David Malysheff shudders as he recalls the day he found himself surrounded by grumpy grizzly bears on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula while shooting footage for Gary Cooper’s Fishing Diary.
“We were on their turf, and they were not happy,” recalled the Victoria-based cinematographer, whose other harrowing career highlights include being charged by an elk near Jasper and his flight on a wind-whipped plane that had to land in Nunavut in a spot only slightly longer than the width of a football field.
It occurred during a 17-day flying tour over the Canadian Arctic with Viking Air pilots and brass to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Twin Otter’s maiden flight.
“It was like the opening of a David Lynch movie [Blue Velvet]. As we were coming in like a helicopter, I could almost wave to the grader operator on the main runway,” he said.
That high-flying adventure began when strong winds suddenly shifted direction during the Twin Otter’s descent into Resolute at the end of its flight from Pond Inlet on Baffin Island.
After circling, the pilots decided to do a “cross-runway” landing, touching down on its 59-metre width instead of using the length of the runway, he said.
“At the end of day, the airplane did what it was meant to do beautifully, which is short-takeoff-and-landing,” recalled Malysheff, 58. “I knew something was up when the pilots said: ‘No GoPro cameras for this landing.’ ”
Whether shooting aerial footage of coastal patrol vessels from helicopters for the Royal Canadian Navy, spending 18 days underwater on the submarine HMCS Victoria, filming Harrison Ford at the movie star’s private airplane hangar in Santa Monica or working as director of photography on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network shows including Moosemeat and Marmalade and Tribal Police Files, there’s never a dull moment in this globe-trotting shooter’s life.
“I’m fortunate to be able to say I love my job,” said Malysheff, who is busier than ever these days. It’s partly because of the C300MarkII, the state-of-the-art Canon EOS Cinema camera that shoots ultra-high definition 4K video, which his company Gamut Productions recently acquired.
Armed with decades of experience and a can-do attitude, the graduate of Camosun College’s now-defunct Applied Communications Program admits he finds it hard to turn down gigs.
Early one morning in December, for instance, Malysheff drove from Victoria to Parksville, spent the day shooting electronic-press-kit material for the UpTV movie Game of Love with Heather Locklear and digitally transferred his media at midnight. After four hours of sleep, he woke up to prep another project and fly to Kelowna, where he spent that day shooting a Doctors of B.C. project.
A day after that, Malysheff began shooting Aspirations, a digital short for entrepreneur Joel Conway, whose Victoria-based Fortress Foundation aims to empower men to eliminate sexual exploitation.
Malysheff’s travels have taken him to such faraway places as Japan, the Philippines, Africa and Russia, where he was invited to a Bolshoi Ballet performance attended by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Last year, Moosemeat and Marmalade, the APTN culinary series co-starring Cree bush cook Art Napoleon and London Chef owner Dan Hayes, took him to London.
After shooting the tower of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and fish and chips from the banks of the Thames, he recalled Hayes asking his First Nations co-host what he felt like doing next. Replied Napoleon: “I don’t know, Dan. I feel like maybe going out and colonizing something.”
As exotic as his adventures can be, such as being invited to a pow-wow in Lillooet recently, Malysheff said he never takes them for granted.
He was there as director of photography on Tribal Police Files, former police officer Steve Sxwithul’txw’s new APTN series that Malysheff describes as “like Cops,” but it features officers on a reserve near Lillooet.
Malysheff is also re-teaming with director Peter C. Campbell on Penelakut: Return to Kuper Island, a documentary followup to Kuper Island: Return to the Healing Circle, Campbell’s 1997 documentary. It takes a closer look at how things have changed for First Nations students who endured horrific conditions and abuse at residential schools they were forced to attend.
His new labour of love is A 20th Century Passion, a documentary Malysheff is co-directing and producing with filmmaker Hilary Pryor, with whom he has worked for 30 years.
Their many partnerships, which date back to Take Off, Pryor’s 26-episode 1990s children’s TV series, include her recent APTN series Tiga Talk, documentaries such as One Hit Leads to Another, Checklist: A Measure of Evil and Mama June: A Different Perspective on AIDS, which he shot in Tanzania. They are also collaborating on A Change of Mind, Pryor’s new documentary on brain injury.
A 20th Century Passion focuses on the fascinating life of Dr. Peter Gary, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor and composer whose wife promised that an ambitious oratorio he wrote in the 1970s to commemorate the lives of the six million Jews massacred during the Second World War would get its world première in Jerusalem before he died. The documentary interweaves archival material and interviews with the Polish-born concentration-camp survivor, who was liberated by the British Army from Bergen-Belsen on his 21st birthday, weighing just 76 pounds.
After emigrating to Los Angeles in 1950, Gary worked in the film industry as a composer, taught music at the University of California and spent two decades working as a sports-medicine physician.
Since moving to Victoria in the early 1990s, he founded the Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and Education Society, and shares his experiences with thousands of schoolchildren and youths.
If the filmmakers can raise enough to pay the orchestra, the film would culminate with the oratorio’s world première in Israel on April 16, the day after Gary’s 92nd birthday.
“The more I thought about his story, the more it stuck in my craw,” said Malysheff, who learned that Barak Tal, an Israeli conductor, was flying to Victoria to meet Gary for the first time after hearing his story.
Intrigued, Malysheff suggested they shoot two interviews, setting the stage for the project.
Another passion project, Malysheff said, are TV shows he shot for HeroWork, the local charity founded by Paul Latour, who unites tradespeople and others to participate in “radical community renovations.”
The Vancouver-raised cameraman has lived in Victoria since he was 17, when his father, who worked for B.C. Tel, relocated the family. He admits his first impressions weren’t favourable.
“I came to Claremont, where people took school buses. It was like The Beverly Hillbillies,” he recalled with a laugh. “But now I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
He initially focused on radio at Camosun, going on to spin records for Denny’s Canned Music, and working at CKDA, “the hip radio station,” and at CFMS, the mellow FM station.
“I used to push buttons on [background music] shows like Candlelight and Wine,” he said, mimicking a broadcast: “And that was Ferrante and Teicher doing a song I believe Simon and Garfunkel wrote, Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
He began doing audio at CHEK TV, when it was located on Epsom Drive, before he started shooting commercials. When he left CHEK, he bought himself a Betacam and launched Pan Video Productions.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said. “I didn’t have to move to, like, Lloydminster.”
While Malysheff said Victoria “is such a great place to come home to,” he cherishes his wilder out-of-town adventures, as when actor Harrison Ford agreed to appear in The Immortal Beaver, his 2008 documentary portrait of the beloved de Havilland bush plane.
Malysheff was so nervous he asked Ford’s manager if he could arrive a day early to check out the location before shooting Ford’s segments.
“All of a sudden, there’s the Blade Runner himself pulling up in his golf cart, and he says: ‘Hop in!’” recalled Malysheff, who helped the star push his DHC-2 Beaver biplane — the same vintage two-seater that Ford, 72, crashed on a California golf course last year — out of the hangar.
“He was very humble. He said: ‘Don’t forget: I started out as a carpenter.’ ”
Malysheff’s other recurring gig — shooting electronic press kits — is an art in itself, he said.
He has captured behind-the-scenes footage for locally filmed projects including The Boy, The Keeper (Dennis Hopper), Fierce People (Diane Lane), Write and Wrong (Kirstie Alley) and The Mermaid Chair (Kim Basinger).
“The most important thing is understanding the hierarchy of a set,” explained Malysheff.
As well as knowing the importance of not getting into an actor’s eyeline, or asking questions that haven’t been approved, Malysheff has learned the importance of being prepared.
“Owning two tall director’s chairs is important, because you don’t have to start bothering props [personnel] for it,” he said.
There are times a star you’ve been told not to talk to can make it challenging to follow the rules, however, as he discovered when Spooky House filmed at Craigdarroch Castle in 2002.
When Malysheff stopped for a snack, he turned around to see Sir Ben Kingsley walking up to him.
“Ben Kingsley caught me with a mouthful of peanuts. He said: ‘Now David, I’m going to be walking a jaguar in this next scene, and you’re going to be wanting to get a shot of that.’ ”
