Interview with Award Winning Underwater Cinematographer Roger Munns

Roger Munns is a British underwater cinematographer and an Emmy™ and BAFTA award winner. Based in Sabah, Malaysia, Roger is a highly accomplished Director of Photography (DOP) specializing in underwater sequences, with over 30 natural history ocean sequences filmed over the past two decades.

Most recently, Roger served as the series-wide Director of Photography on Our Oceans, a landmark Netflix series narrated by Barack Obama, which explored the world’s oceans. His extensive body of work includes being a principal cinematographer on Blue Planet II—where he filmed 10 stories—Director of Photography for Apple’s Under the Sea screensavers, and a sequence cameraman for Planet Earth III.

You can see more of Roger’s work on his website (www.roger-munns.com) and on Instagram @rogermunns.

In this interview conducted by Aoife McKiernan for Inside Scuba, Roger shares insights into his career and the challenges of filming in extreme underwater environments.

IS: You're in Malaysia now. Do you live there full time?

RM: Yeah, I live in Kota Kinabalu in Borneo. I've been here since 2001, which is what, 24 years now almost. It's been a while! It's been a minute, as they say.

IS: Was moving there a practical decision, or?

RM: It was like many things in my life, I just fell into something and got stuck. I had learned to dive in Australia on a one year working visa and then I started traveling through Southeast Asia working as a divemaster. I actually had a job lined up in Sulawesi, and my friend was diving here in Sabah at a place called Sipadan, and he was a divemaster and he said, ‘come out for a couple of weeks before you start your job’. So I did.  Then I loved the diving so much that I ended up not taking the job in Sulawesi, but staying around. He left, I fell into his job, and then I got into the whole video thing through a company here, and I just never went home.  If you'd have asked me before I came here where Borneo is on a map, I would not have been able to point it out. I would've had no clue, but I just kind of arrived here and then never left basically!

IS: Regarding your career there seems to be a lot of that, as you described it, that you ‘fell into things and then it kind of stuck’. You studied Maths, was that ever a possible path?

RM: I was chatting about this with my friend on a walk the other day, about how little use our university degrees have been! I think I went to university because that was what people did and I was intelligent and I chose maths because I was good at it. And I think very quickly, within a year or so, I was literally doodling maps in the lectures and deciding what I was going to do when I finally finished. I just slugged my way to the end of it, to be honest. Not proud of it, but I certainly didn't make the most of my university career. It has not been that useful.  And then exactly that, I fell into something and it stuck. I kind of didn't know what to do with my life but I knew that I loved the ocean. I grew up in Cornwall and I lived there. I surfed and lived in that surfing community lifestyle when I wasn't at school or uni, living in a caravan and working in a surf shop and working in a bar at night. I loved surfing and hanging out- that was what we lived for.  So I knew I loved the ocean, but I had no idea what to do. Then I went to Australia on a whim with not much money when I was about 24 or 25, with a few hundred quid in my pocket and I thought it was about time to put myself in a bit of a risky situation and work out what I was going to do. And that's when I discovered diving in Byron Bay. I actually went to a dive centre because I think the waves were flat! I didn't have much money left. I was sleeping in the back of my car and I just asked them for a course. I said, ‘look, if I work for you, will you give me a free course?’ And they were like, ‘well, mate, work for us first and then we'll see.’  So, I washed masks and filled tanks for a week and then they relented and gave me an open water course and I loved it! I was just like, wow, this is amazing. I can hover, can see fish, it's incredible! All these dive masters are so cool and they're traveling the world! I want to be like them. So, I kind of just fell into diving, which was good because I was a terrible surfer!

IS: I'm thinking about your poor parents wondering where is he now? Is he okay? He’s living in a car!  You sounded like you were a bit of a disaster, rambling around in the world!

RM: It does sound like that, now that I think about it! Yeah, my mum was pretty keen on accountancy for sure! I think she was not so happy to see me heading off.

IS: Your parents, do they understand your job now?

RM: Yeah, I think they are very proud of me now. And my mum's funny. I'll tell her, ‘oh mum, there's a programme coming out on BBC’ and she'll watch it and she'll say, ‘Roger, we didn't see you anywhere!’ I'm like, ‘I'm behind the camera mum.’ She says, ‘yes, yes, I know, I know, but I always look out for you. I saw a boat with someone getting off it and I thought that it might be you’. She loves to see me, she wants to see my face on screen. So if there's a ‘Making Of’, she gets very excited. But I think obviously now I've had a little bit of success, so they're quite proud. But I think when I was in my early thirties and still earning $500 a month and filming tourists and wedding videos and promotional videos for dive resorts, I think they were probably tearing their hair out.

IS: When your work was making those videos for tourists did you think, you know what, I’m good at this and people seem to be happy with what I'm producing. Let's take this another step further, or was that another thing that naturally evolved?

RM: It was an evolution. I mean, at first I was super happy. I got this job working for a local company called Scubazoo here. I was a divemaster and I was into photography, but back then cameras were so expensive. I mean they still are now, but there are entry level cameras now.  Back then that didn't exist. It was the era of slide film and you had to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get a camera. So I just couldn't afford it on my divemaster salary. Then they offered to train me to shoot video and I could film tourists and dive resorts for them for commission, no salary. I just slept in a room near the dive centre and would go and film some people during the day and then try to flog them the video at night and make some money, make 20%. I think I made about $40 a video.  I got into that and I loved it, it was just so creative and it was super fun. It was very hard work but I had great times living in the dive resorts. I did that for a couple of years and then that was enough, you start to get a little bit creatively bored, filming people swimming along after turtles day after day. So in my spare time I would go and shoot fish. The company was very ambitious and aggressive and they started doing TV programmes, things like survival and travel programmes. I started getting a little bit of work there, a day here, a day there, filming a travel programme or getting a little bit of underwater footage for them. It just built up that way. I worked on The Really Wild Show, a British wildlife show that had a little bit of budget and they would travel around the world, and I did a few jobs on that. It was kind of a gateway. I remember someone gave me a copy of Blue Planet, the original DVD Box set, while I was working in the resorts, and I watched it and I just thought, this is incredible. The level of film making and storytelling is just wonderful, but not for a second did I think, that's what I want to do. I just didn't think it was achievable. I didn't have that as an attainable goal. I'm not one of those people that sets their mind on a goal- I want to go to the moon, how do I do that? I'm going to become an astronaut first and do the blah, blah, blah…. I just sort of do the next thing. I never really imagined that I would be able to work on those sorts of programmes. I just kept going and doing the next thing really, I guess.

IS: Did you ever have a moment where you thought “Oh, wow! This has actually happened for me?”

RM: Yeah, I think there were a couple of moments. I think when I worked on my first Attenborough show. The first one I worked on was Life in Cold Blood. I filmed a turtle mating sequence along with another camera man. When that came out and Attenborough’s voice was over my footage, I mean, that was definitely a moment. I did that and then very quickly I did another sequence. For me, they were the holy grail, those Attenborough-narrated, BBC, landmark blue chip documentaries. That was what I saw as the pinnacle of the career. Those guys that filmed on those programmes were sort of gods to me. And so, to work on one of those shows was definitely a milestone.  And then, with a colleague of mine, Jason, we filmed the Humpback Heat Run for the first time in Tonga, and we kind of came up with a story and the idea, and that's the only reason they used me, because otherwise they would've sent a much more experienced cameraman. But we at Scubazoo pitched them the idea and sold it to them that we could do it. So, they kind of had to use me! We made it, we did it, and that was in The Making of Life, so I was featured at the end of the episode- there was my face, so mum was happy! And so that was definitely a big milestone for me. And actually, that was kind of a false dawn. I was like, I've made it. That's it, the phone is just going to keep ringing and I'm just going to keep working on this. Look at me, I'm in The Making of Life, I'm part of the club now. And it was such a hard club to break into because, in this business, certainly 15 years ago, they hardly made any programmes and they had a trusted handful of cinematographers that they would use, and it's very expensive to go and shoot these things. It's a lot of pressure. So of course, why would they trust some random new person to do it? They'd just give it to one of their trusted operators. So I thought, okay, bang, I'm in! And then, for two years, no one called. I thought, oh, okay, alright, I've got to get back to doing the normal stuff again. And then it was Blue Planet, and that’s when I really broke in and did a lot of work.

IS: You thought the door had been swung open. But no, it had to build up slowly, get momentum. So how did it happen between Life and Blue Planet?

RM: I was still just working on all kinds of stuff and presenter shows and the occasional BBC show. And then Blue Planet II was commissioned. Back then, the BBC were the only production company that would make these very expensive wildlife programmes, and they had a name for it worldwide. No one else really did it before. This was before Netflix and so on. And even then, most of them weren't underwater. There was Planet Earth or Frozen Planet, and they would have little underwater bits, but a genuine underwater series like that comes along once in a generation, really. There has only really been 4 or 5 of them ever at that level. Blue Planet I and II, Our Oceans, and there was a French film a while ago. So Blue Planet II comes along and they need 50 stories to fill this 6 part series. They cast the net wide and they look for interesting new behaviour, dramatic sequences, amazing events. I pitched a story to Jonathan Smith who is the producer of the coral reef episode about something which I'd heard of from the resort I worked in when I first got that job, filming tourists in 2001. I'd heard from the photographers based there that there was an anemone fish that would leave the safety of its anemone and push a coconut shell, with its mouth, back to its anemone so that it could lay eggs on it. I pitched this story and Jonathan said, ‘yes, this is amazing. Does this genuinely happen?’ It was exactly the kind of thing they wanted. So, I went and did a recce [reconnaissance] and filmed a few shots of it to show that it actually happened. And then again, if you suggest a story you have a strong link to it. And at that point, I'd already done 3 or 4 stories, so I was a bit more of a trusted pair of hands, although not fully in. They gave me that story, and it was actually the first story that we filmed for Blue Planet II. We used a couple of new pieces of equipment, a scope that we'd built. They're quite common now, obviously, but back then we had the custom built one for the series, and I got some very new looking footage with that scope and really proved that it worked. That was at the start of a two and a half year production. I got out there straight away, filmed that sequence, and then the footage went back and everyone loved it. From then on, I was trusted to shoot more and more for Blue Planet II and I think I shot more than anyone underwater on that series in the end. I shot 10 stories for it. So yeah, I was trusted early and managed to deliver. And that's kind of the story in this business. It's hard to get an opportunity and then you'll get one for some reason, maybe someone will be sick at the last minute, or you'll find a story and you'll get a chance. And if you can deliver it, then you can keep working. You get one or two chances, and if you can deliver, then you get trusted again. If not, then very quickly you get forgotten about.

IS: On your website you've got a lovely section of frequently asked questions, all about getting into this line of work. I've never seen an architect or a teacher or a civil engineer with one of these sections on their website. Why do you think people seek your advice so regularly on this?

RM: That's a great question. I think it’s because, you mentioned architects, for example, maybe those people have a very clearly defined path to doing what they do. If you want to become an architect, you do the right A levels, then you go to university and you study for seven years, then you go and do your professional qualifications. There is a roadmap. But if you talk to 10 different underwater cinematographers, they'll all have a different story about how they got to the point where they can earn a living from what they do. And probably, what they do to earn a living will be subtly different as well. They'll have a different niche. We all have different niches within the niche that we're in. There are a lot of people that are 20, 21, even sometimes 14 or 15 years of age, that believe that's what they want to do. I guess they very quickly find out that there is no path or at least a discernible path, and they're out there trying to get information from people who have managed to do it, like myself and others. It is tough, it's very difficult. And a lot of people also get to a certain point and find themselves stuck almost like I was. But yeah, you can get to a certain point and you feel like you're at a plateau and you can't break into that next level that you want to get to, and that can often be tricky.

IS: I've been watching Our Oceans, it's so spectacular. There’s a scene in the first episode of the blennies and their courtship displays, it’s like they’re dancing! In my experience, when fish see you approaching they retreat. These scenes were so close up to the marine life but they were acting very naturally and being vulnerable, leaving their hiding spots. How does that work?

RM: Well, I guess the answer is patience. We will go down and sit with a subject for hours and the equipment has a part to play in that, the use of closed circuit rebreathers, so that we can have those really extended bottom times. Typically, my dive day looks like a 3 - 4 hour dive, followed by a break and then a 1, 2 or 3 hour dive. And generally, if we're filming benthic subjects like those blennies that Roger Horrocks shot so beautifully, then we're literally sitting very close to them for 4 or 5 hours. You have your tricks, maybe you start further away and you move in slowly, but after a while, generally they'll get used to you being there and you'll get that natural behaviour that you want to get. It's really patience, persistence, perseverance - the three Ps.

IS: Good motto! There’s a scene where an octopus finds a glass bottle and takes it over as their home. That's not something you can curate or predict will happen. How are those scenes shot?

RM: Yeah, it's an interesting balance. These expeditions are an expensive enterprise and typically we're on location for 2 - 3 weeks, maybe 4, but generally 3 weeks is the magic number. We have a limited amount of time and we are very targeted in what we're going to get. We're not just turning up and filming, deciding to film an octopus and following it round. We will storyboard, we'll have researched. There's a team of researchers and assistant producers who find the stories and they will find a cool behaviour. Then we'll work out a story from that. With the example of the octopus living in the trash in Lembeh, Katy Moorhead, our director, had researched it and found this behaviour where the octopus used shells as a hunting blind. They find a shell and then they bury themselves and use that to pounce on crabs who are unsuspecting. So that's where we went to film. While we were filming that, the octopus was throwing out bits of crab and that attracted a predator, a pufferfish. Then it looked like the octopus was squirting water through its syphon to shoo away the pufferfish to scare it off, so we filmed it. Each evening when we're on location, we'd go through the rushes, the footage each night together as a team. We look at what we've got, look at what we need to get, and discuss it. We were watching it back and we'd filmed it at 70 frames a second, and we could see that the octopus was shooting these little pebbles, these chunky grains of sand at the fish. It was actually firing these projectiles at the fish, bouncing off the pufferfish's belly! So, that was complete serendipity. You go out with the plan, but then sometimes serendipity happens, and you change the plan. We had a scientist called Steve Simpson who was a consultant on the series. So we can call him up, bother him at home, wake him up from his bed and say, ‘is this real? Has anyone recorded this before? He said ‘no, it's new to science!’ So, we knew we could concentrate on it and have something really unique. So sometimes you get lucky. Other times the opposite happens and the behaviour you go to film doesn't happen for some reason and you come away empty handed or you have to completely pivot and try and find a different angle or story.

IS: Do you think you could estimate what percentage of what you shoot gets to see the light of day?

RM: Shooting ratio, it's pretty wild. It can really vary. So one extreme, if I look at a shoot, like on Blue Planet 2, we filmed the Boiling Sea where all these fish rise to the surface, like a bait ball situation. You get mobulas, sailfish and dolphins coming in. We were out there for 3 weeks and we had a 30 minute bait ball on the final day and there were 2 of us shooting. So, there was probably an hour of footage condensed down into 5 minutes. So that's a pretty tight shooting ratio. Whereas if you have a benthic shoot where your subject, like the anemonefish, is there in the same place every day, you can just go down and film it. You can film 20 hours of footage that then have it condensed down into a 5 minute story. That's probably the two ends of the spectrum in terms of shooting ratios. And it's hard. You always try to be as clinical as you can be, but then it's better to overshoot than not have enough in the edit.

IS: You work as a director of photography. Can you explain what that means?

RM: It's just a fancy way of saying cameraman, cinematographer. Well, no, it’s a tricky one. A director of photography is someone who's basically in charge of bringing the artistic vision of the director to reality. As a director of photography, I'll sit down with the director and they'll say ‘we need to shoot this, how are we going to shoot it?’ It will be my responsibility to work out how to light it, what lens to use, what camera we should be using and what frame rate we should be shooting at - all of those decisions. You're often making those decisions on the fly and underwater it's pretty hard to chat! You're often just faced with a situation and you have to make it work or make it up as you go along. You're very autonomous, which is why ‘director of photography’ encompasses more than just ‘camera operator’, because you are already thinking about look and style and lighting and everything like that. And you'll do that before the shoot as well, have virtual meetings or in-person meetings with the director where you decide on the kind of style and look you want to go for and pick lenses, cameras and equipment accordingly. We have motion sliders, scope lenses…. a huge toolbox of things we can pick from. So, it's my job to work out which ones we need along with the director. It's a collaboration really.

IS: I'm thinking of your mum again, saying ‘we didn't see you!’ If she was to see you, the crew and all of that, what would she see? What would the behind the scenes be like? Is it sunshiny and gorgeous, or is everyone a bit tense because the conditions are changing and you're on a deadline.

RM: The real behind the scenes, it's all those things. It's stressful. There are joyful moments and sometimes, if you're filming cetaceans, you can be having experiences that people pay tens of thousands of dollars to have. You can be up close with a mother humpback whale and her calf and having surreal experiences, but with the pressure of having to deliver amazing shots from it. There are some of the most wonderful people. I think it's a real privilege to work in this industry because most people are not in it for the money, because there isn't much money. They're in it for a love of wildlife and travel. You have to get along with each other. It's a very intense situation. You're almost like a little family that works together. You may never have ever met each other before, but you come together and live in very close proximity, on top of each other for 16 hours a day for 3 or 4 weeks. Or, if you're in the Antarctic, maybe 2 months, and you have to be the kind of person that can get along, you've got to be a little bit easygoing. There are definitely times when it gets stressful, but generally we're all understanding people. There's also a lot of sitting around. If you go on an open ocean shoot, you might see nothing for 2 weeks and that can be really tough mentally. You're just driving around on the ocean and seeing nothing, day after day. It can be incredibly hard to keep spirits up and you all know that you're expected to come home with great footage, so there's that constant pressure. If you have a couple of good days straight away, it can be wonderful. That really takes the pressure off. If you get the key behaviour very quickly, it’s really nice. But if you're ticking into the first and second week and you still haven't seen what you came for, then it can start getting pretty stressful.

IS: I’m sure both tourists and locals would be curious and excited about a film crew coming. When they see you out filming whales, in Hawaii for example, does it happen that the local resort who has a few zodiacs comes out with their tourists on top of you? You have highlighted where the whales are for them.

RM: Hawaii is a good example because it's very regulated there. As a tourist, you're not allowed to get into the water with humpback whales. We had special permits and collaborated directly with the University of Hawaii scientific team to uncover new behaviors. But there was a moment where I was jumping into the water for Our Oceans, filming a heat run - a competition pod where the males all chase the female. And the big part of our story was the female sheltering her calf while being chased by all of these marauding, 50 tonne males, and I was swimming towards it. They're going so fast, and you kind of have to intercept. So you move the boat ahead of them, without disturbing them, drop in, and then you might have to adjust and swim on the surface into a position near their path. The guys on the boat are pointing for you, telling you which way to swim. So, you sort of look back and get an angle. And then, as I'm pedaling really hard and I'm about to free dive, it's very stressful, and I suddenly heard this voice: ‘Hey everybody, if you look over to your left, there is a cameraman in the water! He's about to enter the water, dive down and film the whales. Probably filming for National Geographic or something, wave and say hi!’ And I looked around and there's this massive, massive whale watching boat with the marine biologist on the speaker and 100 people all on the edge of the railing watching me. It was very surreal. It felt like that movie where life's being narrated with Will Ferrell. It was a very odd moment! There are those moments where you're juxtaposing these incredibly wild situations with a hoard of tourists nearby. Luckily, in this case, they were not in the water, but there are certainly wild places that are more and more full of tourists. Or of divers, who have every right to be there, just like us. But it can be tricky to negotiate sometimes.

IS: Tell me about the silicone cameras that were mounted on the humpbacks and captured footage of that heat run.

RM: We worked with the UH scientists who have been researching that population of whales for a few years, and they're attaching these things called CATS Cams. They're small and have a GoPro-esque camera inside and they also record depth and speed and a bunch of other scientific information. On the surface, the scientists will have a long pole, and when the whale surfaces they will very gently pop the camera on the back or side of the whale. It has a super soft silicone suction cup. After eight hours it pops off and floats to the surface. It has a tracker so the scientists can find and collect it, and gather all the data. On Our Oceans, we helped fund some of the science and we got some of the amazing POV footage where you're riding with the whale and the whales are hitting each other on the heat run. We also got some beautiful footage of a baby whale taking milk from its mother where you're sort of riding with it. It gives you a really intimate perspective and that close up Fast and Furious feel, when they have cameras mounted on the cars. For the heat run, it really brings the intensity home with that close up wide angle. Something you can't really achieve when you are backed off underwater, filming it with a typical camera.

IS: It was really epic. I’m sure I’m not able to appreciate the sheer size of these animals and the power of them moving through the water at speed.

RM: It’s the biggest mating event in nature. It's so impressive to see. It's absolutely amazing.

IS: Do you ever feel afraid? A male of that size who's interested in mating, he's not going to be too concerned about you if you're in his way. You're like a little fleck of dust to him!

RM: I remember when we filmed the heat run for the first time in Tonga about 15 years ago for Life. I think it was one of those situations where it was day 17 of a 21 day shoot and we still hadn't seen a heat run. So the stress was super high, everyone's panicking. And then suddenly we got the call that one was happening- we had a helicopter and they'd spotted one. So we just bolted out, got on it, and no one had ever done it before. No one had jumped in front of a heat run before, and you’re sitting on the back of the boat, bobbing around with your fins on and the boat ploughing ahead and all you can see is froth and tails and carnage, and the sea is boiling with all this smashing. It just looks huge! And suddenly, you think, is this a good idea? Have I thought this through? No-one has done this before. What’s the plan, we’re just going to jump in and film them? And obviously, it's way too late then to voice concern, so you just had to do it and hope for the best. And that was my main concern, exactly what you just said. I don't think humpbacks would intentionally hurt you, but if it was just too preoccupied with what it was doing, with chasing that female, then it might not take any notice of you. We did a thing for the BBC about it, a beautiful soundscape for BBC radio. I dove down and found my spot at about 7 or 8 meters, then sat in the blue waiting for them. All you can see is blue. It's like being snow blind. Just blue, blue, blue, waiting for them to come and you're just trying to stay calm and waiting for them to emerge, and then suddenly, they're just on you. They're just piling past you and over you. The moment before it was terrifying. Just waiting, the anticipation. Then when it happened I was just so worried about getting the shot. All I'm thinking is, just hold it steady, get in focus, press the record button, just saying those things- hold steady, focus, record button. Playing those three things in my head constantly because you can easily forget to press record! So you just do the simple things. Do the simple things, film it, and then once you've got that, then you can get clever. But yeah, it was pretty terrifying that first time. I have done a lot of work with whales and they are very aware of you, even if they can’t see you. They're very sensitive and they have very little desire to hurt you in most situations. It's just avoiding those situations where they might be stressed or there's a reason for them to throw the tail around.

IS: What's happening now and what’s next for you, Roger?

RM: I've got a couple of things. The main project I'm working on now is the real life Finding Nemo. If you saw A Bug's Life, National Geographic did a natural history version of it.  They have commissioned the same thing for Finding Nemo, a four part wildlife series. We did one shoot last year and then the principal filming starts at the end of this month. I have three shoots in the first half of this year for that to keep me busy.

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