Making QUEENS: a conversation with Producer/Showrunner Vanessa Berlowitz

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Welcome to the Heart of Show business.
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I am your host, alexia Melochi.
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I believe in great storytelling and that every successful artist has a deep desire to express something from the heart to create a ripple effect in our society.
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Emotion and entertainment are closely tied together.
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My guests and I want to give you insider access to how the film, television and music industry works.
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We will cover Dreams Come True, the Road, life's Travel, journey, beginnings and a lot of insight and inspiration in between.
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I am a successful film and television entrepreneur who came to America as a teenager to pursue my show business dreams.
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Are you ready for some unfiltered real talk with entertainment visionaries from all over the world?
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Then let's roll sound and action.
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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world.
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We are here for yet another fabulous episode of the Heart of Show business, as well as a very special interview on the Eden magazine, which you probably will have already read in the March issue, about this fantastic show called Queens that is airing on Nat Gea or National Geographic the first week of March, and with me I have the executive producer and the owner of Wildstar Films, vanessa Berlovich.
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I had the pleasure of actually interviewing Birdie Gregory, also on the Eden magazine, and of course, he is part of this whole amazing company that is advocating for wildlife and the protection of animals around the world.
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So welcome to my show, vanessa.
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Thank you for having me.
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I'm delighted to be here.
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Oh, my gosh, she's so great to have you and I have to say I've watched, of course, the previews and you know, before it came out and I was, I was so touched and I was so moved and I was so blown away and I just really got to get deep into this and ask you some really interesting questions about this.
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The first thing, obviously, is it took four years, yes, this docu series, and what really stood out for me is when you talked about the differences in climate change in just those four years and you observe those.
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So, when it comes to the filming, can you go a little bit deeper about this?
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Yeah, I mean we had.
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I think one of the worst droughts in East Africa in 20 years happened in the in the middle of our filming and we all know that droughts are getting worse with climate change.
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But it was so striking because our team literally had been following elephants.
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In fact, there was one amazing elephant called Selenge, who turned out to be blind.
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Who are director Faith Missenby's, the first black woman to produce a natural history show, premium natural history, super proud of that.
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But she had been following elephants for our Savannah Queens episode and, you know, came back.
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Filming was suspended because of the drought and because of COVID, came back to see unbelievable scenes of devastation and in fact discovered that her favorite elephant, who she had so beautifully played somewhere over the rainbow to in order to make her feel relaxed because she couldn't see, so she would play music to her and she discovered that her elephant hadn't made it through the depth drought, which was devastating and, you know, just heartbreaking for all our team to sort of witness the extremes that are happening more and more in our environment as a result of climate change.
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That's so amazing that you brought that up, because that was actually one of the most moving parts for me is to see that, to see the elephant approach while music was being played, so that they could literally, you know, have some connection and know that they feel safe, and I thought that was so beautiful.
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And you also touched upon the fact that you have been very, very focused on giving opportunities to female filmmakers.
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Of course, it is a show about Queens and it is a show about the female leadership in the animal space, but in the animal planet.
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But also it was so intentional, I would think, to not only hire seasoned female filmmakers, but you also had the female, seasoned female filmmakers become almost like mentors to the new generation.
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I'd love to hear more about that.
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Absolutely.
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It was when we set out to make Queens, which was totally new.
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No one had actually focused on female leaders in the natural world before.
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We said it was an unbelievable opportunity to showcase and spotlight female talent in our industry.
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And it seemed to make sense because we were looking for a different angle, maybe on what had been done before, where we always show the sort of showy males with their big mains and their kind of teeth and nails and big fights.
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So we wanted people you know, diversity of voices that would look at nature maybe with new, fresh eyes, and so we contacted a few very established female filmmakers In fact, within the director of photography world there are probably only five out of hundreds that are female, and two of them we invited to become our series directors of photography, which is Justine Evans and Sophie Darlington and said you know, we can't, we can't staff our entire series with women, and that sort of highlights the problem because there just haven't been enough women who've been given the opportunity to work on these big shows.
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So they were phenomenal.
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They helped recruit new, young, up and coming camera talent from around the world and they selected an amazing Brazilian girl, an Alaskan woman, a woman from Tanzania, both from Kenya, as well as a whole number of junior camera assistants, who all got the opportunity to be trained by them online in person, have their rushes reviewed.
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Reds, who are amazing camera company that helps, supplied free cameras actually for these women, which was phenomenal meant that they could actually, for the first time, sometimes hold professional cameras.
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You know, for a woman who's trying to make it in Africa, she's going to have no access to the kind of camera gear that we need to make these shows.
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So what sort of happened was Queens became this living academy almost, where the four year process of making the show became an opportunity to train other women and bring them up in our genre.
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And I'm delighted to say that, you know, we have managed to completely shatter the numbers.
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Prior to that, there would be 1% of a production would be female and now it's, you know, multiples of that.
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So we've really really sort of changed the face of the industry in the course of one production.
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I absolutely love what you said because, of course, you know March is also, you know, the month for celebrating the day of the woman and how timely it is that you're coming up with the show.
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I would probably think it's a strategy of marketing as well from Nat Geo to release the show Queens on the month of the women, correct?
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How did this project come about?
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Was it something that you went and you thought about it and then you pitched it, and was it something like a mage to order?
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No, I think there's a moment in time where I was one of very few women that managed to become senior in my industry and I worked at the BBC for 25 years and became one of the very few executive producers that was able to sell and pitch these very expensive projects.
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And it's very significant that it's only really when women have that power that you can affect change, and that was something that I was able to enact when I started a company with my husband.
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I was able to have those conversations with very senior buyers.
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For example, janet Han Vissering is another woman, korean woman, who's very senior at National Geographic.
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One on one as women.
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I pitched her an idea and said you know, I've been following elephants around for two and a half years with my family making a film about the matriarchy for Disney nature and I was really struck by the female leadership that I was seeing in the elephants.
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And I went to Janet and I said why don't we make a film about two great matriarchs in the savannah, where you have the hyena matriarch and you have the lion matriarch, and in this one place in Ngora Gora, crater, tanzania, they fight each other and I thought that would make a fantastic one off.
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But I said why don't we feature the two women that have also become specialists of filming those two female female lead species?
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And she, she listened and I think it was that it sparked something in her as a female leader.
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She just went Vanessa, that's a whole series.
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So in that moment it went from being a single idea to a whole series.
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And then she said go away, come back with six great stories, six great matriarchs.
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And we looked at the there are 10 that have officially recognized and we said, ok, well, which ones will give us the balance of different sorts of habitats, different styles of leadership?
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But then, when we started to look even further and speak to scientists, we realized that they're more animal societies than we realized how are led by females and that the way that they show that dominance is much more subtle and that's often why it's been overlooked in the past.
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So, frankly, we've got Queens two, queens three ready to go.
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I can't wait.
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I can wait, and also because what I love about it and that's actually, it seems to be, the prime message of your production company is that you do not want to be preachy, you don't want to be just.
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Ok, let me tell you about this, and this is what you should be doing, and you really do deliver that style.
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You know the inspirational, moving, but also learning, the education, like the episode of the bonobos, which I was so moved and touched by it Because, of course, first of all, I had no idea that this, this, this specific race of the monkey, whatever you want to call it, that they're so similar to humans.
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But I really loved that you were showing, with all those little monkeys, that they needed the female.
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They needed the female and the human, the women who were chosen to take care of this beautiful creatures and would have them for months just to build the bond, and I think that was so beautiful.
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Yes, no, I mean, the bonobo story in the Congo is phenomenal.
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So there's an amazing sanctuary that we worked with, the mama bonobo sanctuary, and what they do there is so inspiring.
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These are women that are often orphaned themselves by civil law who volunteer their services to literally live 24 hours a day with these baby orphaned bonobos, because in those first few days literally those babies will die of heartbreak if they don't have constant comfort and contact.
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So these women take on this huge responsibility to rehabilitate these orphaned creatures and repair their damaged mental health, help them to become a bonobo again, learn what it is to be a normal, free animal, and then they actually help them get reintroduced into big outdoor kind of community forest where they can live almost as wild again.
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It's an amazing story.
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It's a story of mutual redemption, actually of both the women and the bonobos.
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And I think that's what all along the way, we worked with unbelievable women who obviously are crew.
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I'm hugely inspired by the women that helped film this series.
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You know little Tanya Escobar, who's five foot tall, just shilling her way hundreds of feet up into the rainforest and enduring massive tropical storms and being attacked by wild bees and day after day.
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So that was inspiring as it was.
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But then we worked with people like the Lionesses in Kenya, which is an all female patrol group who literally go out and police the savannah and protect the elephants and they're coming face to face with poaching on a daily basis and going into communities and trying to understand and help people deal with the very real conflicts that they have.
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Now that you know, human populations are growing and they come into conflict with elephants.
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So we worked with these women alongside our filming and just inspired by so many people supporting documenting, saving wildlife in the world, and that's what we wanted to show with the biggest story of this series.
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I think you totally succeeded in that and I love that.
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You said that there's going to be a Queens 2 and Queens 3.
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I hope so.
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So fingers crossed, fingers crossed.
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How did you get to Angela Bassett?
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Was she like on your list or did she approach you to executive produce and obviously lend the narration to this?
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So when we set out to make this show, we went well, who would be the voice?
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And there was one voice we wanted.
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We wanted someone like Angela, who's a phenomenal actress.
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She can bring both high drama, she's sassy, she can do humor, incredible breadth.
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But she also represents she's such an icon of the acting world.
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She represents female empowerment, diverse female empowerment, and she is the queen, I mean, you know, from Black Panther.
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She's played this incredibly regal role and we felt that she embodied everything that, you know, we aspired to represent with this series.
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So at the point when we had a first cut, we approached her agent and sent it to her and hoped, fingers crossed, that she would like the show.
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And she was.
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You know, I think she was immediately intrigued, but as much as anything, she was interested in the ethos of Wild Star and what we were trying to set out with our Academy, which is also taken on what we've been doing on Queens, which is training up more underrepresented groups, not just women, all different groups that have no voice in our industry, and she is doing something very similar with her company.
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So she said everything about this project fits.
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I mean, she enjoyed the content, she felt she could really give it, you know, some gravitas and but also bring her acting skills to it, because it's a very drama led style, really, that we've adopted.
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But she also felt that she wants to be an ambassador for the series and she's been absolutely phenomenal.
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So she's the exact producer and we've also working with her company who are helping amplify everything that we're striving to achieve.
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I think Angela is such a perfect choice.
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I mean obviously Wakanda forever, Exactly.
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Exactly.
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The queen of Africa.
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I mean, you cannot, obviously you shop above and beyond Africa, but she is a perfect.
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She's a perfect voice and and and presence for something so spectacular as the Queens series.
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Ease, but did you.
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What advice would you give to others?
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Because of course there is.
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You know the readers of the magazine, but also my listeners to my podcast people do want to do something about it and sometimes it you feel helpless and like, well, I'm not going to go to Africa, how can I help?
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You know wildlife survive.
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You know because you've said it, the statistics are staggering about how much we're losing the animal species you know in the planet and how fast, how much faster, the rate is going.
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So what type of advice would you give to both aspiring filmmakers on one category, but also to just the general public, to become more active and more involved in the preservation of wildlife and conservation?
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of course, so I'll break that into two answers.
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I think, firstly, with aspiring filmmakers.
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Now more than ever, we need new voices.
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We need voices that are close to the people that live with wildlife, which is why faith was so important.
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She is simple, she's Kenyan and you know her voice is.
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We need to start hearing from the people who live with animals, because their voice matters.
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They, they have to deal with what it's like to be in conflict, sometimes with animals, but they also have the best understanding of the world from guardians of these, this wildlife.
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So we need to empower them, we need to make stories for them.
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We need to have them tell their stories.
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So I would say any aspiring filmmaker that lives in an environment with with animals, make films about those animals.
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Get those stories out of any platform that you can, because your voice matters.
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I worked in the BBC for decades and we made wonderful shows that reached large international voice audiences, but it was white British voices making those films.
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I think that the stories that will cover from the people locally are different and they're important.
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So that's what I would say, and I would say that people who are inspired by, generally by nature and the environment to make films, be as creative as you can.
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You've got to be.
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You know people.
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You've got to compete with very entertaining things.
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You've got Marvel films.
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You've got, you know, incredible dramas.
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So you need to use your creativity to get these stories out so that use humor, use drama, use a pop star, use any one that you can.
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That's that can bring young people to this story so that more people are made aware.
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And then I would say, if you're actually trying to become active in supporting the natural world, it's all about policy.
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It's all about who you vote for.
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You know this is find out what your government thinks and which parties are pro the environment and vote for them.
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It's as simple as that.
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So I would say, you know if you are inspired by film or a particular species, go online, see what groups like Mama Bonobo are working to support, for example, bonobos.
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See if you can donate, see if you could go and volunteer.
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You know there are lots of ways that people can help and be active in this cause.
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Yeah, I love what you said about volunteering, because I think you will be making such a memorable experience for somebody young to go and say, instead of just going to Ibiza and partying or just going to some you know fun, just nightclubbing thing, why don't I learn about myself by being in this type of environment?
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What do you think that we, as humans can learn from from these animals, both on the matter of leadership as women, of course, but also as a human race?
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Well, there's much to learn from these female leaders.
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Starting with that, I've been so inspired, you know, coming up as a female leader.
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I looked around and there weren't many role models in my industry and I looked around at, you know, their greatest leaders in music, acting, fashion, some in government, not many.
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And the other thing that really struck me was that the types of leadership that you saw were quite there seemed to be.
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You were either one type or another.
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There didn't seem to be a sense of you could be all different types of leaders.
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As a woman, and I think that's what I was amazed at when we looked in the natural world, as we've got female leaders that use wisdom and experience like an elephant, whereas we've got hyenas who are frankly a badass.
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They use their brute strength because they're bigger than the males, they're very aggressive and they'll do anything to seize the crown.
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They are absolutely ruthless.
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And then you've got, you know, bonobos that lead with kind of consensus and love and peace and a much more sense of communal and community and alliance, and all different variations, lionesses that lead with these very tight sisterhoods that will literally do whatever it takes to protect that sisterhood.
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And I found that very interesting because it makes you realise.
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You know, often, as a mother and a senior leader, I feel all of these.
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I feel a pull and a push and seeing that also in the natural world, where these leaders were trying to keep their family safe but also lead the whole community through a drought or whatever they were trying to challenge, they were trying to face.
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And I particularly found the elephant, the older elephant, nature Arc.
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She reminded me of how I feel sometimes when she hit the road and she was like I've never seen a road before, I don't know what to do, and she was paralysed and I love that.
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She looked to the younger ones.
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She looked at her daughter and her granddaughter and they showed her the way.
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And I sometimes feel like that with my team, where you know the younger female leaders, when I hit sort of obstacles of you know, I'm not sure how we do this.
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It's not how I used to do it.
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They'll go okay, it'll be fine, we'll make it work, and that's I found really inspiring just looking at how the animals do it.
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But I think generally we can take huge inspiration from the natural world.
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I find it very calming to know that animals always find a way, they always find a solution.
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Their drive is for life and for survival and for optimism.
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They don't.
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Their drive is not for destruction.
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There is no animal species that's trying to destroy another.
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They are just struggling to make their way.
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And that positivity I think we could all earn a lesson from that that sort of coexistence that we see in the natural world of all these species.
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What a beautiful ending to this podcast.
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I really do believe that there is a great reason for documentaries like this.
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It's not just about animals and it's not just about wildlife.
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It's really about learning something so that we can create our own humanity and make it a little better, so we can learn from that.
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Let's not destroy.
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Let's not destroy what God has created, let's not destroy the magnificent balance that there is in nature already, and let's try to restore the balance ourselves in our own life.
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This has been such a great conversation.
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Vanessa, thank you for coming on my show and anybody who's listening.
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Please do check out this incredible series Queens on Nat Geo.
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By the time this episode drops, it'll already be available to you.
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So make sure that you educate yourself, that you entertain yourself, you get inspired, you get touched and moved, like I did.
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Let's keep on making more great, inspired content, and this is the heart of show business.
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If you like this episode, please do subscribe and give it a review, because I love to get more wonderful people like Vanessa on my show and over and out.
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Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the heart of show business.
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If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend.
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You can also subscribe, rate and review the show on your favorite podcast player.
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If you have any questions or comments or feedback for us, you can reach me directly at theheartofshowbusinesscom.