Diving Deep with A Life Illuminated's Dr. Edie Widder and Tasha Van Zandt

Tasha Van Zandt’s latest film, A Life Illuminated, dives deep. Not simply a glorious journey to the depths of the ocean, the work is a finely realized portrait of Dr. Edith Widder, a pioneer in the study of bioluminescence who quite literally brought the magical world of subsurface light shows to the attention of scientists and science-fans over many decades.

Mixing the career-spanning majesty of the Goodall-focussed film Jane with the vertiginous wonder of Free Solo, Van Zandt’s gift is to provide context to Widder’s work while bringing us on board for her latest journey. With a camera focussed both on the subject herself, as well as her subject of study, audiences are granted a rare opportunity to not only experience the wonders of the deep, but to be wowed by the tenacity, courage and persistence of our most accomplished guide.We spoke to Edith Widder and Tasha Van Zandt prior to the premiere of A Life Illuminated at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival

POV: Jason Gorber
EW: Edith (“Edie”) Widder
TVZ: Tasha Van Zandt
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

 

POV: Tasha, what drew you to focus on Edie?

TVZ: Ever since I was a kid, I have been a huge fan and admirer of our deep sea world, starting with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. After growing up, I learned about this amazing woman, Edie, who got the first footage of the giant squid live in its natural habitat. I followed that story when it came out and was just fascinated. It showed me how little we’ve explored and discovered about our own planet and how many mind-blowingly amazing, humbling discoveries there are to be made. Years later, as I was starting my career in documentary, I became even more fascinated by stories about parts of our planet that feel so out of reach, but yet are really the barometer and connector of all of us. The deep sea became this fascination for me. And it lent me to thinking about how Edie’s own story hadn’t been told.

 

POV: Edie, what is unique about this story is that the lights are finally being shone directly on you, literally. Was there trepidation?

EW: It was a gradual process. Tasha snuck up on me.

 

POV: You’re used to things sneaking up on you in the dark!

EW: [Laughs.] I had myself convinced that this was a story about bioluminescence more than it was a story about me, so the only disagreement we had was in the title. I wanted to call the film Life Illuminated. And she wanted to call it A Life Illuminated. And therein lies the difference in our perspectives! This was a great opportunity, I felt, to show bioluminescence as this indicator of life in a way that most people don’t appreciate or know. You as a blackwater diver can appreciate how much of our planet is unknown to most of the people on the planet and what a unique environment it is, and what a thrill it is when you make those discoveries personally.

 

POV: I would humbly suggest that it’s also pretty extraordinary to shine the light on you. I think that it’s easy to dismiss as just one person among many within the scientific community doing this. What the film does in a gentle way, not in an aggrandizing way, is show what you have contributed to the greater discourse.

EW: I’m coming to terms with it. [Laughs.] There’s no denying it at this point.

 

POV: You’ve accepted the point that the article “A” really is something that is relevant?

EW: It’s there to stay.

 

POV: Sometimes celebrity overtakes the message, especially when it comes to nature. With David Attenborough, for over half a century, has done an unbelievable job of bringing us places we didn’t know we wanted to go. But it’s not about him: it’s about him bringing us along for the journey. Are there people, visual storytellers like that that you as a scientist learned from directly?

EW: Jacques Cousteau, obviously. That’s who I grew up with, and was providing a window into this amazing world that I wanted to know more about. There’ve been many along the way and I’ve gotten to work with some of them!

TVZ: A really big drive of telling this story, is that I grew up enamoured with stories from Jacques Cousteau and following David Attenborough’s tales into the ocean and beyond. But Edie’s was really the first story where I could see myself in her, and I felt like I think that was a big part of the spark. When I met her, as a female cinematographer, director, person who loves exploration and adventure, there’s been a lot of times when I’ve been the only woman on set, the only woman in the room. Edie was really a pioneer. She was one of the first women in her field, one of the first humans to ever go into the oceanic twilight zone, and endlessly followed that curiosity in the face of so many obstacles without letting that stop her.

When I heard her story, that was the first time that I felt like all of these parts of our planet I’d been so fascinated by, and these amazing people who have done such extraordinary work in this field. Edie was the person where I felt like she should be just as known as Jacques Cousteau, David Attenborough and beyond. She actually has ventured into these places and made more discoveries than anyone else. So many people thought of our deep sea as this dark, empty void. Edie was one of the first to go down and be able to document and show it’s filled with light and life.

As a fellow person who likes to be behind the scenes and behind the camera, Edie, I think we’re very much both documentarians, I very much understand that feeling, but for me, I wanted to really shine the light on Edie so that other people can feel the inspiration that I felt from her. Hopefully, more people see themselves in Edie and think about all of the things that may seem impossible, but that she’s shown are very much possible.

 

POV: As a kid growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. I realized one of the things I get through diving is I get not only that sense of weightlessness, being in an environment where you feel almost super-heroic. But I also know at a moment’s notice, things can go very badly. Edie, if you could talk about that sense of the mission, putting yourself in personal danger in order to do something as reasonably esoteric as science, but as beautiful and artistic as our understanding of the natural world?

EW: I’ve always been driven by the curiosity, so that’s the driver. When I was in WASP submersible, I did occasionally did feel claustrophobic. But most of the time I didn’t because I didn’t think of it as being inside, I thought of it as looking out. It was what I was seeing outside that intrigued me. So your question’s triggered a lot of realizations that I hadn’t actually considered before. I’ve been involved in a lot of documentaries, but the documentary’s always about the animals and I’m a talking head to provide the information about the animals, which is fine. But my experience with Tasha was so different than all of those others and they were extensive. She dug into not just the science and the bioluminescence, but into my background.

She found an audio tape that I made while I was in WASP. That’s in the movie and that was so amazing to see that and then to see, to have that scene where I’m talking about how brilliant the luminescence is and you see nothing because there were no cameras. I love that.

 

TVZ: The fact that there were no cameras in that WASP dive, that was such a challenging scene to craft because it was one of Edie’s biggest pivot points, but there was no documentation of what she saw. We tried a lot of different experiments of how to portray that and visualize that. Ultimately, we discovered that the best thing to do was to sit in the darkness so that the viewers could really experience and question, wait, why can’t I see what’s there? Oh, there was no one to document, there were no cameras. Edie was discovering this unseen world, and it pivoted her on to this path to try to problem-solve the way to document this to share with others. And so, in this meta, macro way, my mission with the film has been to really amplify the things that Edie’s seen and now help spread that to others to see these unseen worlds.

 

POV: Space exploration is substantially easier if we send probes, if we send satellites, if we send remote cameras. We don’t need the weight, we don’t need to send people to explore places. In similar ways, at the bottom of the ocean, if someone has the technology you’re using, it takes manual dexterity to work with petrochemical exploration, but we could send remote objects down there to capture this stuff. And yet there’s something beautifully artistic, beautifully humanistic about you being in that suit rather than simply sending an ROV down there. What is a human being going there different from simply sending a remote probe?

EW: For the longest time, and actually I still maintain this is true, the fully dark adapted human eye has been better than any camera system out there. Some of the newer cameras like those that were used in the film when we were in the Triton, some respects, they’re a little bit better than the human eye, but in other respects, they’re not as good.

The camera grabs contrast and enhances contrast, so point sources show up beautifully. In fact, the camera sees more colour than the fully dark-adapted human eye, which is dependent on your rods— the light’s too dim for your cones. But there was something that we saw in the background that was a broad illumination. It’s a little hard to describe, it looked like it was a ceiling beyond the luminescence, that looked like duckweed on a pond, with black lines through it. I don’t know what it is. But I had Nathan Robinson dive with me, and he saw it too. And was describing it the same way, and we couldn’t get it on the cameras. And how exciting is that, that there’s this [thing]: it’s light, it’s got to be life, but we don’t know what it is.

 

POV: Do you think of yourself as a storyteller?

EW: I’ve learned to become one as I’ve just so wanted to be able to share what I saw. Tasha includes that NBC newscast right after I made one of my first dives in WASP and they asked me what was it like down there, and I said it was like the 4th of July. I took a lot of ribbing from my colleagues about that! When you watch the 4th of July, you’re outside of the display, observing it from a distance. But down there, you’re the center of the fireworks display. In fact you’re the cause of it, because every movement you make is the trigger for the luminescence.

One of the things I discovered early in my career is that diving with a Deep Rover, with a single person sub that was untethered, I was able to answer a question that had been bothering everyone for quite some time, which was how much bioluminescence is there when we’re down there, when we’re not down there stirring things up. What’s the spontaneous level of bioluminescence? In WASP, I couldn’t answer that question because I was on a tether, so I was constantly like a tea bag on a string. But in Deep Rover, I thought I could find neutral buoyancy, I went dead in the water. I had black tape with me and I taped over all of the little indicator lights. I was as black as black could be down there, and then I had my digital watch, and I was going to count the number of flashes per minute that occurred spontaneously. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and there was nothing.

When I bumped the thrusters, there were explosions—just amazing amounts of light, streams, rivers, vortices, sparkles, views, everywhere. I moved the sub forward with the thrusters, and all of this light would come back up all over the sphere. There was light everywhere, but it was in hiding. You needed to be able to see it, you needed to know how to stimulate it. That was part of what this film was about, is this other way of stimulating it. It’s something I’ve known for some time, but has been, is almost unknown, even in the scientific community. I’ve finally been able to capture it and talk about it and show it to people.

 

POV: Tasha, are you going under water?

TVZ: I did! To capture the story was a huge, impossible feat. We had a really small window, as you see in the film, to have these experiences, to go into the submersibles. We had a tropical storm heading our way, we were losing time, losing days. We had three dives total, two were tests and then the third is the one that the film is centred around. And that’s when Edie and Nathan were able to do this research and document the flashback. On our first dive, I went down in the second sub, and got to see Edie from sub to sub as our spheres went down into the darkness. I had never been in a submersible dive before, let alone nothing close to 3,300 feet under the surface of our ocean!

One of my greatest fears was how I would respond to being under that amount of pressure. A mantra for me was Edie’s message of curiosity overcoming fear. As we would go through each zone the light would change, from the sunlight zone, where we would see the little window of light as it closed in and this brilliant, turquoise world, into the deep, dark navy world of light where little embers of sparks were starting. Then we reached the twilight zone, this world that Edie had told me about for so long and that I’ve read about since I was a kid. There were sparks shooting out of the thrusters and little creatures and fish and bioluminescent lights around us.

Landing on the bottom on that first dive, we tested the cameras for filming in complete darkness and nothing was working. The pressure impacted the cable. Edie spent her whole life trying to document this mystery and here we were with this very short expedition to document it, and it was nearly impossible.

 

POV: The outside camera meant to capture the behaviour wasn’t working, or the cameras that you were using to capture the capturing?

TVZ: Both. It crashed. Nothing was working. We weren’t able to capture the bioluminescence, and we weren’t able to capture Edie’s sub. We had to go back to the surface and try again. It was a lot of problem-solving and a lot of following Edie’s perseverance to try and try again. But the biggest thing was how life-changing it felt.

On the second dive I got to dive with Edie, to sit by her side. It was truly one of the greatest moments of my life. It was completely transformative of how I see our planet, and it really changed how I saw this film. It helped me realize that when we went into the edit, I wanted this feeling.

It’s interesting you brought up the theme of space earlier. I often think about the “overview effect” you hear from astronauts looking down at Earth and seeing our pale blue dot. All of a sudden, during those dives, I was in the center of this pale blue dot, with Edie, seeing our planet in this whole new way.

 

POV: Submarines and space programs have military origins, but submersibles now are almost entirely designed for petrochemical exploration just like space is designed for exploitation of resources. How do you navigate the paradox of occasionally working with petrochemical extractors to tell the story of the beauty of the planet?

EW: My career was made possible because the navy had an interest in bioluminescence. They were interested in bioluminescence because it could reveal large, cigar-shaped objects moving through the water at night and they needed to have a predicted capability to know whether a submarine could be detected from a satellite, for example. In my early career, I developed the instrument which is still the navy standard for measuring bioluminescence in the world’s oceans. I co-hold the patent on it. But we had to figure out a way to measure bioluminescence in a reproducible fashion so that the photon flux was a number that was repeatable with the same instrument in a different place.

It’s pretty easy to measure bioluminescence. You just put a light detector down there and stir it up. But you get a different number depending on the detector, so we had to develop new detectors. So it had a military application, but from my perspective, I had a pure scientific interest in it. But I did think about the contrast that you’re talking about. I was fine with it. I wasn’t building weapons, I don’t feel like I’ve ever had that much to do with the oil extraction community, although the WASP was actually developed for the oil industry, you’re correct about that.

 

POV: The other one is Petro Canada.

EW: That’s true, Deep Rover was Petro Canada.

 

POV: The main boat that you’re on, is that not an extractive boat?

EW: No, that was Ocean X, funded by Ray Dalio. So that’s a weird shift that’s occurred. There used to be funding from NOAA and the National Science Foundation for deep sea exploration, but a lot of that money has been cut. So now we’re dependant on wealthy people like Ray Dalio and Eric Schmidt from Google. They’re story driven, they’re about getting stories, and the science doesn’t always come first. I’m not denigrating that at all, but it just creates a different priority.

I would like to see significant government funding for ocean exploration. I think it’s so needed, and it doesn’t make sense to be spending money on space exploration at a time when our planet is disintegrating. We’re not going to be able to live on Mars. We’re kidding ourselves if we think we are.

A Life Illuminated premieres at TIFF 2025.

Get more coverage from this year’s festival here.