My Octopus Teacher, The Red Carpet and Jimmy Chin

A Casual Chat Between Academy Award-Winning filmmakers

If you are anything like the half of the staff at Whalebone who wouldn’t stop telling the other half that they absolutely had to watch this gorgeous little documentary about a man and an octopus right now, or the other half who stopped what they were doing (yeah, sorry your Hot Sauce Issue was late) and watched the film—if only to make the other half stop talking about it—then you already know what a moving story it is. Then you can skip watching this trailer for My Octopus Teacher, but you might want to anyway if only to remind yourself just how beautiful Craig Foster’s story of a year spent underwater with an octopus truly is.

If you are like either of those four groups of people mentioned above, then it probably comes as no surprise that the words “My Octopus Teacher” come up an awful lot in connection with the word “Oscar” right now. So maybe that means Harry Winston is making eight tiny custom bracelets to bedazzle a red-carpet octopus as we speak. Probably not.

Harry Winston is making eight tiny custom bracelets as we speak.

It also means that people are curious about how the film came to be. People like Chai Vasarhelyi, who along with her husband Jimmy Chin, directed a film called Free Solo that was the last documentary both halves of the Whalebone team kept telling everyone they absolutely had to watch right fucking now a couple years ago. The Academy Award-winning filmmakers chatted with My Octopus Teacher filmmakers Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed about their amazing film, but somehow did not push them to release the Snyder Cut of the doc. They did ask all kinds of more sensical questions about how they went about turning eight years worth of filming and 3,000 hours of footage of basically an octopus swimming into one of the more remarkable undersea stories we have ever seen. Just a casual chat between Academy Award-winning filmmakers and probably-going-to-be Academy Award-winning filmmakers.