaining experience was what the chimpanzees did, the story line that unfolded in front of us was something we couldn’t have written. That was really the piece of luck that came our way. [Read More]