Peter Zuccarini (English)

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 0:07

Where dreams come from a podcast about realizing our dreams. You are listening to where dreams come from a media for change podcast. I'm your host Sanjeev Chatterjee. In this episode we meet Peter zuccarini who is without a doubt among the top underwater cameraman working in the film industry today. His credits include life of by Pirates of the Caribbean, Motorcycle Diaries Darjeeling Express, to name just a few. I spoke to be at his Key Biscayne, Florida home, we talked about the origins of his aspiration of becoming a recognized underwater director of photography, and what it has taken to pursue this dream over a career spanning more than a quarter of a century. Peter, greeny Welcome to where dreams come from. Part of the reason why I wanted to do this podcast is the stories that I've heard from you about your childhood, youth. And now your professional life, and the trajectory of that. And I always think of you as a person who knew what he wanted to be a dreamt about the future and chased it. I just wanted to ask if you would share a little bit about where you grew up, and what the circumstances were.

Unknown: 1:30

I grew up on the island of Key Biscayne, Florida. It's connected by a Causeway system to Miami. So it's not proper remote island. But when I was a child, it certainly was a lot less developed than it is now. And we had a lot of vacant lots and open property. And we could walk for example along the sea walls and look for wildlife in a way that is hard to imagine now when the whole water line is built up of home. So my early childhood was spent sort of exploring around the island, especially the water environments, by nursery school and incense was replaced by the beach, my mother moved here from the northeast, like a lot of people had an island had been hit by a really bad hurricane a couple of years before we moved here. The types of people who lived here is very dissimilar to now and that the people who moved here after the hurricane were young families that didn't have their life set up yet they were still just getting their first jobs. They wanted to live near the beach. And little stories come from that form you I guess you know, you don't remember I just remember it like a dream now because it's so long ago, but I guess those are formative years, I can remember we would shake out the creatures from the Sargassum grass into a bucket and then coming back and then there would just be one Sargassum fish. And the other 10 things were gone. And I would say to my mom, somebody took my fish, somebody took my crabs, she's like, well, maybe that big fat fish ate them all. We started to learn some, some lessons like that. And then, as a kid, we we started to learn how to go diving for lobster and spear fish. And at about 12 years old, I started to feel like I really loved being out on the water. I really love diving with my friends. But it seemed like there must be something else to do besides just like kill all these things we love seeing. I started to develop an interest in underwater photography and I had like a little Kodak Instamatic camera, which did okay, but I had no control over the lens it didn't really have as wide of a lens as you really need for underwater. So I started to learn about underwater photography by reading this book by Philip shulkie. And then I learned kind of what I needed, but then I had to figure out how to get it. So I approached my father I said, you know, had this camera picked out at the camera store. My father said I'll make a deal with you. I'll help you buy that camera but you're going to buy the camera, I'm going to buy you a lawnmower and you're going to go out and mow people's lawns and make money and then you can buy the camera yourself and for me buying you the lawnmower you can mow our lawn basically forever. As time went on. I my father had home movie cameras and I would take like aquariums and I would take the the super eight camera and put it in the aquarium and I would just push it down into the water and move it around on the turtle grass flats as my underwater camera. I couldn't afford a Motion Picture underwater camera but we had these home movie cameras Of course it back then everybody shot everything on film. I was really into sports. I probably thought you know, maybe I would have a chance to do some competitive sports. And probably my initial dream was something like that more in line with doing sports but then when I went to art school and studied fine art in school, I I realized that there was this interesting combination of photography and filmmaking. And because I had grown up my whole life, snorkeling and free diving, there was these cool kinds of shots, I could do swimming with the camera. Somewhere in college, I thought, Okay, this could work like, I'm not going to be the athlete, maybe professional athlete I had dreamed of as a child, but that I could combine the physicality of moving a camera through water, underwater, through caves through the mangroves, carrying it around, you know, into the swamps to get to the really cool places. I really enjoyed being outdoors. And I really enjoyed the physicality of the filmmaking process. Because at some point in my college years, to finish my films, I would be in the editing room for hours and days and nights. And I liked the editing that I was doing of my work creatively, but I didn't like the process, I didn't really see myself working in an office behind a computer for the majority of my creative time.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 6:17

What is the shape of a dream? You know, we say that we become successful if you're able to chase a dream. And you give a little bit of an hint of what you're talking about. So perhaps, if we can back up a little bit and talk about several dreams that you may have had, and and what was the process of distilling?

Unknown: 6:36

When I was first making my own films, I wasn't really that interested in narrative filmmaking, or even documentary filmmaking per se. I was much more interested in filmmaking about the way dreams feel. I think a lot of filmmakers approach this because film is one of them, is a unique medium where you have layers of sound and image, which can approximate the just the wildness, the way dreams operate in your mind. And I've always thought of dreams as like a really fantastic place to start looking for ideas, when for my projects. I love the way dreams when you move through a dream, that you could be yourself and then you beat you become someone else and you're seeing a bear and then it becomes a bowl. Like things change. I At first, I thought it was two different things that there was really not I mean, your dream of what you want to be. When you grow up, or your dream of what you want to accomplish is kind of like a dream like you. You're moving through time with certain people accomplishing certain things, requiring certain skills, making certain contacts. And then as you move through it, it's very fluid is rarely exactly what you imagined. And sometimes you end up in a place like what I'm going to describe where I'm underwater, swimming with cameras, seeing amazing things. It isn't really a dream, I imagined. But when I'm there, it is a familiar dream in the way that dreams kind of keep moving and changing. And then when I would be swimming through a school of 20,000 fish, and surrounded by them, I thought this is like a dream. This is my dream, I'm living my dream. So I can be very in touch with that sentiment of like pursuing a dream, accomplishing getting arriving there. But I think it's much more abstract. Even as you as you live as you live the life because it becomes very abstract what the dream really is.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 8:48

I have the great privilege of having an higher education. And you know, through that educational process, the idea of chasing a dream was always framed in terms of competition, and about competitiveness in the marketplace.

Unknown: 9:05

It's a strange thing, right to do be doing an art form, but then be dealing with this competitive environment. Like if we all sort of distill our most pure thoughts of what we think art is, do we really think competition plays into that, like, it seems a strange combination. But yet, if you want opportunities, your work to be seen as one thing that becomes competitive because there's lots of people who want their work seen there's only so many venues or so many eyeballs available. And then if you want to survive at it, meaning you want people to pay you if we're gonna operate in society, that you need to be paid to survive unless you have other means. So then it becomes competitive, you know, who's going to buy my art or who's going to pay me to make my art, all those things become competitive. Those become very significant, almost like boulders. You're moving down a river, you're moving down this river in the boat, and you and you're paddling and you're picking your smooth course. But there's no ignoring that giant boulder in the middle, that seems to suck you right up against it or that you have to work way around it. And competition is for me kind of like that these giant boulders as you're trying to move smoothly down this river, that you may have to face them, you can't ignore them, or you'll be smashed by them.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 10:25

What's your advice about competition and art,

Unknown: 10:27

my advice really, is, is rarely logistical. Because if you love the water, and you love communicating about it, or you have a passion for either changing things that you see environmentally, with the oceans, or the rivers, or you are in love with the artistic practice, and you just love water as a medium, for the way, light and color and objects move through the weightlessness of water, if those are the things you're passionate about, you know, I always tell people to be wary about taking jobs that you're doing that for other people, as opposed to whatever it is that sparked your passion in that process itself. So that is to say if it's about the environment, like go right after your environmental causes go right for the heart of them, or, or artistically, if you have a story that you've been longing to tell, be wary of telling other people's stories first, to learn how to tell your own, those are the things I really try and emphasize to younger people.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 11:32

I just think that simply dreaming is not going to want to get you there. So what is it that you need to do on top of having a dream.

Unknown: 11:44

At some point in my life, I was working as a director of photography on lower budget movies where he had to be very inventive, working, you know, in guerilla filmmaking, if you want to call it that, and being very resourceful, but sort of getting worn out, during that brilla milk filmmaking process, I sort of streamlined and said, I really want to be back in the water, I feel like the minute you decide exactly where you want to be, it just starts happening. Like, if you're really crystal clear on where you want to be, the minute I've made a strong resolve that I was willing to literally almost live in the streets like I was living out of my van, I was not gonna like let money drive me I was gonna let opportunities that were similar to where I wanted to go with my career drive me. So no matter what the fees was, or if there was no fee, whatever it was going to take for me to learn war. And once I decided that, it just seemed like the doors started opening up almost immediately. And I think it was just as I opened my own eyes up to that were opportunities all around me, I just needed to sacrifice. One of my first mentors was my college film Professor Leslie Thornton, to keep me working. She knew that when you first get out of college, it's it's hard, you know, you have college debts, you don't really have a clear career path if you're in art field. So she would, she would send me rolls of 16 millimeter film. And basically tell me shoot, this is a story I'm working on. And basically, she would pay for the film and pay for the processing. And I could shoot whatever I wanted. And she would like tell me how it did or didn't fit into what her larger process was. And but back then you couldn't just shoot film because you wanted to it costs a lot of money. Like you can now your iPhone is more powerful than our 16 millimeter cameras were in some ways. So she allowed me to keep shooting and that was helpful. And then that was one mentor I had that was supportive of me doing things the way I wanted to do them. And then I met Sonny Gruber, who was one of the leading authorities on Shark biology in the world. He had a biological Field Station in Bimini Bahamas, which was an area that I had grown up going to and spearfishing and I knew the area well. And I went as an assistant for another filmmaker, and I was able to get some shots of sharks that other people weren't getting, I guess because I was comfortable swimming around the sharks. When the job was over. Dr. Gruber said, Hey, you know a lot of crews come through here filming and you know, very frequently they don't get the shots of the sharks underwater they need because they came maybe prepared to do it. But then when they saw what the sharks looked like, they were hesitant. And because you're so comfortable around the sharks, maybe you can come back when other crews come here and I can start to help us since you're young and need to meet people and then it became kind of an interesting relationship where whenever a crew came in To the biological Field Station, he would give me a call and say, I got this, they're willing to hire you, or you call and say they're not willing to hire you, they brought their own guy, but I'm gonna fly you over here anyway, if you're willing to come. So I would go over for free. Anytime there was a shoot at the Field Station, for a few years, I did that. And I accumulated a lot of great experiences, learning about even more about sharks from people who were studying sharks, learning, ways of filming around sharks, meeting actual filmmakers, and some of those relationships actually went on into the future. But when you go through those sleep deprived, intense product, productive cycles, you bond more than you would in an office setting where you're like, out in the out in the ocean, the sprays hitting in the face, you know, you can't see everyone, you know, there's dangerous animals, there's dangerous navigation. So I forged a lot of really good relationships from that time period. I met different photographers and filmmakers, directors I worked for. And I think as time went on, through my mentors, I sort of learned about myself what I bring to different collaborative film processes.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 16:22

Most of my life is spent in the 20th century. And now we're in the 21st century, dreaming was an essential part of who I became, a student told me one time when I was talking to him about his dream, he told me the problem is it's not as if we don't have dreams, but we are doubtful that the dreams we have our own dream,

Unknown: 16:45

was a very good point. We're all so connected. There has always been that principle in art that, you know, so many ideas are derivative of other things that we felt or seen, and, but now with how connected everyone is, like instantly, in a way that we never imagined, probably when we were in our youth, that Yeah, there's now it's more like collective dreaming, like the true version of the site, guys, like the ghost of the times is now with us all the time. Now, if I ever have an idea that I get excited about that, I think is somehow interesting, in that it's a new take on on storytelling, I always have this, like, underlying urgency in me now that like, not that I used to, like, if I don't do this, someone's gonna do it someday, if I don't do this idea, someone's going to do it like really soon. Because we're also connected. And we're also influenced by so many similar things, you feel like a little bit of urgency to pursue your dreams in a way that maybe I was more relaxed about it, before technology was, was linking so quickly,

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 18:02

you work in a very, very niche area on which you are at the top of, for want of a better better term of the food chain, to get there, what really makes you tick,

Unknown: 18:16

to have to deflect a little bit of that notion of being at the top of the food chain, because I don't really necessarily agree with that. And we all know what happens to the things at the top of the food chain, and everything at the bottom of the food chain consumes them one day, meek shall inherit the earth as, as it is written anyway. So I don't think of myself really on top of anything. You know, I, I think of that I'm very passionate about what I do, I think to stay interested and able to contribute at the highest levels. I look at my process now. holistically might be a word I could apply to it, I can swim through a tunnel, accelerate up to the surface, take the camera out of the water back into the water, I could attach myself to a propulsion device and zoom through the water. I can do all these things in one shot because of the weightlessness that cameras can have in water. So to fully explore that, you know, I like to be able to practice and I I assume that you know steady cam operators and drone operators and movie cam, they would have to do the same thing to be really the top of their craft. And I embraced that part of it. When I was an athlete, I liked you know, Training and Fitness. Now I don't do any fitness except as it relates to my craft. I only do things to move my body by going out and swimming with my camera, you know, doing things underwater with my fins. You know, that is something I really like but that's just the physical part. Then there's there's this whole other aspect I'm constantly trying to improve myself and how I hear people. And a big part of my dream now is understanding other people's dreams. If I meet a director that I'm working for, to help them create their underwater scene in a movie, a best case scenario for me in terms of how I would enjoy the process, and that I'm actually living my dream would be that I'm fully receiving what they want to get from it. And maybe some things that can't fully articulate, but I'm hearing that between the lines or I'm seeing and their visual references that they're offering me. And then as we start to work, I'm seeing what they're responding to, which maybe isn't exactly what I thought, from the storyboards or the script. And then at the end of it, I've done something that I really value myself as something new that I never thought I would have done. It was something I hadn't imagined. But now I'm seeing it and I'm enjoying it. And it isn't exactly what they imagined. It's something that together, we like created this dreamy scenario that everybody is just really like, getting stoked by excited by

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 21:13

to end, I just want to ask you the question. Whether you think you are successful at what you do, or if not, then what would success look like?

Unknown: 21:27

I have specific dreams, if I'm using dream as a sort of that I'm living a life that I imagined. I see myself doing those things. But of course, once you've lived scenarios that you've imagined, that you never thought you could arrive at or that you, at some point, believe you could arrive at but it would be a lot of work to get there. Once you start living them out, then of course you have to adjust them. So there's things that have far exceeded my expectations about the life that I'm leading and things I've been able to see people I've been able to share those experiences with. And there's a handful of things that I have imagined for myself that I have not yet arrived. So it's still it's I'm still I'm still dreaming and still reaching for some dreams. And I'm still having dreams at night that remind me of things that that I still fascinated by him and want to try and live in the waking life.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: 22:31

He does a great thank you very much. This was a real pleasure. Thanks for listening to where dreams come from a podcast about realizing our dreams. My guest pizza greeny realized early in life that he wanted to combine his outdoor athleticism with his love for water environments and photography. Beyond getting support from his parents, and mentors to follow his passion. What enabled me to continue dreaming was his discovery of a clear purpose for his work. Along the way, he picked up on the value of true collaboration with others, understanding their vision and bringing his own expertise and experiences to contribute towards the realization of a shared dream. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Until next time, I'm Sanjeev Chatterjee.

Unknown: 23:24

Where dreams come from is the production of media for change.