Tom Hanks & Executive Producer Mike Gunton on the Unique Challenges of Making The Americas
Far from paradise, the Caribbean presented some of the most difficult challenges for filmmakers on The Americas.
NBC's The Americas takes viewers on an expansive 10-episode adventure stretching from the northern edges of Alaska and Canada to the southern tip of Chile and many points between. It’s an in-depth examination of nature, which doesn’t always cooperate with human shooting schedules. The team behind The Americas captured footage on 180 expeditions over the course of five years, and some of those expeditions were more challenging than others.
Capturing footage of behaviors and environments never before seen on film required developing new technologies and strategies. Meanwhile, some of the most impressive segments were captured through a combination of expansive preparation and a healthy helping of good old-fashioned luck.
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Tom Hanks and The Americas executive producer Mike Gunton on the challenges of filming in the Caribbean
“You know that extraordinary migration of the red crabs in Cuba, that was a story that we were worried wasn’t going to happen,” said The Americas executive producer Mike Gunton, in the conversation above with series narrator Tom Hanks. “Because, you can’t go forever, there’s limits on our resources, so you have to pick a time. That migration happens under certain weather conditions. Ninety-nine times out of 100 we want the sunshine, because that’s when nature looks beautiful. On this occasion, we wanted rain… We were getting very worried that there wasn’t going to be rain, and the crabs just wouldn’t do the migration.”
Tom Hanks, meanwhile, expressed a certain kinship with those red crabs. “This often happens, even in my day job,” Hanks said. Whether you’re a Hollywood actor on set or a Cuban red crab waiting to migrate, the wrong weather can ruin your plans.
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Filming the red crab migration was a matter of getting a camera in position and waiting for the right moment. Meanwhile, off the coast, filmmakers were figuring out novel ways to get the camera where they needed it to be.
“If you’re doing some massive great shoot like with the sperm whales, you can’t get the camera operator down underwater because one, they’d die, and they can’t do it quick enough,” Gunton said.
Sperm whales are the deepest diving mammal on Earth, descending to thousands of feet beneath the surface in search of squid and other prey. Filmmakers needed a camera to follow a whale on its dive, remaining underwater for an hour or more, then return to the surface for retrieval. Since a human operator couldn’t do it, they designed a passive camera system and attached it to a whale.
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“It’s a combination of a tag, a data logger, and a camera,” Gunton said. “The whale dives, takes the camera down with it, the camera fires, films a sperm whale diving, and we see it actually hunting. I think it’s the first time anybody’s seen it. Catches a squid in a puff of ink and dust and then comes to the surface. And then, of course, the camera has to pop off the back of the sperm whale.”
From there, the documentary team needed to find the camera, and the clock was ticking. “The poor researcher who did it spent hours and hours and hours with the battery getting weaker and weaker and weaker… she finally found it caught up in some seaweed on a beach somewhere off the Caribbean coast. And we saw the footage, and it’s in The Americas,” Gunton said.
See behind the scenes on The Americas
A whale-operated camera system is only one of the technological tricks on display in The Americas. In addition to 10 cinematic episodes filled with wild stories from the natural world, fans will see the people and technologies which made The Americas possible in a behind the scenes special titled The Making of The Americas, premiering on Peacock April 21.
The ninth (and second-to-last) installment of The Americas — “The West Coast" — is set to premiere Sunday night, April 6 at 8:00 p.m. ET on NBC. Tune in an hour early at 7:00 p.m. ET to catch an encore presentation of “The Amazon" — the series’ fourth episode. All episodes stream next day on Peacock.
New episodes of The Americas will air weekly Sundays at 8:00 pm ET on NBC, and will be streaming on Peacock the following day!
