Lucinda Axelsson (‘Secrets of the Elephants’) marvels at how much we still don’t know about elephants [Exclusive Video Interview]
Lucinda Axelsson, the executive producer of “Secrets of the Elephants,” understands how iconic the large mammals are but also how much we still don’t understand about them. “There’s so much that we are just discovering about elephants that speak to their intelligence, empathy, emotional depth, that we felt that it was time that we really caught up with the latest science and found out the true secrets of the elephants,” she tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts: TV Documentary panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). Part of this was achieved by telling counterintuitive stories to what we thought we knew. “We think we know an elephant matriarch. What is more loving, giving, caring, nurturing than a female elephant? So we were trying to tell stories that made you go, ‘Oh, hang on a minute. That’s not what I thought mother elephants did.’”
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“Secrets of the Elephants,” aired on National Geographic and can currently be streamed on Disney+. Over the course of four episodes, the series explores the lives and functionality of the giant animals. The show focuses on species that live in the African Savannah, the deserts of Namibia, rainforests and the continent of Asia. Axelsson is nominated in the Best Documentary or Nonfiction Series category along with fellow executive producer, James Cameron. The show also received a nomination for Best Nonfiction Cinematography.
An example of the elephant matriarch the crew encountered was with Savannah Elephants. “We have this story where these elephants are up on this high plateau and they’ve gotta get to water. There’s no water up there. So somehow they’ve gotta get off this massively high plateau.” The matriarch was forced to find a way to get everyone in the pack and do so while protecting her babies as well. “She basically organizes the family and then leads them off the edge of this cliff effectively and takes him down this incredible slope all the way down to the water. Your heart’s in your mouth and it certainly was when we were filming it.”
Among the unexpected things the film crew captured was the birth of a desert elephant in the Namibian Desert, where a newborn hadn’t survived into adulthood for years. “The next day, we’re up early down there and the mother with the new calf and an auntie was with her all alone. The herd was gone.” The mother immediately started sniffing the ground and the air to find where the herd had gone to and brought her baby along as they made there way back to the herd. “Cameras are rolling and then just before sunset, they caught up with the herd and were reunited and it was the most incredible spectacle. It was the most joyful thing you’ve ever seen.”
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