From Orphaned Cougars to Eco-Comedy: The Films of Scott Renyard

Before Scott Renyard founded The Green Channel, he spent decades making films about the creatures and ecosystems most people never think about. An orphaned cougar cub project for Discovery Channel that he landed by literally bumping into the producer at a festival. 

A baby killer whale story that started at a Thanksgiving dinner when his mother mentioned a box of footage under the bed. A collection of 16mm reels from a DFO cinematographer that he bought for three thousand dollars out of a storage vault in Victoria. 

And more recently, an 18-year documentary about volunteers trying to save herring in Howe Sound, a series inspired by the phrase “The Power of One”, and a comedy born out of the tariff chaos south of the border. We asked Scott about the films that shaped his career and why he keeps finding new ways to tell environmental stories.

This article is a part of our interview series with Scott Renyard, founder of The Green Channel. 

Read the previous parts here: From Revelstoke to The Green Channel, The Pristine Coast Story, 119 Days in the Courtroom.

Question: Your first major directing credit was Project Cougar for Discovery Channel. What drew you to that story, and what did making it teach you about wildlife filmmaking?

Actually, Project Cougar was a case of serendipity. As part of my early development as a filmmaker, I went to the Banff Television Festival. My project Who Killed Miracle? was selected by Discovery Channel for a meeting with the commissioning editor at that time. I was coming out of that meeting and literally ran into the producer, Signe Olynyk. Stuff went flying like a real-life movie moment. While picking up our stuff, she asked how my meeting went, and I told her, “Not so good, they passed.”

Later that day, I saw Signe in the delegates’ lounge and asked how her meeting went, and she said that her meeting was a catch-up. Project Cougar was still on and in production. But her director just landed a series and wanted to bow out. She asked about the film I was pitching, and I told her I had a rough cut. She asked to see it, and by the end of that day, I was offered the director’s role to complete the film.

Project Cougar was a challenging film to complete because some footage had already been shot, and it was set up as a story to investigate whether orphan cubs could be raised in captivity until they could survive on their own in the wild. The trouble was, how do you film these cubs without them imprinting on humans? So the scientists behind the project decided that the only access the project would get would be the release of the cubs in the wild. So there was a pretty big gap in the story to fill. So Signe and I decided  to expand the story and look at the circumstances surrounding cougar attacks and weaving the two threads into one film.

Even on a small budget, I knew that we could re-enact actual cougar attacks using green screen and a connection I had with the mainstream filmmaking community in Vancouver. I had been working on the MGM series, The Outer Limits and learned a lot watching the visual effects team. I reached out to Danny Virtue, Executive Producer,  who I met and worked for on the Neon Rider series. Danny, as most people in the Vancouver biz,  owned the Virtue ranch in Mission and was neighbours with animal handlers who had trained cougars for film work. We also needed horses for one scene and Danny had plenty of film ready horses and stuntmen. So, within a mile of the Virtue ranch we pulled together several key scenes for the Project Cougar film. 

The green screen work was pretty tricky. We had to film the cougars inside a huge cage. For safety, only the handlers and the director, me, were allowed inside the cage with the cougar. At one point, they had to station a handler behind me because one of the cougars kept trying to circle around behind me and get me by the back of the neck. A pretty typical move by a cougar to capture and kill prey. Luckily, I didn’t become prey and we got the shots we needed.  

I suppose what I learned during the making of that film is two things. First, dig deep and investigate your story the best you can because insights will reveal themselves and give your story more depth. During the making of this film, for example, I noticed the colour white kept coming up in the attacks. A white bike, a white dog, a person wearing a white shirt, and a kid riding a white horse amongst 4 other horses. It seemed to me this was a likely trigger colour for cougars.  It makes sense because deer are a primary prey for deer and they have white tails or belly fur. Even though this observation didn’t make the film, it planted the seed in me to put on my investigative journalist hat when making a factual program. You never know what observation or new fact will make your film stand out from the rest of the films in the marketplace. And second, the interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world are very complex, and simple solutions are more likely to fail than succeed. It made me realize that we need to tread softly around critical habitats and somehow find ways to give space to other creatures that share the planet with us.

 

Question: “Who Killed Miracle?” is about a baby orca rescued in 1977 near Nanaimo that later died under controversial circumstances. That film won awards at Yorkton and WorldFest-Houston. What made you want to tell that story, and what was the most challenging part of making it?

After returning from the Banff Television Festival two years before taking on Project Cougar, I was at our family Thanksgiving dinner. I was looking for a documentary project to take to Banff. My mother, Rochelle Termehr, then blurted out, “Well, what about Miracle?” And I said, “What is Miracle?” She went on to tell me that she and Peter, my stepfather, had been given access from 1977 to 1982 to film the rehabilitation of a baby killer whale that was rescued by a sport fisherman, Bill Davis, From Campbell River , B.C. and the owner, Bob Wright,  and staff of Sealand of the Pacific, an oceanarium located in Victoria, B.C. Over dinner, I learned more details about this fascinating story, and the kicker was the footage was in a box under their bed. After pulling out the box, dusting it off, and looking inside, I realized I had the potential of a great film in my hands. 

Even though a film was planned back when Miracle’s story was unfolding, the tragic end seemed to put a damper on anyone wanting to put the film together. So, no film had been made with the footage.

After reading more about the story, I realized the clock was ticking. Many of the participants were now quite old, and I wanted to capture as much of the story from the original participants as possible. So I began the process of reaching out to Bob Wright(Sealand of the Pacific’s owner), Angus Matthews (General Manager of Sealand of the Pacific), Allan Hoey(Miracle’s veterinarian), Bill Davis (the sports fisherman), Larry McInerney (head Sealand diver) and others. My connection to the story through my parents helped to open the door to these key people in Miracle’s story, and by the summer of the next year, I had most of the interviews and some scene reenactments in the can, as they say.

One thing I noticed during the interviews was a nervousness in talking about how Miracle died. The public story was that environmental activists had tampered with Miracle’s enclosure in an attempt to free her, and she got entangled in the net and drowned. It seemed with this story the more I knew about it, the more I realized I didn’t know. So I kept digging. 

I wanted to know what happened to Miracle before she was rescued. Why had she been shot? Where did it happen?  Why was she in the shallow Menzies Bay where killer whales rarely ventured? Was there a way I could find out what pod she came from? Was she a transient killer whale? Was she a resident killer whale? These questions eventually led me to Dr. John Ford, who was working at the Vancouver Aquarium at the time. I was hoping Dr. Ford would be able to shed some light on her lineage. He is an expert on killer whale vocalizations and I had a sample of Miracle’s voice. I thought maybe he could shed some light on what type of killer whale she was and maybe even the pod she came from. But unfortunately, Miracle was so young, her vocalizations were like killer whale baby talk. And according to Dr Ford, all baby killer whale vocalizations are similar. I suppose it’s like trying to determine what language a child is going to speak later in life by listening to it cry.  So that clue turned out to be a dead end. But while there, in walked Alexandra Morton, a person that would not only have a huge impact on the film I was doing about Miracle, but she would be a key person in several of my next films as well.

 

Alexandra agreed to do an interview on the spot, and she explained that Miracle’s death was a result of the design of the pool. Suddenly, all of the nervousness I felt during some of the interviews made sense. There was obviously a lot more to the story than what made it into the mainstream press. Later, I met Larry McInerney, the head diver and he corroborated Alexandra’s observation that Miracle had drowned between the nets of the pen. You see, the Sealand whale enclosures were in the ocean and not on land. The whale pens therefore needed two nets. A chain link fence around the perimeter of the pen to keep the whale from intruders from the outside and a net on the inside so the whale, in theory, would not be harmed from the softer material.   The sad truth was everyone was trying to do their best for Miracle, but as Larry says in the film, it’s not the one thing that gets you, it’s several things combined that get you.  And in this case, several factors and decisions resulted in tragedy after so much effort was made to save her. 

 

Miracle certainly impacted the people around her and she played a key role changing our perception of the killer whale from monsters of the sea to highly intelligent and social beings. Her story had so many firsts: she was the first baby killer whale to be befriended by a human in the wild, she was the first killer whale to be transported by flatdeck truck for hours, and she was the first killer whale to be transported by a sling under a helicopter.

 

During the making of that film,  I also felt I was beginning to find my voice as a filmmaker. Investigating complex stories with multiple threads of science and creativity  through the film was where my voice wanted to be. And many of my films are exactly in that space. It’s also been rewarding to put my many years of science study to good use. 

 

Question: You also executive produced the remastering of several classic films by the late Dick Harvey, including Living River and Indian Food Fishing on the Fraser River. Why was it important to you to preserve those films?

Dick Harvey worked as a contract cinematographer for the Department of Fisheries and Ocean and later became the manager of the Big Qualicum River Salmon Enhancement Project, located near Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. Dick spent about 40 years filming all things related to salmon, hatcheries, wildlife, and watersheds around the Province of BC using a 16mm camera. I believe his work is the largest collection of footage from his era on BC wildlife and fish in existence.

During the making of Who Killed Miracle? I was looking for underwater footage of killer whales, and Alexandra Morton had some reels of killer whales filmed by her husband, Robin, that were stored at a private facility called, the Lowlight Vault. The vault had been moved from Vancouver to Victoria, and it took some digging to find the vault owner and Alexandra’s footage. I happened to mention my search for the footage to Sylvia Jonescu Lisitza who was the Executive Director of Moving Images at the time. Sylvia happened to have a phone number for the vault owner who had retired. Before I knew it, I was on a ferry to Victoria to look at the remnants of the vault holdings that were in a storage locker. When I met the Lowlight owner, I was surprised to find out she was ailing which was the reason the vault had been closed down. After talking with her, she was relieved that someone was able to help her wind things up and return all the footage to the rightful owners. In the end, I loaded up all the reels and a few film masters in my van. Sylvia, with her knowledge of the local filmmakers, helped me locate and return the miscellaneous reels.   And Alexandra Morton’s footage was part of that find. But I also found something else. 

We went into her storage locker in the basement of the apartment building, and I was amazed that there were a few hundred cans of footage from filmmaker Dick Harvey. She told me that she owned the Dick Harvey footage because the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had stopped paying the storage fees, and her agreement transferred ownership of anything in her vault that had a delinquent balance owning after one year. I asked if I could pay the outstanding bill with a little extra. She agreed and we completed the deal that day. 

Slowly, over the years, I’ve been digitizing the Harvey collection and have used many shots in my films. In the collection, I found copies of “Living River” and “Indian Food Fishing in the Fraser River,” and both were in pretty rough shape. I managed to get permission from Dick’s widow Kathleen to remaster these two films, and I’m proud to have rescued the films and have them as part of The Green Channel’s library so the public can enjoy his work.  I’ve been passionate about finding old films ever since and am always on the look for films that I can give a new life to. Our history is so important, and learning about how things were can teach us so much about how our world is doing today. His collection is, in my opinion, a national treasure. 

The sad thing is during the Harper government era, that government did not value our history and, in fact, saw it as a threat to business interests. I remember having a conversation with one of the DFO librarians when they were shutting down the fisheries libraries. She was in tears, not because of the fact she was going to lose her job, but because she was watching valuable data, reports, and books being tossed out that staff had dedicated their lives to preserving. I’m sure hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funded work was thrown away. And this so-called cost cutting  was sold to the public that everything was going to be digitized, but it’s still not clear what percentage of those historical assets were actually saved. 

It’s a tragedy when politicians treat public resources as if they were their own property to do with how they choose. If it wasn’t for the historical information I did find, I could not have traced what happened to our wild fish resources. And the irony is, the Harper government was a staunch supporter of the oil industry in Canada, and my discoveries found that fossil fuel burning might not be the most important factor in the fight to reverse global warming. This might have taken some political pressure off the fossil fuel industry.Can you imagine that if I hadn’t seen that one report from John Neilson et al about the sea lice juveniles in that technical report…https://www.int-res.com/articles/meps/39/m039p221.pdf the world would still think that overfishing was the reason for the collapse of the northern cod of the east coast of Canada in the 1980’s? 

I think there is a general perception that knowing more is bad for business, but I think the opposite is true. If the fish farm industry would have been aware of this fundamental problem of disease exchange between the farm fish and wild fish populations, they could have designed their operations differently. Instead, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions,  of dollars have now been invested in a technology that has to change. Investors have been hurt by this, businesses have been hurt by this, communities have lost complimentary businesses that depended on wild salmon, and I could go on and on with the list of negatives. I think detailed, granular films, studies, science and research and the like help our economies succeed and are the best allies for our decision makers.

 

Question: Your most recent work includes The Herring People, The Firekeepers series, the eco-comedy Pressure Point, and Rise of the Eco-Tariffists. That’s a wide range, from serious investigative documentaries to comedy. How do you think about balancing tone when the subject matter is so urgent?

As an artist and scientist, I’m drawn to new ideas. I spent most of my early years learning and I haven’t been able to turn off that tap after graduating from university. So even though my work is broadening in terms of the genres I’m using to convey those ideas, the heart of it all is finding ways to reach audiences with storytelling that will feel fresh and explore ideas and findings in a fresh way. I think the world also needs to see content that isn’t always super serious. So I’ve decided to add comedy to the environmental genre because most don’t associate comedy with the environment.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very drawn to the long form investigative documentary where I can drill down and explore links between different silo’s of research and try to bring them together in a cohesive overview, which I hope leads to new discoveries. But I also want my work to be accessible to larger audiences that might not be drawn to the long form documentary.

The Herring People was truly a labour of love. It took me 18 years to complete. Although to be fair, for the first three years I wasn’t sure there was a story to be told. I had joined the Squamish Streamkeepers and was volunteering time on weekends to walk the streams of the Squamish watershed to help salmon reach the spawning grounds or rescue fry in the summer from drying creeks. But as time went by, Dr Jonn Matsen, who grew up in the area, got the idea that we should see if there were any projects that could help the local herring run that used to spawn in and around the Squamish estuary. The locals remembered a large herring run that arrived every spring, and the thinking was that maybe the salmon runs were suffering because they had lost a vital food source as the fry exited the Squamish River into Howe Sound. My opinion about whether there was a story here to tell suddenly changed when a group of us went under the Squamish terminal dock and discovered that millions of herring eggs had died on the creosote pilings. It looked like the missing herring run had not been extinguished, but were dying in large numbers at the egg stage. The film turned out to be a classic three act story. The protagonists, The Squamish Streamkeepers, had to experiment year after year to find the best way to protect the herring. It’s a fascinating story with many hurdles.  

The Firekeepers is an inspirational series, not unlike TED Talks actually, but in this case we feature the great work being done by individuals in the environmental space. Again, new ideas and fresh ideas that sometimes have flown under the radar of the general public for a long time. I believe audiences will love the personal  stories and experiences of individuals who have spent their lives fighting for a cause, protecting and endangered species, or helping protect the environment in some way. 

Pressure Point – Some of the most watched genres these days are the news/panel/interviews shows. So I thought that this would be a great way to reach a new audience and still talk about pressing environmental issues with humour. It was a lot of fun to do, and the best part is I was able to get support from the Canadian government during COVID to put people to work during a time of need. It was so rewarding to have brought smiles to our crew and now our audience.

Save the Planet Already! is another foray into the eco-comedy space, and if you haven’t seen it, you are in for some belly laughs. All the performances were so fresh, and even though it was done on a very tight budget, it was a fun way to explore environmental issues of the day, or not. Brilliant performances from Harris Anderson, Stuart Jones, KC Novak, Megan Milton, Patrick Maliha, Alannah Brittany, Simon King and host Steven Allen. 

Rise of the Eco-tariffists was born out of the craziness happening south of the border by the Trump administration. Shifting tariffs, picking on long-time allies, have been too much for most of us. So, I thought we needed a little levity and to share a laugh with our southern cousins. Who ever thought that rain could result in a drip tariff? Well, in the world of this film any tariff is possible. I hope you enjoy it.