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‘Rivers run through us’: Willem Dafoe and Robert Macfarlane on why they made a film of the world’s great waterways
Made by the same team that shot Mountain, including director Jennifer Peedom, this stunning documentary captures the great power and beauty of rivers – and how vulnerable they are to a modern world they helped create
Nature documentaries tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they seek to awe us with the splendour and richness of the natural world, or they sound the alarm about how human activity is jeopardising that splendour and richness. It’s a tricky balance: you are in danger of serving up visual wallpaper or beating your audience over the head for not doing enough, even as you ask them to do nothing more than sit and watch a film.
Faced with this dilemma, River seeks to do both. On the one hand, it delivers stunning landscape visuals that demand to be seen on the largest possible screen, enhanced by a stirring score from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, indigenous singer William Barton, Jonny Greenwood and Radiohead. There are riverscapes of every description, from every corner of the world and at every scale, from fine grains of silt to satellite images that resemble abstract art. There are also moments of white-knuckle action, such as an unbelievably long drone shot careering down a glacier as it transitions into a raging river to a rousing Bach accompaniment.
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