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How did you get turned on to the situation in Taiji?

Psihoyos: I'm the Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, an organization that Jim and I started in 2005. I was going around to marine mammal conferences to find out what the main subjects were. The biggest one was in San Diego, with 2,000 of the world's top marine scientists. Ric O'Barry (dolphin-trainer-on-the-show-Flipper-turned-activist) was supposed to be the keynote speaker. I was watching all the guys with PhDs doing these 15-minute poster board sessions and I was just going blind. So I was really excited to get some pop culture and see what Ric O'Barry had to say and all of a sudden he got pulled from the ticket. That got me curious, so I asked who pulled him and they said the sponsor. Okay, who's the sponsor? The Hubbs Research Institute, the non-profit arm of Sea World.

So I called up Ric and he told me he was going to talk about this dolphin slaughter in Taiji. And I couldn't believe that in this day and age the second largest economy in the world was slaughtering dolphins.

I asked who was doing anything about it. He said, "just me." I told him I'd like to help out and took a three-day crash course on how to make a film. Then I showed up in Taiji the next day.

What kind of course did you take?

Psihoyos: I hired a producer to come in and show me how to work the cameras.

Talk about how the break in scenes evolved into becoming such a vital part of the film?

Psihoyos: We were shooting two movies at the same time. One was The Cove and the other was The Making of the Cove. And when Fish came on he had the idea to combine the two. We had a military grade thermal camera - that we weren't allowed to bring out of the country - that wasn't supposed to record video. It was supposed to be used for warfare. So Charles Hamilton, my director of clandestine operations, figured out a way rig it so you could put video through. So we had all this night vision stuff and it when Fish saw it he was like, this is amazing.

So that stuff wasn't intended to be part of the movie originally?

Psihoyos: No

That's crazy!

Stevens: I had never seen anything like that. I was like, that's coolest thing I've ever seen. And the other thing is that Louie is a photographer, so the look was incredible. So I had to talk him into being in the movie. Originally he didn't want to but the team had to be in the movie.

We were screwing around with the idea of a narrator like Bill Murray, because of Steve Zissou. But then we figured that Louie's the narrator. It made so much sense.

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