The Deepest Breath

0:13Hello and welcome to this special episode of the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco, and for today's show I speak with Laura McGann, the director of a new Netflix documentary, The Deepest Breath, a moving story about two remarkable freedivers. I had the pleasure to welcome Laura and Christoph Conan, a freediver and talking head in the film, to our studio.

0:42Free diving is one of the world's deadliest extreme sports. It's very simple. The deepest dive wins. You've got to swim the length of a 70-story skyscraper. Three, two, one. Laura McGann and Christoph Conan, welcome to Monaco Radio. A pleasure to have you both here to talk about The Deepest Breath, which is a fascinating documentary. And Laura, perhaps I'll start with you. I mean, I was just mentioning before, I've always been fascinated by freediving, the scene in general. The film Le Grand Bleu, for example, was one of my favorites. And I was so happy in that sense with The Deepest Breath. Tell us about your connection, actually, to the sea.

1:26Were you always inspired by that? Or was it something completely of an unusual topic for you? Well, I've always, you know, I used to bodyboard as a kid on holidays, snorkeling. But I suppose I moved to the sea there a couple of years ago and I go swimming with the girls a couple of times a week. And yeah, I just like fall in love with the sea, I suppose, over the last maybe 10 years or so. And so when I read about Stephen and Alessia and mentioned freediving, I had to Google what is freediving because I didn't know. and I was presented with these beautiful images of people behaving more like seals and dolphins than human beings under the water with no air tanks and being filmed by another freediver, I didn't know this at the time, who was able to kind of move with such fluidity and speed, I suppose, under the water.

2:22I love Blue Planet, all that kind of thing, like I happily sit for, you know, back in the day in my 20s, like a whole day watching Blue Planet but this was something I hadn't seen before. It looked different and the blue was just stunning and the beautiful light coming down and visually it just really struck me as being special. Something really special, something incredibly cinematic and then as I learned more about Stephen and Alessia it just affected me on a whole other level and it was really their passion for life and for doing their own thing and for kind of going you know I'm not going to do maybe what my parents expect me to do or what society expects me to do.

3:01I kind of have this other idea and I'm going to do that. I think that's what maybe people like about the story as well and it's what I liked about it initially. I was maybe looking at people who were doing something that I might like to do and maybe hadn't been brave enough to do yet, I suppose. And Christoph is here as well. And Christoph, you are actually a free diver, right? And of course you're one of the talking heads in the film. but tell us how was it to be part of this documentary because of course for you i know there's the emotional connotation of it as well so yeah when i first got contacted by laura's team it was a really nice chat and it really immediately felt like people that cared about the story and people that wanted to get the facts right and were interested in the human part of it and then i had a conversation with laura and it was really lovely we got along instantly i I think.

3:54And I just felt like it was the right thing to do, to share and to make sure that Steve's story was out there and that he wouldn't be forgotten and that his legacy would live on. And I think Laura was the best person to do it. Like she even lived across the street from Steve's father. Like it was just meant to be, I think. That was actually total coincidence. Yeah, like I had been chatting to different people online all over Europe, kind of over in the States. And then somebody said, you know, meet with Peter, his dad. He lives at this address in Dunleary, Dublin. I said, oh, geez, that's across the road from my house.

4:28And I have to ask, it's impressive, you know, the footage, I mean, you had. I mean, because it looked like you were there with Dan, in a way, at all times. How was that process of research as well? Because it really felt like quite close to the subject as well. Yeah, the archive or the footage that we've gathered over the years has a beautiful intimacy to it. And I suppose COVID kind of, because we couldn't go anywhere for a while, we had this extended research period and it did no harm because it just meant we could learn more. And we had more time to really research the story, find out what is the most important parts of, you know, Stephen and Alessia's lives that really reflect the true meaning of the story.

5:17And so we were able to say, look, but there's this event, right? We've won photo. So there's somebody in the background of the photo. I think they're holding the GoPro camera. Who's that? And Alessia might say, that's Stefano. We can touch with Stefano. Stefano, do you have anything from that day in 2006? And he'd go in and have a look in the wardrobe and he'd say, oh yeah, actually, do you know I actually have 500 gigabytes of that? And that just kept happening. That happened over and over. Like I stopped keeping count. We were really, really lucky. Because people would be filming freediving events.

5:49It's, you know, the avid filmmakers who are doing their own thing. And they'd be up close and they'd be with their GoPros or they'd be with a whole lot of cameras set up. And, like, the community is really good at documenting itself. But also, like, Stephen and Alessia, like, if somebody turned around and wanted to make a documentary about me tomorrow, there'd be about three photos, you know. Whereas, like, you know, with Stephen and Alessia, it just felt like the story, their stories were just being covered from the minute they were born. You know, they're not Kardashians. It was unusual. And so, you know, the film is testament to all of the people who filmed or recorded stuff with Stephen and Leslie and Stephen and Leslie who recorded stuff themselves.

6:26So we had this beautiful wealth of incredible archive above and below the ocean. And what we did then was we kind of identified where the holes in it were. and even in a scene, within a scene we might just be missing because often times the cinematographer would focus on the athlete as opposed to the safety diver Stephen was the safety diver and so we'd say we need a shot of Stephen here who's waiting for his athlete to return from 100 metres down or whatever and so we went into the Caribbean, Mexico and the Caribbean Sea and an amazing scuba diver who would go down and film this massive big shot and Stephen would be like a speck of dust in the middle of it.

7:10So we had this amazing honour of having the archive but then going and getting to make a film under the sea as well and to weave it in with the archive so it felt part of it and you always felt like you were in the scene. So those shots are just speckled throughout the film and just help kind of give the audience a clearer vision of what exactly was going on in the day. So as a filmmaker, it was an adventure. It really was. It was amazing. It was done very beautifully, I have to say. And Christoph, tell us, what's your fascination with deep diving? As I said, you know, visually for me, I think that it's something quite beautiful and unique.

7:47But, I mean, you are a free diver. Tell us, when did you actually start doing it? I started actually as a child, funny enough. I didn't know that I was doing it. But I grew up in a little village next to the riverside. And there's a little lake in my village. And I belong to my uncle. And in the summer, we would always be out there swimming and splashing around. And I mean, I would put stones in my pocket and go down to the bottom and sit there and wait. I don't know what I was waiting for or what I was doing. But 20 years later, it turned out that I was actually a born freediver. But the real competitive side of freediving and the training I started doing in Dahab in Egypt when I met Steve, actually.

8:26So Steve introduced me to the sport. And I was a bit hesitating in the beginning. But the moment I popped my head on the water, I was hooked. and I wanted to go deeper and longer and more to get absorbed by the sea and the beauty of it. How interesting. You are, you know, an actor as well, I believe. So how did you mix those two kind of together, freediver and acting? Because I know also you teach some Hollywood actors about how to freedive. Tell us a bit more about that. So I was working with this theatre company in Belgium and we were touring the world and I was a bit fed up with having Brussels as my waiting room for the next tour to happen.

9:05So I decided to move to Egypt and fill in those blanks, so to speak, with diving. First as a scuba diver and then meeting Steve, introducing me to the sport and becoming a freediver. And I was so hooked that when I had to leave Dahab for another tour, I was a bit bummed out. It's like, I just want to train. I just want to be in the water and freedive. That's all I wanted to do. So I kind of decided to stop theater at that point, which was silly because it was my first love and I still wanted to continue with it. But I was so hooked on freediving. Then a few years later when all the tours were kind of done and I had to move back to Belgium to look for new work, I just settled down in Brussels again.

9:48And I had the honor to start working in a film studio, like an underwater film tank. So they offered me this job, this great job that I never imagined that actually existed. and I started training and coaching actors for their underwater work, which for me was best of both worlds because I was still working on film sets and still in contact with acting and freediving. So I could combine all these elements and bring my expertise into that. And it's a wonderful job. That's amazing. That sounds like a dream job as well. It does. Yeah, it really does. I like it. Such an amazing story. And which actors?

10:24Idris Elba is one of them, right? Yeah. Yeah, Idris Elba is one of them. I actually trained them here in London for Luter, the Project Luter, together with Andy Serkis, a fantastic guy. I trained Rammstein, the German metal band. They came to shoot in our studio. Yeah, a few more. And Laura, coming back to you as well, I mean, the film, besides the beauty of freediving and the dangers of it as well, it's a love story. And it's quite touching and moving. Of course, you know, we're not saying what happens in the end and everything. But tell us, how was Alessia's reaction to the documentary? I'm very curious about that.

11:01Of course, she's one of the main characters together with Stephen, of course. How did she feel about it, in a way? Yeah, look, myself and two of our producers, John and Sarah, when the film was pretty much finished, we actually showed it to Peter first in Dublin, Stephen's dad, and some more members of the family. And then myself and John and Sarah went over to Rome and sat down with Alessia in her house, and her dad and her boyfriend. And we watched the film and, you know, yeah, we were like nervous as we were with Peter, you know, where I've always just really worked to just be honest, you know, with the story.

11:38And, you know, sometimes there's a wonderful moment and sometimes it's not such a wonderful moment as well. So we were nervous and Alessia watched it and she just gave me a hug afterwards. And I burst out crying. She wasn't crying. I were crying with relief that, you know, she was happy. Like Alessia had given so much to the project and it was important to me that she was happy with it. And afterwards she asked for a copy of it so that she could show some of her friends and family and her coach actually, so that she didn't have to explain what had happened. She could just get them to watch the film and then they would understand.

12:17And for me, I just thought, oh my God, I'm so thankful that she's getting some use out of this film. She's given so much to this. I'm glad that it's of use to her in some shape or form. Yeah, that meant a lot to me. She wanted to be better than the best freediver ever. When you push first to a limit, a lot can go wrong.

12:48That was Laura McGann and Christoph Conan from The Deepest Breath. The show was edited by David Stevens and I am Fernando Augusto Pacheco.