Life on Air

I often get letters, (and) quite frequently people say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power, that created nature. To which I reply and say, 'It's funny that people, when they say that this is evidence of almighty, always quote beautiful things.' They always quote orchids and hummingbirds, butterflies, roses, but I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in West Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball turning him blind before he is five years old, and I reply and say, 'Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well.' And I find that baffling, to credit a merciful God, with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual and to allow people to make up their own mind about the moralities of this thing or indeed the theology of this thing.

We made a film about chimps hunting monkeys: that was an extraordinary and powerful and alarming and dismaying thing to see. Again people say, 'How can you put on such savagery, of a predator catching prey? And you are milking it for violence.' If they saw what you put out on the cutting room floor of this animal in suffering — I mean it's a very narrow line that you have to tread, you cannot in my view eliminate it entirely, that is to sentimentalise and to distort reality, but equally some of it is very hard to take, but it's about the reality of what chimps are and we are very close to what chimps are.