GORDON BUCHANAN
Wildlife filmmaker Gordon Buchanan reflects on a life of adventure, a need for nature and why exercise has become a non-negotiable
For the past 30 years, Gordon Buchanan MBE has travelled to just about every corner of the globe, filming wild animals in wild places. He’s hand-reared grizzly bear cubs in Siberia, integrated himself with an Arctic wolf pack, and tracked cheetahs on foot through the searing heat of the Kalahari Desert. To spend months at a time in these environments requires no shortage of physical and mental resilience. Even on days spent driving through the bush, rather than hiking up mountains, time pressures and unpredictable wildlife mean absolute concentration is required at all times.
However, in speaking to Buchanan it becomes clear that whether he’s trekking through a tropical forest, or sinking into knee-deep Arctic tundra, he feels most at home in environments most of us would find inhospitable. The discomfort comes on the return to ‘normal life’: the ringing phone and the cluttered inbox.
He talks openly about his struggles with depression – “the wave rolling in” – but also how exercise and general healthy habits have helped significantly. Strength training provides Buchanan with a sense of achievement and real, observable progress, even when it feels hard to find elsewhere. Equally, he speaks of the healing power of nature, even the type found just outside your front door. Being present, he says – feeling the warmth of the sun or the chill of the breeze – is a powerful thing. We’re all animals, after all.
A LIFE OF ADVENTURE...
You need to capitalise on the time you have in the field, because that’s the most expensive part. You might have National Park fees to pay, you’ve got all the travel, the equipment hire, and you need to figure out the best window to film whatever behaviour or animal it is you’re there for. I’ve done a couple of trips where we spent weeks filming and they just didn’t make it into the programme, but I’ve been fortunate in that most projects I’ve worked on we’ve come away with enough usable footage.
Sometimes these trips are incredibly unhealthy and you don’t get any exercise at all. I used to go through fits and starts with exercise, where I had long periods of being really into it and then other periods where I would fall by the wayside. Last year I was filming in Zimbabwe and that was really tough, because we spent 14 hours a day just driving around looking for wild dogs. At the end of the day you were so knackered that you had no energy to do any s
